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GI_Clutch posted:got a second phone line and unlimited service within a year.  Talk about dialup and hourly rates reminded me that I was so out of it during winter break my senior year of high school that I basically played Counterstrike all the time and nuked any chance of my ex calling me because I was on the phone line all afternoon-evening 
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Nov 27, 2020 19:01
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In 1989 we moved to a city with a major Army base. The owner of one of the local television stations ran a BBS, and in 1992 he started an ISP company. We were one of his first subscribers. $30/mo unlimited, 14.4k. Before (and alongside) that, we had CompuServe. Why would we keep CompuServe as well? It was much more user friendly than the pre-WWW internet. I do not miss the days of Archie and Gopher.
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Nov 27, 2020 19:28
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I have so many ancient isp stories. At that same dial up isp I worked at, we once had a customer call in for three days straight with dial-up problems. Her computer would connect and run slow, or it would connect at a good speed and drop the call, or it wouldn’t connect at all sometimes. Very unreliable even for dial-up. At our end we just saw normal connection stuff and her hanging up quickly on the call. It was strange to have someone call in for 3 days straight because even back in the windows 98 days, dial up was very easy to troubleshoot. All of the settings were correct, nothing was hanging up the line, nothing had changed with her computer, I couldn’t figure it out. Finally, exasperated on day 3 I asked “ok, we have to think outside of the computer. Did you move phone lines, is there construction in your neighborhood, have you had any wiring work done” “Well”, she said, “I guess the only change is that my basement flooded a few days ago” “And where is the computer?” “In the basement” “Did it get wet?” “Yeah, I’d say it was about half way underwater for a few hours”  I had her come in and I just gave her a 56k modem from the stack we had laying around and it cleared things right up.
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Nov 30, 2020 15:37
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FilthyImp posted:I begged my parents for a secondary line but it was too expensive. We had a second line that started as a fax line for a business my mom intended to start. We had the fax and then it just became the permanent dialup line for AOL. Then around 1997, we switched to a local dialup, and wired the bedrooms for ethernet. We set up a hub, in the garage attached to an old Mac to handle the dialing up, and now we were splitting this between two main users, me and my brother. My brother was addicted to Counterstrike, so he would regularly just go and unplug me from the hub because apparently my use of AOL Instant messenger was too detrimental to his lag. Really the best part was that just plugging myself back in was the best revenge. Thankfully cable lines came to my area in 2001, but I think that things like that are why I never really got into playing online games, it just sucked playing over dialup, even when you were the only one using it.
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Nov 30, 2020 16:39
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My dad (about 7000 years old in his mind) has no grasp at all of electronics, and I mean that far and above the general "old person cant computer" stereotype. You oughta see him when he's had to use a mouse in his life, one slow, thundering click that nearly destroyed the mouse instantly. He is always on the phone in the evenings, always. He also has a way of saying foolish words when he is grasping for the correct ones sometimes, its hard to explain*. When we had dialup, he would often just pick up and cut me off without checking (no one had two lines around here), but this one time stood out in which he sang out (we were one of those families who did that instead of coming to you and talking normal) "codo27, ARE YOU ON THE RADIO?" The best was when I needed a massive 16mb driver update to make NHL 2003 work correctly, got it for my birthday. It was 99% done, must have been about an hour and a half to download that much, when mom hit the button on the surge protector with the vacuum. When I had guitar hero 3 and you had to play the final boss battle against the devil, upon seeing it he would make the sign of the cross towards the TV. He also didn't like the idea of me playing Diablo, even when I explained I was trying to kill the devil. *VCRs were only ever referred to as "movie machines" in these parts. We were driving home one night, passing by a hot dog stand an entrepreneurial kid had started up, and a nearby derelict of sorts would always hang out there by it. Dad remarked "George is there again, stood up by the....movie machine". He was referring to the hot dog stand.
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Nov 30, 2020 18:51
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I have a family friend (sort of a grandmother to me, really) who actively avoided computers her whole life. She was an elementary teacher and when the school started adopting computers into the curriculum she dug her heels in and refused to use them When it came to a point where they were required, she just straight up retired. It’s gotta be tough nowadays to be a no-tech outlier. We have to print and send her pictures of the kids. And stuff like that, which is fine, but we’ve offered to buy her an iPad so we can send her lots of pictures and do FaceTime and she straight up refuses. Secretly, I’m a bit jealous of her. Must be nice to live that simplified version of modern existence.
