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Powered Descent posted:The translucent plastic craze got a boost from the imac, but it was already well underway by '97. Picking a few 1997-tagged examples from this link: It appears that mine has! I just remember VTech as being late to the game, and our dumb product launch guides from the time touting the colors as a hot selling point.
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Jul 29, 2019 14:05
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I have a weird fondness for the Steam video because it was the first video I ever saw running on a computer, somewhere in 1995. It was a horribly encoded MPEG mess but drat, it still impressed my young mind at the time. Same for the Buddy Holly clip on the Windows 95 install CD (I spent way too much time digging for all the stuff on that CD, there were crappy videos, MIDI music, games...).
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Jul 29, 2019 14:11
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Peanut Butler posted:yah I was gonna say it went back a little bit further, I kinda miss the aesthetic of the clear/grey kind even though I generally prefer a more 80s smoked/hard edge/silver/woodgrain look The blobbyness was definitely an artifact from end user computers becoming powerful enough to assist in non-angular designs, as well as advanced CnC machines that could create the tooling. Everything produced up to that point had corners because it was easier to do with most things still being machined by people.
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Jul 29, 2019 14:20
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I never could stand the loving blobject aesthetic, or the goddamned ridiculous neon translucent plastic poo poo. I was still a cultist then, and part of my soul never made the transition between Mac OS 9 and X because X was just *so loving ugly* for the first eight or so years.
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Jul 29, 2019 14:32
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Exit Strategy posted:I never could stand the loving blobject aesthetic, or the goddamned ridiculous neon translucent plastic poo poo. System 7.5.3 
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Jul 29, 2019 14:40
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Iron Crowned posted:System 7.5.3 Ah, yes. The One True Faith. System 7.5.3, hard drive full of Pathways Into Darkness, Marathon, and Escape Velocity.
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Jul 29, 2019 14:43
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EV with the Borg Cube and Neutronic Kestrel  Iron Crowned posted:System 7.5.3 I think the lack of FPU coprocessor and weaker processor saved me from OS 8. OSx may have had an interesting launch but it was way nicer than its contemporaries. Very different.
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Jul 29, 2019 14:51
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Iron Crowned posted:The blobbyness was definitely an artifact from end user computers becoming powerful enough to assist in non-angular designs, as well as advanced CnC machines that could create the tooling. Yes, and it absolutely was a counterforce to the 80´s "everything made to look like it was constructed from LEGO and designed by Volvo" which again was a "modern look" revolution against the 70's "lets slap wooden paneling into this wooden paneling"-school of design.
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Jul 29, 2019 14:56
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Der Kyhe posted:the 70's "lets slap wooden paneling into this wooden paneling"-school of design. Where did that come from, though? Misplaced environmentalism?
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Jul 29, 2019 16:27
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Vavrek posted:Where did that come from, though? Maybe a reaction to the space-age look of electronics in the 50s/60s, all rounded corners, colorful plastic and painted steel?
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Jul 29, 2019 16:31
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Vavrek posted:Misplaced environmentalism? People wanted devices that weren't ostentatious and could blend in with the china hutch or whatever and I think Wood Panels accomplished that. Especially when you had those 70s wood panel walls that were the rage. Hell, even the old Atari had the woodlook inlays. My grandparents had a 70s stereo system that was all aluminum and steel and it stood out, but it was housed in a rolling cabinet with wooden sides. Anyway, it's in the 80s that electronics start looking like industrial black devices, when conspicuous consumption takes off and you're supposed to show off the gear you can afford.
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Jul 29, 2019 16:44
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Because it looked classy as hell. Wrapping a bunch of surfaces in wood paneling screams you're in the big leagues now. It seems like 70's era cars were more status symbols so they had stupid poo poo like that. Then the Japanese moved in and ate everyone's lunch. I miss unique looking vehicles. Since engineers have figured out the exact best shape for aerodynamics all cars look vaguely the same. Chop the front and back 2 feet off any car or SUV and you'd be hard pressed to tell what the make was. EDIT: to be more clear, external wood may have been some effort to 'return to nature' but interior wood was/is purely a status symbol thing. Krispy Wafer has a new favorite as of 16:47 on Jul 29, 2019 |
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Jul 29, 2019 16:45
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Pham Nuwen posted:Maybe a reaction to the space-age look of electronics in the 50s/60s, all rounded corners, colorful plastic and painted steel? The 70's had some nifty designs IMHO, just not the blatantly fake wood paneling. Office parks came from the 70's. While poking around in the local newspaper archives, I found an article from 1977, about how the building I currently work in was so novel for having green space and a lake.
