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I miss the days when you could play the lottery and maybe get an insane part that can go nuts. Back when I could get a casual 1Ghz overclock on my Athlon. Nowadays you can't get lucky with a video card because they bin all the chips and if your cheap card could overclock, they would have figured that out and put it into a higher SKU.
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Dec 22, 2023 21:55
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I remember the Cellerin 300a in particular being a legend because A) you could probably find a carton of them for $30 each at a computer show and B) you had about a 85% chance of successfully overclocking it to 450 by changing one setting on your motherboard.
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Dec 22, 2023 23:27
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Remember computer shows? All that overstock product has moved to shady auction sites now. I miss being able to buy headphones for like a dollar. Or a TV for twenty bucks, delivery up to you.
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Dec 22, 2023 23:47
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Kwyndig posted:Remember computer shows? All that overstock product has moved to shady auction sites now. I miss being able to buy headphones for like a dollar. Or a TV for twenty bucks, delivery up to you. I only ever got to go to one (at a Holiday inn in MA) but I bought my first ide dvd from drive from some random vendor whom I'm pretty sure I handed over my debit card to pay for. I was a dumb kid. One sketchy copy of PowerDVD later, I could watch The Matrix on a 17inch monitor.
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Dec 23, 2023 00:10
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 I don't know how this image got so compressed. I'd take a new picture but my phone got run over and the camera doesn't work anymore. I don't have the RAM anymore but I do have this box, which was a Christmas gift from like 1992, and it allowed our Tandy 386 to finally play the game I'd gotten the previous Christmas, El-Fish
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Dec 23, 2023 00:51
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BrainDance posted:Goddamn I miss Gateway. Whatever happened to having an aesthetic? The cow boxes and all that. My everyday laptop is a gateway Still chugging along. I've put in an SSD and a lot more RAM though
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Dec 23, 2023 01:59
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wash bucket posted:Skip to 2:30 if you're in a hurry. Why couldn't computer towers in 1998 be all kinds of colors? Why not a mint green, or a pale jade? Why not orange? Why not a deep blue? Was it a technological problem somehow?
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Dec 23, 2023 06:01
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You have to imagine among the millions upon millions of computer users in the 90's that someone wanted a computer which was mustard yellow. Was there a technological hurdle that kept that one guy from getting his yellow computer? Or was it just stupid systemic bullshit?
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Dec 23, 2023 06:03
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Teriyaki Hairpiece posted:I listened to this person read a book for multiple minutes and I still haven't gotten an answer to my question: You clearly didn't listen because the answer is Germany and, shortly thereafter, Europe. They regulated the color of computer equipment for offices. Any computer that wasn't gray or beige couldn't be used as an office computer or something, they're less clear on the consequences. But yes, if you made a pale jade computer you'd be cutting yourself out of the lucrative German office market, losing out on potentially tens of sales. Computermakers are capitalists, so this was not done.
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Dec 23, 2023 06:50
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Kwyndig posted:Remember computer shows? All that overstock product has moved to shady auction sites now. I miss being able to buy headphones for like a dollar. Or a TV for twenty bucks, delivery up to you.
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Dec 23, 2023 06:59
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But it has to has to cost very little money to make a small rectangular metal box pale jade, yes? And then you could conceivably make it hundreds of dollars more than its beige and white counterparts?
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Dec 23, 2023 07:00
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Teriyaki Hairpiece posted:But it has to has to cost very little money to make a small rectangular metal box pale jade, yes? And then you could conceivably make it hundreds of dollars more than its beige and white counterparts? Congratulations you figured out the thing Apple figured out. Now if you had acted on it 20 years ago you could be one of the world's largest cell phone manufacturers for some reason.
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Dec 23, 2023 07:05
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 Colorful plastic boxes in 1999??? This was under the Christmas tree for me, all 900mhz, iirc. Finally, I could play rollercoaster tycoon all afternoon without bogarting my mom's work computer.
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Dec 23, 2023 07:16
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poo poo Fuckasaurus posted:You clearly didn't listen because the answer is Germany and, shortly thereafter, Europe. They regulated the color of computer equipment for offices. Any computer that wasn't gray or beige couldn't be used as an office computer or something, they're less clear on the consequences. But why
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Dec 23, 2023 09:05
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Big Mac posted:
This is the exact computer my first wife and I bought together, iirc it came with Win95 and I made the god-almighty mistake of putting ME on it. I think I remember it was actually fairly competent for what it was after I had stuck a pci FX5200 card in it at some point.
