|
I cut my teeth doing DNA sequencing on the Pharmacia ALF-express in the late 90s.   It's so old and obsolete that these are the only pictures I could find of it on GIS. This machine was really modern for its time, since no radioactivity was involved, and it ran automatically controlled by a regular PC running Windows95. The trickiest part was pouring the acrylamide gel slab between the two glass panes without getting any bubbles. You had about a minute or two before it started to set. Then you loaded each lane with a different marked base. 40 lanes meant you could sequence 10 samples at a time, and get 600-800 base pairs read per sample. Really nice machine, very reliable and decent software too. But every single technology involved is really obsolete. Gel slabs went out almost 10 years ago, and Sanger sequencing is being phased out by next-gen sequencing right now.
|
#
¿
Jul 14, 2012 16:25
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 3, 2024 15:10 |
|
|
Mister Kingdom posted:You want real ridiculous failure, imagine a record player in a VW Beetle (top center): See the windshield washer kit in the top left? The WV beetle came with a windshield washers that ran off the air pressure in the spare tire. Looks like the aftermarket kit came with an electric pump like every other car ever. e: Oh lol, a spare fuel cannister to keep under a seat inside the car. Sounds like a fantastic idea!
|
|
#
¿
Jul 15, 2012 18:50
|
|
|
JediTalentAgent posted:I remember around the DVD era, though, VCD had a bit of a following for folks because several DVD players supported VCDs, allowing folks to burn stuff on their PCs with regular CDs. VCDs were huge in Asia, mostly because the movie could be pressed by the same plants that made bootleg CDs. It was also the format for internet piracy of
|
|
#
¿
Jul 17, 2012 13:47
|
|
|
JediTalentAgent posted:The only real streaming competition that I ever saw at that time was a format called "Vivoactive" which I thought was better than Realvideo with comparable file sizes. Vivo files were the format for pirating video in the mid 90s, as the files were smaller than mpegs and could be downloaded on a dialup. The only free player didn't support skipping around when playing a video, so if you wanted to watch something you had to start over if you had to stop it for some reason. Picture quality was horrible, and everything looked rasterized for some reason. However, if you were on dialup and wanted to see a terrible Ranma½ fansub in 1997 you had little other choice.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 27, 2012 14:28
|
|
|
Csixtyfour posted:Texting pagers! To bad it took at least 20 minutes to send one text message. Are those the two-way pagers that they still tell you to shut off every time you get on an airplane?
|
|
#
¿
Jul 29, 2012 14:56
|
|
|
Lankster NZ posted:Back to old school Mp3 player chat for a minute. I had both the iHP-120 (died suddenly) and the iHP-320 (died after I dropped it into the sink). Great players, bulky, but sounded great. Real clicking buttons and the remote was good too. You could keep the player in your coat pocket and leave the remote clipped to the coat collar so you didn't have to fumble around with the whole player if you wanted to switch tracks. The thing also didn't require any kind of software installed. Just plug in the usb, and it worked like an external HD. Just drag and drop files. Used it with Windows, OSX and even Linux a few times. Great for moving large files around. Only downsides were that it was bulky and required you to manually update podcasts. No dedicated software means no syncing.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 5, 2012 11:37
|
|
)and I still use it pretty much daily running RockBox firmware. 
|
Totally Reasonable posted:unsavory types (like the Steves Jobs and Wozniak) used to make unlicensed copies of it, which were used by other unsavory types to make free and untraceable calls all over the world. Hello!
|
|
#
¿
Aug 8, 2012 06:27
|
|
|
I found this in the computer room flotsam at work. From that awkward time in the 1990s when CDRs were unknown and there was a market for >1,44M magnetic media. Zip drives were the most common ones. This is one of the forgotten brands, I had never seen one before I found this in a pile of old junk.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 3, 2012 20:17
|
|
|
DNova posted:Are you throwing that away????????? Of course not. I just put it back on the shelf where it will sit until the sun blows up or someone else cleans out all the old crap. It's potentially full of someone's old scientific raw data from the early 90s, or maybe a backup of something.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 4, 2012 11:36
|
|
|
minato posted:Pop quiz: What's this device? That trick only worked on C64 and Apple II discs. PC discs used both sides by default. When 3.5" drives became popular, DD discs stored 700kb and cost about half of HD 1.4M discs. The only difference was a 4mm hole in the upper left corner. Since I was a broke highschool student at the time, I bought DD discs and took an electric drill to them. Most of the time it worked great, as long as no plastic chips got inside the disc casing.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 11, 2012 11:24
|
|
|
Donkwich posted:Does Europe still have a lot of paternosters? Never seen one. Wikipedia says there are very few extant here in Sweden. The ones that are left are in older office buildings, and not accessible to the public.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 1, 2012 19:46
|
|
|
Ron Burgundy posted:I've always thought that Battersea power station had the best looking control rooms. This is the control room for the first production reactor in Sweden, Ågestaverket. It was built as a research reactor, but also provided heat and electricity to the Stockholm area. When it was mothballed in 1974, all radioactive material was removed, but the plant itself was left intact. Very few people are allowed in to see it, but I hope it will be turned into a museum some day. 
