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Wacky Delly posted:Yup: Panasonic machines of the time are what I think when I think "cyberpunk". The FS-A1WSX in black and gold is my hands-down favourite computer design of all time: 
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Jul 7, 2021 22:21
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man MSXs are gorgeous and are absolutely real life cyberdecks Also I love the idea of a phreaking sim / RPG, presumably you could emulate old PBX systems and what not entirely in the memory of a modern PC... someone put together a kickstarter for this
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Jul 8, 2021 00:18
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Neito posted:I work in UCaaS, and without fail when we're setting up, someone will ask how they get their thirty year old fax machine onto our network. If it weren't for that and overhead paging units, we would have maybe 25% fewer tickets. When I was doing jack-of-all-trades IT, about ten years ago, I would occasionally have to crimp together an unholy amalgam of plugs and jacks and wires that would go on each end of a cat5 cable in the walls. You see, 100BaseT only required the orange and green pairs, so with a little custom wiring, you could repurpose the blue or brown pair to carry a POTS telephone line through the same cable as the computer network. Just put together an RJ45 plug with pins 4 and 5 (for the blue pair; use 7 and 8 for the brown pair) connected to wires going to an RJ11 jack, and all other pins connected to a short section of ordinary ethernet cable ending in an RJ45 jack for a computer -- and a corresponding setup for the wiring closet, to hook up the analog phone line to the desired pair. The practical upshot of all this was to put an analog phone jack someplace that was wired only for the computer network. Someplace, for example, like the desk of the big important sales guy who needed a fax machine right next to him, and no, the newfangled fax-to-email service wasn't good enough for some unspecified reason. I'm sure nowadays there are much better ways to do this in the UCaaS bag of tricks, but this method will still work in a pinch. Just remember that a modern gigabit network requires all four pairs, so doing this will force the connection on that cable to fall back to old fashioned horse-drawn 100 megabit. Still, that's an acceptable tradeoff in many cases... and I'm sure there are quite a few places that haven't even gone gigabit yet.
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Jul 8, 2021 01:38
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Powered Descent posted:When I was doing jack-of-all-trades IT, about ten years ago, I would occasionally have to crimp together an unholy amalgam of plugs and jacks and wires that would go on each end of a cat5 cable in the walls. You see, 100BaseT only required the orange and green pairs, so with a little custom wiring, you could repurpose the blue or brown pair to carry a POTS telephone line through the same cable as the computer network. 20 years in jack-of-all-trades IT in the same company... I did some of this at our older locations - phone system needed 2 pairs per phone, so I was able to run 2 phones on a single existing cat5 run. Now 15 years later and I am converting some of them to VoIP, so I am having to re-wire jacks and swap out 66 blocks (ugh). On related note, at our oldest location we occasionally find random abandoned 10Mbit hubs stuffed into ceilings and walls, along with many hundreds of feet of abandoned coax from networks past.
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Jul 8, 2021 02:38
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barbecue at the folks posted:Fax is the superior technology, why downgrade Japanese Business System spotted
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Jul 8, 2021 03:05
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stevewm posted:20 years in jack-of-all-trades IT in the same company... You ever find old twinax in the walls? The place I've been at for 18 years we're still pulling it out. Also we're migrating everyone from desk phones to soft phones and the screaming. Oh the screaming.
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Jul 8, 2021 03:29
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KillHour posted:And yet you go there now and they all use fax machines like it's 1995. FilthyImp posted:Lol when some US/British developer was asked to Fax The Source Code over the Nintendo of Japan. Neito posted:I work in UCaaS, and without fail when we're setting up, someone will ask how they get their thirty year old fax machine onto our network. If it weren't for that and overhead paging units, we would have maybe 25% fewer tickets. The worst career decision I ever made was being the smart guy in a meeting and telling our VP that we could totally route our Fax calls in to a virtual fax server through the same voice circuit that all our VoIP traffic went through, 7 years ago when I was the Subject Matter Expert for all things dial tone related at my old job. The best career decision I ever made was leaving all telephony experience off of my resume and focusing on SD-WAN and SASE Security after I was laid off and had to job hunt for the first time in 20 years. gently caress faxes and everything that touches them.
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Jul 8, 2021 04:21
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GreenNight posted:You ever find old twinax in the walls? The place I've been at for 18 years we're still pulling it out. The coax I'm finding is likely "Thinnet" /10base2. Have found BNC terminated cables and a few T junctions. Been pulling it out over the years during remodels. they used to have some sort of turnkey POS system provided by/leased from Siemens. It used the Thinnet cabling. Thankfully this was before my time here. I've also found some multipair wire. which was used with serial terminals. A couple of these were still in use when I started. The remaining serial terminals at remote branches where being run with serial to Ethernet gateways running over a very expensive 128k Frame Relay link. Was so glad to get rid of all that.