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Jul 29, 2019 16:45
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Krispy Wafer posted:I miss unique looking vehicles. Since engineers have figured out the exact best shape for aerodynamics and all cars look vaguely the same. Chop the front and back 2 feet off any car or SUV and you'd be hard pressed to tell what the make was.  I kinda drool over the way cars looked in the early to mid 70's, but then I remember that they guzzle gas and I'm likely to die in the event of any kind of crash. Those convertibles tho.
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Jul 29, 2019 16:47
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Peanut Butler posted:I assumed it was to make it easier to free up the motion a bit if it seizes up Most likely a vibration damper
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Jul 29, 2019 17:07
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SCheeseman posted:Peter Gabriel seems to have had an affinity for terrible CGI during the 90s Those graphics were pretty good for 1992. 
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Jul 29, 2019 17:12
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Iron Crowned posted:I kinda drool over the way cars looked in the early to mid 70's, but then I remember that they guzzle gas and I'm likely to die in the event of any kind of crash.  It did have the little problem that, as the saying went, every time you got into the driver's seat you should kiss your knees goodbye. And that it could be blown off the road by a 10 MPH crosswind.
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Jul 29, 2019 17:17
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Krispy Wafer posted:I miss unique looking vehicles. Since engineers have figured out the exact best shape for aerodynamics all cars look vaguely the same. Chop the front and back 2 feet off any car or SUV and you'd be hard pressed to tell what the make was.
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Jul 29, 2019 17:21
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Iron Crowned posted:The blobbyness was definitely an artifact from end user computers becoming powerful enough to assist in non-angular designs, as well as advanced CnC machines that could create the tooling. In the early nineties I worked on CAD software at HP. Practically all of HP's MEs used our products, because they were "sold" internally at much less than what they retailed for. The application I co-developed was the first of these that supported freeform surfaces. A short time later, HP products (especially the printers) started to look sort of melted... I'm sorry.
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Jul 29, 2019 17:42
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Transparent plastic so you can see circuitry:  Transparent displays like minority report:  -- me, age now Zopotantor posted:In the early nineties I worked on CAD software at HP. Practically all of HP's MEs used our products, because they were "sold" internally at much less than what they retailed for. The application I co-developed was the first of these that supported freeform surfaces. A short time later, HP products (especially the printers) started to look sort of melted... 
Unperson_47 has a new favorite as of 19:28 on Jul 29, 2019 |
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Jul 29, 2019 19:22
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Unperson_47 posted:Transparent plastic so you can see circuitry: I still haven't figured out how they were supposed to read that clear paper in Babylon 5.
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Jul 29, 2019 19:33
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Iron Crowned posted:I still haven't figured out how they were supposed to read that clear paper in Babylon 5. Never watched it. By clear paper do you mean basically transparencies?
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Jul 29, 2019 19:36
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Unperson_47 posted:Never watched it. By clear paper do you mean basically transparencies? yeah, the prop department used them in place of paper
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Jul 29, 2019 19:45
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Krispy Wafer posted:I get a Visa cash card from my in-laws every Christmas. It’s a miserable way to receive money. I get one every year from my employer. I take it to my grocery store and trade it for an Amazon card of the same denomination.
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Jul 29, 2019 19:55
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I have a lot of memories playing Snake on #9. I don't recall any of the phones my parents had before the mighty Nokia, but I do remember at one point we did have a Bag Phone. 
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Jul 29, 2019 20:02
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I always thought people on bag phones looked like they were calling in an airstrike.
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Jul 29, 2019 20:03
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WescottF1 posted:I get one every year from my employer. I take it to my grocery store and trade it for an Amazon card of the same denomination. I just buy groceries with it, that way I can spend the money I would normally spend on groceries on other things.
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Jul 29, 2019 20:10
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Unperson_47 posted:Jesus Christ, the 'tude is coming from inside the thread! That's beautiful.
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Jul 29, 2019 20:14
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Arsenic Lupin posted:That's beautiful. When I first saw it, I was wondering how you were supposed to scan paper on top. Then I remembered that's back when not every printer had a scanner. Reminds me of the first scanner I had. It was a Mustek LPT scanner from 1996-1997 that was a gigantic piece of poo poo. I bought it to scan pictures of my childhood dog to save on my computer. She had just gotten hit by a car and killed and I could never get it to work. 
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Jul 29, 2019 21:06
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My first printer was a heavy sheet fed box that weighed about 20 pounds and was completely powered via the printer parallel port. I got it on clearance and used it for a couple of years until I realized why it was so cheap. The company never made Windows 95 drivers. I had no idea parallel ports could deliver that much power.