|
|
#
¿
Nov 15, 2012 12:06
|
|
|
Jedit posted:Epyx joystick? Where? That's the Konix Speed King. I always hated them. That's a Kempston stick, and they ruled for C64/Spectrum gaming. Very distinct and it clicked when you moved it.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 16, 2012 13:30
|
|
|
Jerry Cotton posted:Newsflash: Almost every joystick out there back in the day was sold in different (and non-different) colour and button configurations by about 5000 companies under various names. Especially that one ^^^ Kempaton was the original, sure there were knockoffs. They also made a joystick interface for Sinclair Spectrum computers. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kempston_joystick
|
|
#
¿
Nov 16, 2012 20:42
|
|
|
einTier posted:Indestructible was this monster. The Kempston, the Bat Handle and the Tac-2 were pro-tier joysticks. 
|
|
#
¿
Nov 22, 2012 14:42
|
|
|
Elim Garak posted:Those old school sticks may have great form and last forever but I am extremely happy that I haven't had to do a joystick calibration in ten or fifteen years. That was not fun. Those joysticks that were just posted are digital. Four directions and one fire button. The diagonals are just the two component directions combined.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 24, 2012 21:49
|
|
|
dougie posted:Fortunately my dad opted to replace our Sinclair Spectrum with an Amiga 500 rather than one of these.. I never even saw one of those in real life. Were they even sold in stores outside the UK?
|
|
#
¿
Jan 21, 2013 11:50
|
|
|
RC and Moon Pie posted:
That was an awesome read. Thanks!  I feel sorry for Biro who lost everything in a failed project to create the newest most advanced analog keyboard based on 8-track tapes juuuust before digital synthesizers became available.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 6, 2014 16:19
|
|
|
 No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame.
|
|
#
¿
May 5, 2014 21:03
|
|
|
Valfar posted:I still have this thing, and use it occasionally. It's the iRiver H320, and it's still working great. Works as a standard USB mass storage device, so just plug it in and transfer files. Currently running the latest version of RockBox! I had the iRiver H340 for years and it was pretty drat good. When the battery died I got a replacement on eBay and kept using it until I killed it dropping it into a sink full of water, soap and dirty dishes. Fantastic sound quality, and I really liked that it worked just like an USB drive and didn't need any software installed at all.
|
|
#
¿
May 10, 2014 09:11
|
|
|
Collateral Damage posted:When I was in grade school I remember we got to watch presentations that were pictures shown by a slide projector accompanied by a soundtrack that came on reel. The teacher had a "portable" reel to reel player that she'd haul out and set up on the desk, and the sound track would have a beep or ding sound to signal that it was time to change slide. Collateral Damage posted:This was mid/late 80s. Google tells me most of those tapes were from the early/mid 70s. Pogo Pedagog Presenterar 
|
|
#
¿
Jun 3, 2014 08:43
|
|
|
Code Jockey posted:You know what I just caught myself doing? In the command prompt you can do notepad file.txt. Or install a windows port of your favorite command line Linux text editor. nano.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 20, 2014 19:50
|
|
|
Back in the day of manual code and codewheel copy protection,  came with a text file that had all the codes. Or the game was properly cracked and you could enter anything.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 10, 2014 06:28
|
|
|
Kings Quest III made you type in several sentences worth of incantations when you made spells.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 10, 2014 14:38
|
|
|
Imagined posted:never did grok IRC for file sharing It was the best of times it was the blurst of times. IRC file sharing was pretty terrible, but the way to get before bittorrent was invented. Most ISP didn't provide the alt.binaries hierarchy on usenet, so IRC was the place to go for the latest .mpg of the Simpsons or terrible terrible .rm enocoded anime.There was this huge script for mIRC called Polaris that worked as a fserve or XDCC serve. People with fast connections ran bots with the Polaris scripts that were fileservers. You would join a channel like #futurama-mpeg or #m4ng0st333n_w4r3z and stick around for a bit. A bot would tell you the rules, and if you didn't follow them, got kickbanned. Some channels allowed you to say !list, which would make all compliant bots send you a list of files in a private message. You would then send request to the bot, which placed you in line a file. Then you just had to wait for everyone else to get their files or get dropped from a huge netsplit or some other random glitch. If you were lucky, eventually the bot would set up a binary transfer and send over the requested file. Large files were often divided into chunks of 25M each in a split .rar archive. Other bots would run adds for ftp servers. These were also really annoying. If you got lucky or knew someone you could be let into private IRC channels or get logins for ftp servers with no lines. The few people on fast connections were expected to serve if they wanted to get in on the good stuff. I had a feeling there were a lot of these servers on university Unix accounts. e: 
