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Antioch posted:You guys, I went to the Deutsche Museum in Munich Germany a couple days ago. They have so much cool old stuff. I tried to grab pictures of the explanations when they were in English but I didn't get everything. Hopefully that doesn't detract from all the neat pictures.  I love the Enigma!The beautiful thing about it is that it's all relatively simple clockwork, and all it actually does is connect a given key to different light bulbs depending on the current configuration of the rotors. So in just a few minutes, you can completely understand the operating principle... and also understand why it has its biggest flaw: a letter can never be enciphered to itself. (That is, an E can become any other letter in the encrypted text, but never still be an E. If you're Alan Turing, and you have a guess as to a word that might be found in the coded message, it's easy to see where it might be, and what that might mean for the key that was being used.) This page is an excellent overview of how it works. And if you feel like playing around with one, there are plenty of emulators that are 100% accurate to the real hardware. This one that runs right in the browser is convenient to use, but doesn't try to re-create the look of the machine. For that, there are fantastic programs for Windows and Android. Powered Descent has a new favorite as of 18:13 on Oct 15, 2016 |
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Oct 15, 2016 18:10
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Cat Hatter posted:Did anyone ever attach a printed output directly to an enigma machine? I can't imagine transcribing more than a day's messages before replacing all the light bulbs with solenoids strapped to a typewriter or something. They existed but I think they were fairly rare.
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Oct 15, 2016 18:57
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Keiya posted:If you really want to understand how simple it is, [build one out of paper!](http://wiki.franklinheath.co.uk/index.php/Enigma/Paper_Enigma)  That is brilliant and I'm totally making one of those.
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Oct 15, 2016 23:57
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BNC connectors were also used in 10BASE2 thin-coax ethernet. Those were the days. Your network lived in a single long cable that snaked around behind all the computers, plugging into each one in turn with a T-adapter. The ends of the cable had to have terminators plugged into them. And if some user undid the wrong BNC connector, breaking the cable, the entire network went down. Good times. 
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Nov 23, 2016 22:51
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Keiya posted:Prop departments LOVE recycling random junk lying around, it's way cheaper than custom making stuff. It's especially fun when you see the same prop recycled in a different show... sometimes a different genre, even. Though that occasionally rises to the level of being an in-joke... The Borg use computers and stuff, right? Stick some floppy drives in the wall!  Many many more of these: http://www.ex-astris-scientia.org/inconsistencies/present-day-devices.htm
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Dec 5, 2016 06:03
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Cat Hatter posted:I've never seen this mentioned before, but the Jem'Hadar ships on Deep Space Nine had some grey blocky vent tube thingies in the back that were made from some specific brand (they all look a bit different) of septic infiltrator chamber. Man, "septic infiltrator" sounds like the worst job ever.
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Dec 6, 2016 19:24
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SEKCobra posted:I just deleted 40k deferred e-mails after a compromised web spammed a lot. Some legit e-mails might never arrive. 40k, you say? "In the grim darkness of the far future, there is only spam."
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Dec 15, 2016 16:35
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whiteyfats posted:The back of the 2 dollar bill is really nice. "Which President is on it?" "All of them. They're having a party."
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Feb 3, 2017 00:25
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carry on then posted:Yeah, a lot of cars, especially cheaper ones, from the late 2000s only have CD, AM/FM, and (probably subsidized) Sirius/XM receivers. No aux, no Bluetooth, nothing. My 2005 Mazda has a button for a minidisc player.  (There's no actual minidisc player installed since I didn't get the option package for it, so the button does nothing. But it's my go-to button for when I want to pretend I'm hitting Turbo Boost or Passenger Ejection Seat or Dispense Root Beer.)
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Mar 9, 2017 23:35
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I took a photography course in high school in the mid-90s (yes, yes,  ). I was never anything special at the artistic parts like shot composition, but I loved the hell out of developing the 35mm film and making prints in an enlarger. Partly because there was something so wonderfully chemical about the whole thing, and partly just because the darkroom was a cool place to hang out.)