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Dec 23, 2023 11:03
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well i dunno, i was rocking a sleek black pc back in 94 even the documentation aged just fine 
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Dec 23, 2023 12:35
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After a couple year break I made a Christmas Amiga mod again. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jmza4BxBiCI
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Dec 23, 2023 14:06
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Techmoan sings! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6P0s4dkpOTI
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Dec 23, 2023 14:31
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I was a bit curious about those "German IT standards", and from what I could find it really does check out; DIN 66 234 from 1980 is about ergonomics of computer workplaces ("Bildschirmarbeitsplaetze"). I haven't yet found a (free) copy of the actual standard, but I did find this 1993 paper (in German) that references it. The closest I've gotten to a smoking gun is this, which is about reflectivity of the surfaces (in percent):  It references another paper and not the standard, though. I can't find any contemporary text explicitly mentioning the color of the equipment, but from context it feels like something that standard could well include. Computer viking has a new favorite as of 15:00 on Dec 23, 2023 |
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Dec 23, 2023 14:56
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Also obsolete: writing games walkthroughs for print magazines (and maybe getting paid for them). I wrote a Fallout walkthrough for a German mag and got paid a couple hundred bucks. 17 year old me: wow I can play games and get paid!
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Dec 23, 2023 17:11
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https://twitter.com/HumanoidHistory/status/1738628697077236099?s=20
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Dec 24, 2023 15:23
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That's close to $101K in 2023 dollars.
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Dec 24, 2023 15:39
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I think you're all ignoring that no one thought to make a non-beige PC before apple came up with the iMac.
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Dec 24, 2023 19:38
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Computer viking posted:I can't find any contemporary text explicitly mentioning the color of the equipment, but from context it feels like something that standard could well include. it could well be that beige is the easiest and more sure fire way to meet reflectivity standards
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Dec 24, 2023 19:57
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Rap Game Goku posted:I think you're all ignoring that no one thought to make a non-beige PC before apple came up with the iMac. Pretty sure we had a black Packard Bell before the imac came out.
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Dec 24, 2023 20:16
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Turns out Pantone had something to do with it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beige_box
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Dec 24, 2023 20:16
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What did Pantone have to do with it aside from having a pantone color that is beige that Apple used?
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Dec 24, 2023 20:24
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Cojawfee posted:Pretty sure we had a black Packard Bell before the imac came out. Apple invented colored plastic in 1998. IBM desktops were black before then. At least their Pentium 2 era ones were.
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Dec 24, 2023 20:47
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Cojawfee posted:What did Pantone have to do with it aside from having a pantone color that is beige that Apple used? I think it was standardized after Jerry Manock went with Pantone 453C.
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Dec 24, 2023 21:19
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clearly another 80's company that was trafficking cocaine instead of selling their creation.
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Dec 24, 2023 21:30
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Rap Game Goku posted:Apple invented colored plastic in 1998. There were a few other outliers around too, though not exactly priced for home use.  (Apologies for the state of my poor O2.)
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Dec 24, 2023 21:51
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With that reflection and all, it really looks like a dust bin with buttons. A doctor Who alien?
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Dec 24, 2023 23:05
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The curve on the front? It's molded, not a reflection.  (And the white swoosh on the lid is some paint that has rubbed off on it) Borrowing an image from some guy on twitter, this is a top spec version of the same machine with the matching early LCD monitor: 
Computer viking has a new favorite as of 23:25 on Dec 24, 2023 |
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Dec 24, 2023 23:22
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Desert Bus posted:If i am remembering right, my Celeron was like 75bux cheaper than the equivalent I could turn it into by drawing a tiny line on it with a pencil. Just an absurdly good deal. Maybe not so much for the normal buyer, but upping the speed massively was easy fast cheap and pretty safe. The pencil (or copper paint) trick was amazing back in the early '00s, I unlocked multiple Athlon XP chips that way. Toss a custom cooler on & do some tweaking, you could easily get performance a couple tiers higher than what you paid for. I carried that through to unlocking the later tri-core Phenom chips to quad core, man those days were fun as hell
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Dec 25, 2023 05:25
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Rap Game Goku posted:I think you're all ignoring that no one thought to make a non-beige PC before apple came up with the iMac. People have mentioned IBMs that were black, including that bizarro tower with the custom card and cable that went to a CDROM/1.44 breakout to sit in your desk? And the Acers of the mid-90s were often black but with these weird bug-green panels as well.
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Dec 25, 2023 08:12
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AlternateAccount posted:including that bizarro tower with the custom card and cable that went to a CDROM/1.44 breakout to sit in your desk? The whole thing looked cool as gently caress though 
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Dec 25, 2023 08:32
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monolithburger posted:The whole thing looked cool as gently caress though I installed one of those at a client's office in '98 or something, it was neat looking.
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Dec 25, 2023 10:02
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On one hand that is futuristic and neat as heck, OTOH it also demonstrates why IBM had no business competing in the PC market. Private consumers are mostly interested in low prices and business consumers don't care that much about case design.
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Dec 25, 2023 10:24
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AlternateAccount posted:People have mentioned IBMs that were black, including that bizarro tower with the custom card and cable that went to a CDROM/1.44 breakout to sit in your desk? I had a dark green Acer in like 96. I thought it was pretty cool until the cd rom drive died and we had to put a plain old beige drive in the otherwise dark tower
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Dec 25, 2023 15:42
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Never heard of this one (and it's not Techmoan!) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PYpD6g6nLd0
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Dec 25, 2023 16:57
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