RC and Moon Pie posted:

In high school, my technology teacher heard about this statewide contest for students to build a website about their high school.

I knew very basic HTML, which impressed the teacher, so I was in the contest. We attended the little celebration thing for it when they announced the winners.
a) There were only about 10 high schools in the state participating.
b) Somebody knew Shockwave, which blew everything else away.

This was long enough ago that I got to use my first digital camera, which used a 3.5 floppy for its storage.

Sweevo posted:

The worst decision ever made was letting graphic designers treat HTML like it was a pixel perfect image format and then making GBS threads their pants because the drop shadow on their bevel was anti-aliased slightly differently between browsers.

Sentient Data posted:

Lol, you don't know the joys of corporate web dev and needing to make sure everything runs on ie8. Hell, back when I worked for a fortune 50 a while ago, we had to make sure ie6 rendered the same as chrome, opera (before it went chromium), and firefox

BogDew posted:

Creating image slices in Macromedia Fireworks.

Buttcoin purse posted:

Is that what sites did when they wanted an imagemap - because they wanted all their navigation links to be different locations in one big image - but they were concerned about client-side image map support in ancient browsers, so instead their page consisted of a whole bunch of small images that tiled together to make one big one? At least I seem to remember that being a thing.

r u ready to WALK posted:

i like the old cdroms where the top directory had a fancy background image built from hundreds of carefully placed folders with custom icons

Buttcoin purse posted:

Is that what sites did when they wanted an imagemap - because they wanted all their navigation links to be different locations in one big image - but they were concerned about client-side image map support in ancient browsers, so instead their page consisted of a whole bunch of small images that tiled together to make one big one? At least I seem to remember that being a thing.

r u ready to WALK posted:

i like the old cdroms where the top directory had a fancy background image built from hundreds of carefully placed folders with custom icons

LifeSunDeath posted:

always loved the look of early apple OS desktops. windows really lacks any aesthetic beyond: cubicle drone doesn't deserve nice things.

EVIL Gibson posted:

I, too, love all my desktop icon text to be in the shittiest italics ever.

EVIL Gibson posted:

I, too, love all my desktop icon text to be in the shittiest italics ever.

r u ready to WALK posted:

Keith Atherton posted:

I have fond memories of working as a UX designer on a mission critical internal web app and one Dev was a contractor who didn’t know HTML or CSS and the other was this poor kid who bailed from the company after it predictably turned into a fiasco

Hooked up my old Sony VHS player and it promptly munched my Fast Times at Ridgemont High tape

Come to find out VCRs are now an expensive tech relic (so is VCR repair)

evobatman posted:

I flip old electronics for profit, and good multi-head hifi VCRs can bring some surprisingly good cash!

I've also tried repairing some of them that didn't work, and the mechanical and electrical complexity that's going on inside a VCR is way beyond me.

CaptainSarcastic posted:

There was a British show called "The Secret Life of Machines" that did a really good job explaining how common devices actually work, like photocopiers and such. They did an episode on VCRs and it really is a kind of freaky set up. They don't read the tape in a linear fashion like cassette tapes - they have a a drum that tilts the tape so it is read diagonally to increase the area of the tape being accessed. The tape is spooled off and around a drum that sits at an angle like 45 degrees or something, so instead of accessing a centimeter of the tape at a time it's more like 1.5 or 2cm of tape, like ///////// instead of ||||||||||, if the ////////// were longer.

At least that's how my memory of it is - it's been decades since I saw it and I could be mistaken.

WITCHCRAFT posted:

this image gave me a random flashback of my first computer use as a kid at like age 5

I associated the "read me" icon as hieroglyphics instead of a newspaper

because I mainly used it to play Glypha (Joust, but Egyptian themed)

barbecue at the folks posted:

VCR tech is basically just real-life magic. It's such an interesting period of tech: the inevitable transition to ones and zeroes is already happening but there was still the need to devise one last ridiculously complex analog technology because digital home video is still out of reach. The cumulated engineering wizardry of decades of fiddling with magnetic tape is then poured into this stupidly complicated and and cumbersome format which still manages to remain usable and relevant for two decades. I love old VCRs, the complex mechanism, the clicks and whirrs, the slow corruption of the tape with each pass, it's just so exciting to observe how it all manages to just work.

Data Graham posted:

I'll always love how basically everything you would see on a Mac for like 15 years was the work of Susan Kare.

She's still rockin https://twitter.com/SusanKare

evobatman posted:

I flip old electronics for profit, and good multi-head hifi VCRs can bring some surprisingly good cash!

I've also tried repairing some of them that didn't work, and the mechanical and electrical complexity that's going on inside a VCR is way beyond me.

Jim Silly-Balls posted:

Are you doing ITAD or are you flipping old hifi stuff and the like?

evobatman posted:

Flipping old hifi stuff, but have also done toys, watches, and other stuff I can pick up cheap from the classifieds and flea markets. We did have an electronics dumpster at a place I used to work, and that was a gold mine for a couple of years. Pulled out hundreds of sticks of RAM that I sold in lots, and some nice laptops and workstations that I used for years. I've posted a lot of this stuff in the PYF Recent Purchases and 2-channel audio thread.

Data Graham posted:

Every new day brought a new feature that browsers supported.

Background colors. Background images. Tables. Frames. Javascript. CSS.

One day when Java Applets became supported I put one at the top of my site to display crossfading text: WELCOME TO / MYSITE.COM

It was important to use every feature

Horace posted:

You gave me a flashback to making websites in high school by going to javascript.internet.com (which sounds like a made up URL from an episode of Law & Order about hacking) and copy pasting as many scripts into my Geocities pages as possible.

edit: adorable