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Mar 16, 2017 23:30
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Lowen SoDium posted:I had a Casio Databank DB-C60 I wore one of those until about 2009, when I realized that my phone had taken over every function it served except for "glance at wrist for time", and I switched to an analog face watch.
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Mar 20, 2017 17:33
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Mar 21, 2017 01:44
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HaB posted:I did this. Pretty sure I never had any trouble buying one. Not sure I ever encountered a Radio Shack employee who cared if I was even breathing much less what I was doing with the stuff I was buying. The Radio Shack employees I encountered were always deeply interested in getting my name and address and phone number, and in trying to persuade me to join their battery club.
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Mar 21, 2017 17:44
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Krispy Kareem posted:Technology before everything became standardized was wonderfully terrible. I bought two data transmitters to send wireless traffic from one computer to another, but the range was like six feet and it worked on the same 900mhz spectrum as cordless phones. When I finally got it working it was like magic watching kilobits of data move one at a time between the two computers. That's cooler than what I had. To move anything that was too big for floppies, I had to resort to a null modem, a serial cable, and a copy of Laplink that someone at school had given me.  I was able to use that same serial cable and null modem plug to play Doom against a friend on another PC. Now THAT was just transcendent -- we were both in the same game! When Warcraft II came out, a friend talked a bunch of us into investing in a "network adapter" and oh my god, EIGHT PEOPLE could all play at once in the same game! Suddenly the LAN party became a staple of my weekends.  I still have that old null modem kicking around my box of various plugs and adapters. I'm not sure when I last had a computer that even had a serial port, but hey, you never know when you'll be called upon to fix something ancient.
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Mar 21, 2017 21:38
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Fo3 posted:e for content, what was that old networking PC protocol for C&C/red alert called? It still used network cards. It was probably IPX/SPX.
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Mar 24, 2017 16:02
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flosofl posted:He reacts to a mint condition OG Model-M the same way I would. For anyone who isn't aware, Unicomp bought the rights and tooling from IBM, and they're still making the Model M to this day. I'm typing on one right now and it's the best keyboard I've ever used.
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Apr 1, 2017 08:08
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ToxicSlurpee posted:They frequently broke wrists but didn't often kill people. Fact is though, they occasionally did. As much as people romanticize old things there's often very, very good reasons they aren't around anymore. One piece of advice that my great-uncle passed on to me is that if you should ever find yourself crank-starting a Model T, don't wrap your thumb around the handle, keep it on the same side as the rest of your fingers. That way, if the crank kicks back and shoots out of your hand, it won't break your thumb along the way.
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Apr 2, 2017 23:16
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Typewriter chat and plotter chat come together in a little device I had in the 1980s, the Brother BP-30 graphing typewriter! This was an electric typewriter, obviously, but the way it worked means it was technically a plotter. You see, rather than conventional type arms / type ball / daisy wheel / dot-matrix print head, it had four tiny ballpoint pens in different colors, with which it would draw each letter by moving the pen back and forth and moving the paper up and down with the roller. Yes, really.  The main reason for this unusual design was so that it could draw perfectly clean graphs. You could input a limited set of data, pick what graph style you wanted, and hit go, and you'd get stuff like this:  I turned in many a school report with those graphs on them. Images all found here. The same guy made some videos of the thing in action. Here's a closeup of the pen and roller working together to make letters: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5zpdux9LKJY A really neat little device.
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Jun 22, 2017 11:39
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Humbug Scoolbus posted:Freshman year of college back in the late 70s, working as a keypunch operator for Wisconsin Physicians Service Blue Cross. That was me. I hope you sent a lace card into the system as a prank on your last day.
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Aug 14, 2017 01:57
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Keiya posted:Did the North American Fiber-Seeking Backhoe get introduced as an invasive species down there? I'm so sorry. This is why if you go hiking in the woods or anyplace you might get lost or stranded, it's a smart idea to bring along a short length of fiber optic cable. If you get into trouble, just bury the cable. A backhoe will be along in a few minutes to dig it up, and you can just ask the driver for a ride back to civilization. 