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Nov 30, 2020 19:12
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When I worked at a PC repair place we had the best time but made no money. We had a really old dude easily in his 70s called Cliff who brought his crappy old Cryix PC in regularly for repairs. The issue was always with the hard drive, he'd bring it in, we'd run scan disk and he'd pick it up. I think he liked getting out of the house and always had a good loonnnnng chat when he came in. He used to walk from his house with his PC stuffed in one of these:  So he'd rattle all the way to the shop with it then rattle all the way home after, at which point his hard drive would, well... And the cycle began anew He never once paid us either, not in money anyway. I remember one time he gave us a jar of Marmalade (opened) and a potato (raw) but we never turned him away or even gave him an invoice, it was just Cliff being Cliff
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Nov 30, 2020 19:12
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Being the outlier is better than being like my mother. I remember when she first started playing solitaire and occasionally pinball on my old first computer. I'd come home and she would have my webcam turned around. But since the advent of facebook, its become a full blown addiction to loving meaningless games, especially slot machines. Thankfully there is no money involved because thats a serious issue in my moms family, but she and all her sisters still spend probably 8-12 hours a day playing slotomania and bubble blitz and all this poo poo on their ipads. And know how to do literally nothing else on the drat things. Nothing. Parents come to visit and she brings her ipad around with her, or at least the phone I gave them, and they aren't even in through the porch when she's got it out to "get her points". I would love to smash my keyboard and everything at work here now just thinking about it.
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Nov 30, 2020 19:18
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codo27 posted:He is always on the phone in the evenings, always. He also has a way of saying foolish words when he is grasping for the correct ones sometimes, its hard to explain*. When we had dialup, he would often just pick up and cut me off without checking (no one had two lines around here), but this one time stood out in which he sang out (we were one of those families who did that instead of coming to you and talking normal) "codo27, ARE YOU ON THE RADIO?" My favorite moment was when I had forgotten to bring my dress pants with me for some event and she showed up and handed them to me, saying "here's your ... ... .........vegetables!" More technology-related, she absolutely could never remember the formal name of most shows, and just referred to them by the character names of the protagonist. Interestingly that meant she COULD remember Matlock and Monk correctly! But "Murder She Wrote" was "Jessica," and no other examples are coming to mind because I am starting to wonder if she tended to like shows with character names as titles given that she also loved Seinfeld and Frasier
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Nov 30, 2020 19:30
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Jim Silly-Balls posted:Secretly, I’m a bit jealous of her. Must be nice to live that simplified version of modern existence. I think that this kind of tech-hate should be the normal reaction to being subjected to an hour of twitter. We've just allowed ourselves to become slowly desensitized to something incredibly pathological.
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Nov 30, 2020 19:54
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barbecue at the folks posted:I think that this kind of tech-hate should be the normal reaction to being subjected to an hour of twitter. We've just allowed ourselves to become slowly desensitized to something incredibly pathological. Don't look at twitter.
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Nov 30, 2020 20:08
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For years my Grandma was literally afraid of computers. Like she was uncomfortable that there was one in her house and stuff. Obviously did not want to use the thing. I tried to explain it away for her many times but it never really took. These days she's slightly better about it. Can bring herself to use one if need be. She has what would these days be considered a very basic cellphone that she has learned to use. It does have a screen and a camera, but barely.
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Nov 30, 2020 20:22
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Some Goon posted:Don't look at twitter. ok
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Nov 30, 2020 20:27
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Some Goon posted:Don't look at twitter. https://twitter.com/dril/status/247222360309121024
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Nov 30, 2020 20:53
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extremely_Online I love that that is immortalized in a wikipedia article now.
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Dec 1, 2020 06:51
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My mum stopped paying bills herself on-line when the bank stopped offering a telnet (or whatever) connection. She was fine with a text-based interface using the keyboard, but every web service is bad and wrong and slow because nerds are really loving bad and suck and should never have been allowed to touch a computer to design websites oh wait that's why I don't want to use web services, yeah uhh her hands were all kinds of hosed up by then and using a mouse hurt.
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Dec 1, 2020 07:38
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Regularcars guy did a crossover with Technology Connections: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ekTpcaGXRuE&t=290s
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Dec 2, 2020 17:08
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A match made in BROWN
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Dec 3, 2020 02:24
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l3iU8Fo3z1o This is pretty neat.
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Dec 5, 2020 10:35
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Gonz posted:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l3iU8Fo3z1o this is rad. MIDI confused the hell of me as a youth. I'd go to download some song, thinking I hit the jackpot off some website just having open downloads...turns out it's the MIDI version of some popular song and it sounds like garbage.
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Dec 5, 2020 15:45
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https://youtu.be/Gls-eXUwl9g $20,000!  E: lol, it plays Doom, worth every penny! Cartoon Man has a new favorite as of 19:36 on Dec 8, 2020 |
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Dec 8, 2020 19:29
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I went to my first vintage computer meet up for the year, and got to see some interesting machines, as well as show off a couple of mine A Dick Smith System80. Kinda related to the TRS80 range of computers.  Commodore 8032 PC - continuing the PET line as a business only Commodore, which never really caught on  CoCo 3. The owner of it is a massive Tandy TRS/CoCo collector, he does a lot of mods for them including SD Card drives and other things so they can work with modern hardware  Commodore C64 German model in the background, Vic20 in foreground  Commodore PET 2001 model from the US with its dual disk drive. The disk drive unit hasn't been tested yet.  The two computers I brought along - an Atari 1040STe with 4MB RAM and 800XL  Macintosh SE/30 and Commodore C64C  More Tandy TRS80 goodness  Microbee computers. This was Australia's own computer, to be sold to education, business and home back in the 80s. I think it was also popular in Sweden. Sadly died off as IBM dominated the market, although I think there were a couple of Microbee IBM compatible models  Picked up Windows NT 3.51 and Office 97 from the meet. There's also a copy of NT 4.0 Server that I am waiting on.