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Jul 8, 2021 04:30
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GreenNight posted:You ever find old twinax in the walls? The place I've been at for 18 years we're still pulling it out. We had twinax everywhere in the building. My old VP told me that they had an issue with different ground potential between the different additions of the building and the old dumb terminals would burn out regularly because of it. What is really interesting is that 3/4 of the building was wired with CAT4 wiring. Honest to God CAT4. CAT4 was only really a standard that anyone used for like 6 months between CAT3 and 5. To make matters worse, all of the jacks were wired split pair. That is , 2 jacks where wired off of each single run of CAT4. You could still get 100Mbps out of each jack (and on shorter runs, you could still get 1Gbps if it was reterminated as 1 jack per cable on both ends). But then we started running PoE Cisco phones over it. Cisco phones could use either 2 or 4 pair wire for PoE, but the stability of the connections gets real spoty once you are trying to do 100Mbps on 2 wires of CAT4. And it only got worse the longer the run was. If we tested the TDR distance of the cables, you could probably get a PoE phone to work at that speed at 100m on CAT4, but longer than that and you needed all 4 pairs (or CAT5). Nowadays I work for a company that makes real money and the hardest transition for me is remembering that we can actually spend $$$ on infrastructure and it will get approved.
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Jul 8, 2021 04:37
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GreenNight posted:You ever find old twinax in the walls? The place I've been at for 18 years we're still pulling it out. I just looked up "twinax". Via wikipedia: " Due to cost efficiency it is becoming common in modern (2013) very-short-range high-speed differential signaling applications. " I'm modern (2013).
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Jul 8, 2021 04:58
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Well, yeah, 2013 is pretty much modern computing era in this thread and in an wikipedia article talking about IBM machines from the mid-70s.
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Jul 8, 2021 10:53
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Powered Descent posted:like the desk of the big important sales guy who needed a fax machine right next to him, and no, the newfangled fax-to-email service wasn't good enough for some unspecified reason. This is the thing that gets me; we HAVE a fax-to-email service that works pretty well, but people insist on these boxes on-site for no reason other than "paper machine go brrrrrrrrrrrrr". Also, the number of times I have to explain that virtual fax to virtual fax won't work because it's literally just email with extra steps kills me.
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Jul 8, 2021 14:06
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Neito posted:This is the thing that gets me; we HAVE a fax-to-email service that works pretty well, but people insist on these boxes on-site for no reason other than "paper machine go brrrrrrrrrrrrr". Doesn't the fax protocol do receive receipts even if it's done virtually?
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Jul 8, 2021 16:12
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barbecue at the folks posted:Panasonic machines of the time are what I think when I think "cyberpunk". The FS-A1WSX in black and gold is my hands-down favourite computer design of all time:  Now that's a cyberdeck.
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Jul 8, 2021 18:07
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Mantle posted:Doesn't the fax protocol do receive receipts even if it's done virtually? It probably could on a "could this technically work?" level, but not on a "It's something we even care to acknowledge someone would want to do because loving hell" level.
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Jul 8, 2021 18:49
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When we moved our HQ to a new building a few VIPs were badgering me about making sure I installed a new POTS line for the fax, and I told them that it was time to switch to an efax service since we hardly ever send or receive faxes. There was some blubbering about maintaining technology standards so I told them that the fax is so old it predates the goddamn telephone and that made an impression on them. Over the last year and a half we've received three legit faxes via efax, and needed to send one.
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Jul 8, 2021 18:51
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Dick Trauma posted:When we moved our HQ to a new building a few VIPs were badgering me about making sure I installed a new POTS line for the fax, and I told them that it was time to switch to an efax service since we hardly ever send or receive faxes. There was some blubbering about maintaining technology standards so I told them that the fax is so old it predates the goddamn telephone and that made an impression on them. We had a laser printer our office in a hospital and we could not send outgoing faxes through it, but for some reason it would generate "Free Roofing Estimate" faxes ever so often, maybe once a week. People have largely moved to email for medical info, or just taking screen shots and texting even though you're not supposed to lol.
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Jul 8, 2021 19:14
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LifeSunDeath posted:We had a laser printer our office in a hospital and we could not send outgoing faxes through it, but for some reason it would generate "Free Roofing Estimate" faxes ever so often, maybe once a week. People have largely moved to email for medical info, or just taking screen shots and texting even though you're not supposed to lol. Fax spam exists in 2021 and it is loving hilarious.