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Aug 25, 2017 18:15
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Known Lecher posted:A colleague was cleaning out one of our other offices today and came across a couple rolls of telex paper in a closet. Sadly the machine itself is long, long gone. Crypto Museum has a pretty decent little Telex section, if you want the technical nitty gritty of how these machines worked: http://cryptomuseum.com/telex/index.htm
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Sep 8, 2017 17:44
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Wasabi the J posted:The standard GBoard has text cursor movement by sliding on the spacebar???  (picks up phone, tries it) 
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Sep 15, 2017 18:22
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This thread has taken an odd turn.
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Oct 23, 2017 08:11
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Danger - Octopus! posted:Someone ought to write a parody horror/twilight zone thing about an audiophile whose hearing starts going. Asimov did a short story on the theme (with a sci-fi twist) 25 years before Serling. Wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Secret_Sense Full text: https://archive.org/details/TheSecretSense
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Oct 30, 2017 08:04
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Why is there a naked guy just standing there at a bank robbery? Is he one of the robbers? Had the Symbionese Liberation Army gone enthusiastically clothing-optional? Or was he a bystander -- perhaps the bank had a locker room for people to change into their banking costumes, and he was forced out to the lobby at gunpoint? Yes, the film-based security camera is a cool bit of obsolete technology, but I have so many questions. 
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Nov 28, 2017 20:45
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Imagined posted:Until about ten years ago most places that had a security camera had it recorded on a single VCR tape. The store I worked at in high school kept a month's worth of security cam footage, recorded on a regular VCR. The place was open 12 hours a day, so we had a big wall of 60 tapes -- two per day in EP (six hour) mode. There was a little box that would automatically rotate through the three camera views every few seconds, but it wasn't fancy enough to put a timestamp on the image, so we just made sure there was a wall clock visible in one of the camera views. It worked great, as long as the manager remembered to swap tapes at the halfway point of the day. Nailed more than a few shoplifters with that thing.
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Nov 29, 2017 20:16
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Trabant posted:Having a housing with curved corners is one thing. Having the actual display with curved corners (and expecting to sell it) is another: If you want to go beyond curved all the way to spherical, there's always the Gakken Worldeye. Techmoan shows one of those off here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kcG9O6S6cOU
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Dec 3, 2017 19:08
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Platystemon posted:There was a company, VU1, that was pushing miniature CRTs as a replacement for incandescent light bulbs. Oh joy, light bulbs that you can hear making a quiet high-pitched eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee sound whenever they're turned on.
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Dec 4, 2017 08:52
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I just wish car manufacturers would all start including a nice convenient spot on the dash to mount your phone. With a nice standard mounting option and a nice USB power socket right nearby. I use a clamp-style phone holder that hangs on to a dashboard vent slat for dear life. It works, but I live in fear of breaking the vent, and the power cable drapes all the way down in front of the radio to connect to the cigarette lighter. Also, in winter, when I'm blowing very hot air out of that vent, I worry about overheating the phone. Overall this setup works, but just imagine if every car had a well-placed, standardized mounting point.
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Dec 19, 2017 04:52
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Antioch posted:There's a rapidly going obsolete thing. The last case I bought doesn't even have 5.25" or 3.5" bays. I haven't installed a disc drive in a PC in years. Ten or fifteen years ago I built a new computer for my dad. Being somewhat set in his ways, he insisted that it have a 5.25" floppy drive. He hadn't used a 5.25" floppy in years, but he'd always had one, and he wanted on there "just in case". (Just in case of what, I'm not certain.) The problem was that the motherboard didn't even have a connector for such ancient hardware, and I didn't want to mess with a USB external one. So I just moved the 5.25" floppy drive from his old computer into a spare slot in the new one I was building, and left it plugged into nothing. The placebo worked great; he never once attempted to use it. I finally confessed when I was building his next computer a few years later, which convinced him that okay, maybe he didn't need it after all.