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Dec 15, 2020 04:52
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I think of people who restore old computers and I just cannot imagine tolerating the horrendous load times in this day and age, goddamn.
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Dec 15, 2020 05:11
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LifeSunDeath posted:I think of people who restore old computers and I just cannot imagine tolerating the horrendous load times in this day and age, goddamn. A lot of the time they were shorter than in 2020. Which is sad. E: only applies to games
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Dec 15, 2020 05:40
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You Am I posted:I went to my first vintage computer meet up for the year, and got to see some interesting machines, as well as show off a couple of mine Nice! How much of the stuff is for sale vs. just for showing off? And do you do anything like trying to hook things up together, help people to fix stuff, etc.?
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Dec 15, 2020 05:48
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LifeSunDeath posted:I think of people who restore old computers and I just cannot imagine tolerating the horrendous load times in this day and age, goddamn. It’s why I like the YouTube channels these people make, by the end of the 20-30 minute video I’m usually pretty done with the subject matter and have no real desire to deal with it in real life. It’s the videos that don’t put you off that are the problem.
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Dec 15, 2020 06:08
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Buttcoin purse posted:Nice! How much of the stuff is for sale vs. just for showing off? And do you do anything like trying to hook things up together, help people to fix stuff, etc.? It was mainly for showing off, however I did have a couple of items that I sold off while I was there. Most of the enquiries were from people who had parents/relos with old computers that wanted to know if we were interested in buying off them. There's a lot of knowledge in the group (related to an Australian Vintage computer group on Facebook) that help out with trouble shooting, finding parts, doing bulk orders, etc. LifeSunDeath posted:I think of people who restore old computers and I just cannot imagine tolerating the horrendous load times in this day and age, goddamn. SD/CF/USB adapters and add ons like Gotek have removed a lot of the loading time issues these days. Considering a lot of the media is starting to fail due to age, it allows the original hardware to still run games and applications without worrying about CRC or read errors
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Dec 16, 2020 02:23
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Are we at a point yet that my dual PIII server box has any nostalgia value? It even has an Nvidia FX 5200 in it. A PCI FX 5200. 
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Dec 16, 2020 02:41
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CaptainSarcastic posted:Are we at a point yet that my dual PIII server box has any nostalgia value? I think everything before P4 is getting interesting at this point, I certainly see people building gaming systems with PIIIs, and a dual PIII system is presumably a lot rarer. I assume that unlike say a dual 486 or dual Pentium, a dual PIII system is fairly well supported by a reasonable number of OSes?
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Dec 16, 2020 03:34
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Buttcoin purse posted:I think everything before P4 is getting interesting at this point, I certainly see people building gaming systems with PIIIs, and a dual PIII system is presumably a lot rarer. I assume that unlike say a dual 486 or dual Pentium, a dual PIII system is fairly well supported by a reasonable number of OSes? Yeah, I've run Linux and Windows XP on it in the past. I'd have to double-check but it's got like a gig or two of RAM.
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Dec 16, 2020 04:41
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Is it weird that I want one of these?
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Dec 16, 2020 07:14
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The Bible posted:Is it weird that I want one of these? Not if you listen to a lot of cassettes?
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Dec 16, 2020 07:20
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The Bible posted:Is it weird that I want one of these? Only if you want to put a pop-tart in it like a kid who wants to feed a VCR a PB&J sandwich.
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Dec 16, 2020 08:08
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The Wurst Poster posted:Only if you want to put a pop-tart in it like a kid who wants to feed a VCR a PB&J sandwich. Well, I do NOW...
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Dec 16, 2020 08:41
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I like how philips solved this problem https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oNvxESKLAcA I wonder if you could get them with taller towers that held more tapes
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Dec 16, 2020 09:16
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r u ready to WALK posted:I like how philips solved this problem LOL I was about to say, a carousel of cassettes isn't as good as a cassette of cassettes....like a gun mag.
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Dec 16, 2020 15:41
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CaptainSarcastic posted:Are we at a point yet that my dual PIII server box has any nostalgia value? Quite possibly, I'm pretty sure I saw someone on the forums recently trying to put together a dual PIII from ebay parts.
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Dec 16, 2020 17:26
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I used a dual PIII tower (and man, it was a hell of a tower, drat thing was about 3 feet tall) for my master's work in TYOOL 2010. I really wish I had held on to that, but I must have given it away before I moved.
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Dec 16, 2020 17:39
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never thought "gravity fed tape deck" would be a descriptor i'd need to use
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Dec 16, 2020 19:11
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CaptainSarcastic posted:Are we at a point yet that my dual PIII server box has any nostalgia value? What is that, like 1 watt per MHz?
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Dec 16, 2020 19:24
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