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Jul 8, 2021 19:38
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At a new location we recently built I deliberately did not configure the fax feature on the main MFP just to see how long store staff would go before anyone said anything. They made it 3 months. I tried to get T.38 working via our VoIP provider... what a loving mess that is. Then I remembered we had a single phone line included in our Spectrum package so I connected that to it. It has been used once in the 2 months since I hooked it up.
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Jul 8, 2021 19:51
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Most of the faxes coming in are spam, including the roofing one! The same garbage week after week after week.
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Jul 8, 2021 22:59
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Neito posted:This is the thing that gets me; we HAVE a fax-to-email service that works pretty well, but people insist on these boxes on-site for no reason other than "paper machine go brrrrrrrrrrrrr". We have that (Right Fax, by name) for incoming faxes only. If I want to send something to someone and I can't upload it to their website, I have to print it out and fax it manually.
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Jul 8, 2021 23:05
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Dick Trauma posted:Most of the faxes coming in are spam, including the roofing one! The same garbage week after week after week. Even the Vacation Time Share one? Cause that scam seems real af.
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Jul 8, 2021 23:11
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LifeSunDeath posted:Even the Vacation Time Share one? Cause that scam seems real af. I time share with my parents, kinda. They have a wicked beachfront estate up north and whenever they go overseas we sneak in and pretend to be rich for a few weeks.
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Jul 9, 2021 08:42
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I get why you might double up on F-keys, but why on Earth would you have the later F-keys be listed first? Shouldn't it be F1/F6 instead of F6/F1? Are Japanese symbols written right to left or something?
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Jul 9, 2021 17:02
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GazChap posted:I get why you might double up on F-keys, but why on Earth would you have the later F-keys be listed first? Shouldn't it be F1/F6 instead of F6/F1? Yes.
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Jul 9, 2021 17:33
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Yes and no? Japanese used to be mainly written downwards in columns, first column on the right. Manga usually uses this format, which also naturally works best with pages going right to left. On the other hand, most Japanese text is laid out like English - if you type a Japanese email, it starts top/left, not top/right. If you used an MSX as a word processor, it would presumably be in this mode- which makes the F key layout kind of baffling.
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Jul 9, 2021 23:34
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Computer viking posted:Yes and no? And thats why I initially thought Initial D comic was written in a way like Memento... all flashbacks after the ending.
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Jul 10, 2021 13:02
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Man, I went fishing for ugly MSX computers (they must exist) but ran into Sony machines instead. Holy poo poo: I have a new favourite. (The F keys are in the "correct" order here, hmm.)
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Jul 10, 2021 18:55
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barbecue at the folks posted:Man, I went fishing for ugly MSX computers (they must exist) but ran into Sony machines instead. Holy poo poo:  this has everything you could ever want turbo button? no, turbo slider oh, and a second slider, for the Ren-Sha Turbo function and a bright red floppy drive with "FDD" in giant letters, just so the world knows you're on the cutting edge of magnetic storage
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Jul 10, 2021 19:38
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Back when Sony was cool.
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Jul 10, 2021 20:12
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I wish computers looked that cool these days.
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Jul 10, 2021 20:27
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This is what peak coolness looks like.  
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Jul 10, 2021 21:03
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Dick Trauma posted:This is what peak coolness looks like. Compudyne is a name right out of a Michael Crichton novel, so you're right.
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Jul 10, 2021 21:16
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Dick Trauma posted:This is what peak coolness looks like. That CD drive looks like the one that came with the Pro Audio Spectrum 16 sound card. It's a SCSI drive and the whole guts of the drive slide out instead of just a tray. My first PC got upgraded with one, and I still have it stashed in my closet. Note the repurposed IBM PC AT case. https://twitter.com/rectus_sa/status/1134502190838685696
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Jul 10, 2021 21:53
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Dick Trauma posted:This is what peak coolness looks like. so is the button part the disc tray or the other way around?
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Jul 10, 2021 22:01
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Light Gun Man posted:so is the button part the disc tray or the other way around? that drive is all tray baby 
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Jul 10, 2021 22:08
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Amazing
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Jul 10, 2021 22:17
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too lazy to dig mine out of the closet, but the whole guts come out when you press the button, like on laptop drives. Sort of like on this mitsumi drive (without the lid): Seems like they are media vision branded.
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Jul 10, 2021 22:28
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Space Gopher posted:
Omg that's awesome. I grew up with this, from age 8 or so:  It actually had a 3.5" floppy drive too, but extremely unreliable and half our disks were unreadable whenever... F4rt5 has a new favorite as of 23:18 on Jul 10, 2021 |
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Jul 10, 2021 23:16
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Dick Trauma posted:This is what peak coolness looks like. Ah, my first PC. My aunt had the exact same model as us.
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Jul 10, 2021 23:27
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