axolotl farmer has a new favorite as of 19:16 on Aug 1, 2014 |
|
#
¿
Aug 1, 2014 19:12
|
|
|
There was a Mac emulator for the Amiga the required actual physical Macintosh ROM-chips hooked up for legal reasons, and an external Apple floppy drive if you wanted to use any software. The cracked version used dumped ROMs instead  
|
|
#
¿
Mar 1, 2015 21:09
|
|
|
Dust is terrible for water treatment plants. Contains a lot of heavy metals and other things. Body waste goes in the drain, dust goes in the garbage.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 15, 2015 08:26
|
|
|
Zopotantor posted:Most household dust is just skin scales, hair, textile fibers and mite poop. If there's a significant amount of heavy metals in yours, you probably want to move. Compared to poop, there's a lot of heavy metals in household dust. It's minimal amounts, but enough to make the waste unusable as fertilizer. There's actually been a campaign here from the water treatment authorities to vacuum and sweep instead of mopping to reduce the amount of dust in the household water waste. If people only flushed body and food waste, the sludge could be used for fertilizer instead of landfill. Phosphorous is a finite resource, and a lot of it is wasted instead of recycled because of contaminated waste water.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 15, 2015 10:36
|
|
|
I think I read it on dn.se.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 15, 2015 13:25
|
|
|
Athenry posted:Quake Live is still around and is basically quake 3 in your browser. It is great. Quake live isn't a browser game anymore, but it's free to play and available on Steam or a separate setup.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 22, 2015 20:00
|
|
|
Zopotantor posted:Ahem. Microdrives store the data on an infinite loop of magnetic tape. There was a trick to gain a couple of kB per cart if you reformatted it many times over. It worked by stretching the tape a bit from the spooling, and since it was analog tape read by a magnetic pickup, just as long as there was enough magnetic stuff on the tape to read and write data, it worked.
|
|
#
¿
May 15, 2015 09:14
|
|
|
wasn't two way pagers a thing for a while in the US? in Europe everyone was already using text messages by that time.
|
|
#
¿
May 23, 2015 08:40
|
|
|
someone in one of the YOSPOS buttcoin threads tried to help an acquaintance actually cash out $20000 worth of bitcoins. he offered a 50% discount or something like that to anyone to would pay in cash. posted on local BTC forums and Craigslist. the conditions was that they meet in a bank, verify that the cash was real and stay there until the BTC transfer went through. no takers.
|
|
#
¿
May 27, 2015 09:42
|
|
|
Collateral Damage posted:Was that the three part story that ended up on buttcoin(foundation).org? yeah
|
|
#
¿
May 27, 2015 10:34
|
|
|
Jerry Cotton posted:For a few years, "writing biorhythm programs in BASIC" was actually a way to make some kind of living. those ads used to be all over the back pages of computer and pop-science magazines in the 1980s.
|
|
#
¿
May 31, 2015 11:13
|
|
|
[Weird_Al]-[Random_parody_song]-[96kbps].mp3
|
|
#
¿
Jun 3, 2015 20:00
|
|
|
and up to Windows Me you always ran as root. the few that used Linux were really smug about that.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 4, 2015 09:12
|
|
|
the early legal download sites were terrible. you got ONE download of a drm-ed file that would either only play on iTunes or Windows Media Player. if you lost the file, you couldn't log in and download it again. if your computer died and you forgot the password to allow your new computer to use media tied to your drm key, you were screwed. Amazon and then Apple realized that this was dumb and stopped selling drm-ed tracks. Steam let you download and install as many times as you wanted from the start.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 8, 2015 16:12
|
|
|
laserghost posted:Someone mentioned game piracy. Most of the civikised world missed the extreme fun that were russian game compilations. 10 games on one CD? No problem! I saw some really elaborate pirate CDs in Europe in the early 00s. BEST OF WAREZ proudly on the cover. Professionally printed cases and real pressed CDs, Digipak cases the size of a double CD that folded out to hold 4-6 discs. Weird installers that would unpack and repack sound files and graphics and took forever. The guy who had them said it was like a subscription, there would be a new compilation out each month.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 8, 2015 19:31
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 3, 2024 15:10 |
|
|
laserghost posted:Was it per chance Twilight series? Don't know, but I remember they actually said BEST OF WAREZ on the cover, so prob someone copying Twillight's thing.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 8, 2015 19:55
|
|