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Jan 7, 2018 23:35
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Keiya posted:(their legendarily bad handling of the FDIV bug spawned a lot of jokes at their expense) I only remember this one: "I am Pentium of Borg. Division is futile. You will be approximated."
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Jan 10, 2018 05:48
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"Hey there, lowly IT tech. It turns out the cable plugged into port 173 has a break somewhere along its run, so you're going to need to swap in a new one. Make sure not to disconnect anything else while you're working. I've already filled in that the job will take only a few minutes, I mean you're just swapping a cable, right? Oh, and make sure to leave everything looking nice and neat when you're done, we sometimes parade C-level people through here to show off our nice shiny infrastructure."
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Jan 15, 2018 21:40
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rndmnmbr posted:This has always been my problem with used book stores. Three rooms of Harlequin romances, two shelves of poo poo I actually want to read. There was a small used bookstore in my town many years ago, which had the same ratio: a small but good science fiction section (the part that kept me coming back) and many many shelves of interchangeable bodice-ripper romances. Once I struck up a conversation with the woman at the counter, who as it turned out was the owner, and I asked about it. She said that the romance section keeps a lot of used bookshops in business for a simple reason: people sell the romance novels back to her. Her explanation was something like: "Those Asimov and Heinlein novels you're buying? I'm never going to see those again, because sci-fi people keep their books forever. I actually have to order replacements by mail to keep up my stock, and I make next to no profit. Romance fans treat their stuff as disposable and will dump their last ten books back on me for a quarter a pop while they're buying their next set of ten for four bucks each. I have romance novels here that have circulated more than most books at the library."
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Jan 20, 2018 09:55
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JnnyThndrs posted:
I wonder if anyone has pitted a D-cell Maglite against a Model M keyboard. When an unstoppable force meets an immovable object...
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Feb 3, 2018 02:49
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stevewm posted:Just about every station around here is owned by ClearChannel/IHeartMedia or whatever they call themselves these days. Morning and Evening commute time radio consists of nothing but 30+ minute long commercial blocks. That's the reason my car radio spends about 90% of its time tuned to the local NPR affiliate. I get the BBC News on the way home from work every day.
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Feb 23, 2018 03:14
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My local alternative rock station plays new stuff but also mixes in oldies from all the way back in the 90s, so I'm still able to pretend that the stuff I listened to in high school is still "current".
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Feb 25, 2018 00:54
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Spy_Guy posted:Here's an interesting thing I acquired recently. A Facit CA2-16, one of the most advanced desktop electromechanical calculators ever made. Want to make sure this doesn't get lost. That thing's rad as hell.
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Feb 25, 2018 02:30
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chitoryu12 posted:One of the predictions for 3D printing in 10 or 20 years is extremely cheap, open source clothing. Bug report: librewear button-up dress shirt has a hood, complete with draw string. Dev response: WONTFIX, this is intentional, I've upgraded the garment by incorporating the functionality of a hoodie.
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Feb 28, 2018 18:43
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ToxicSlurpee posted:An alternative would be standing in a scanner that could get precise measurements then that would print clothes based on them. A full-body scanner setup probably isn't something every home will need, so hey, maybe that's a service that can set up shop at the dying mini-malls in your town. Go to the new Skans-A-Lot where the Blockbuster used to be, then get naked and do the standard poses in their bigass 3D scanner. They email you the data file, and you can now print perfectly-fitted custom clothes. Come back and get re-scanned after you gain a few pounds. (And of course Skans-A-Lot will be completely trustworthy with your millimeter-scale 3D nudes. Completely trustworthy.)
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Mar 1, 2018 03:50
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Danger - Octopus! posted:There's a fetishwear company that does this. They have a body scanner thing that they take to events, once you've been scanned then you can order latex clothing made to your exact measurements. Neat! As usual, the perverts are leading the way into the future.
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Mar 1, 2018 23:37
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