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Jul 29, 2019 21:18
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I bet that melted printer would better contour to your arm if you needed to lug it to someone's house a couple miles away in a hurry.
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Jul 29, 2019 21:29
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The printer thing keeps coming up - and I keep recommending cheap b/w lasers with postscript or at least pcl support. We have a Brother that cost $100 or so and just works the few times we need to print something. The massive-expensive color printer/scanner/copier at work has one of the colours misaligned by about 1mm, though, and it's driving me nuts. There was supposedly a tech there to look at it while I wasn't around, but nothing changed. Bleh. Printers, print servers, and printer drivers are somehow still horrible. As for phones, I had a Nokia 3310 like roughly everyone else in Norway in 1999. My parents picked up an NMT network phone a few years earlier, though; some nondescript grey blob with a pull-out antenna. No SMS (since that arrived with GSM), but being able to call people from the cabin was revolutionary.  Oh, and I really liked how OS X looked in the beginning - if nothing else then for being deliberately different. Not that I ever used it, I guess that might have changed my opinion. (And I never touched a system 7/8/9 Mac, they were sort of rare over here.)
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Jul 29, 2019 21:37
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OS X looked so much better than OS 9. Even with all the crappy translucent buttons and brushed metal accents. While we're talking about old rear end printers. This was my favorite printer of all time. The form factor was perfect.  Panasonic KX-P6500. It was another printer that went obsolete because of outdated drivers. Transitioning from Windows 98 to XP really killed a lot of old hardware.
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Jul 29, 2019 21:42
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I can't remember the specific model, but I had an early, circa 1990 Apple LaserWriter I picked up when a school was getting rid of it, and used that thing from about '98-'09- it had very little memory and took forever to print anything more than a few pages of text, but it was user-serviceable as all hell and would print from XP, Win7, and Linux without a problem ended up dumpstering it when I couldn't get a replacement paper roller for it anymore now I have a huge color laser I barely ever use because the toner's so expensive, but it was free from my cousin. Her very young kid switched the language to Spanish and flipped the display upside-down somehow, so she was done with it, and was like 'it prints fine if you don't mind the display being messed up' and I'm like 'oh uh yep I can deal with that (with a factory reset)'
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Jul 30, 2019 00:21
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Krispy Wafer posted:OS X looked so much better than OS 9. Even with all the crappy translucent buttons and brushed metal accents. Good news, there's XP drivers https://panasonic.net/cns/pcc/support/printer/download/p6500download.html
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Jul 30, 2019 03:26
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Peter Gabriel videos own The clothing choices in the Steam video always make me think of FMV/prerendered adventure games like Dark Seed and Phantasmagoria.
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Jul 30, 2019 04:01
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LifeSunDeath posted:Good news, there's XP drivers Hello new thread title! My personal account in obsolete tech was the nextcube! It was a tremendously dense cube, and the monitor used a weird rear end cable and was exceptionally fuzzy for being a grayscale monitor. I lucked into after reading a newsgroup posting- the seller made me promise if I got bored with it that I'd resell it or donate it and not burn it, since it was made out of magnesium for some insane reason and would burn like nobody's business. I wound up booting it up twice, locking myself out and then keeping it in a closet. Young me didn't quite get Unix permissions quite as well as I might have.
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Jul 30, 2019 04:10
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boo_radley posted:Hello new thread title! So, did you burn it?
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Jul 30, 2019 04:15
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boo_radley posted:it was made out of magnesium for some insane reason 
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Jul 30, 2019 06:54
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Krispy Wafer posted:OS X looked so much better than OS 9. Even with all the crappy translucent buttons and brushed metal accents. That owns, I want a printer like this, poo poo that's nice! I've got a 10ish year old Brother laser printer I inherited from my work that, while being a great printer, is loving enormous and hidden away in my garage. This Panasonic would fit on my desk! It reminds me of something I do own, which I think I posted about itt ages ago, but I don't care because I think it's cool: the NEC PC-FX  It's a console that's shaped like a babby PC tower, it rules.  It was the follow up to the incredible PC Engine / PCE-CD, and unfortunately had gently caress all for titles (there's like 60-something total lmao), and no backwards compatibility. Good controller though, and like all the early CD consoles, no copy protection to speak of. It also handles FMV quite well, and has onboard S-Video out (like without a special cable, just a female S-Video port on the back). I need to look into translations for it, there are some neat looking games that came out for it, but they're all in Japanese (and the ones I wanted to play were rather text heavy). (I am still mad about the lack of backwards compatibility, come on NEC, really)
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