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RC and Moon Pie posted:The Smith Corona Wordsmith. A typewriter - with spellcheck! These things had two modes. One was standard typewriter where it would print the letters as you typed like normal, or you could attempt to set margins and type a line at the time and then commit it to paper. There was a tiny display screen that allowed you to make corrections as you typed in this mode. If you misspelled a word, it'd make a very loud and annoying beeping sound. There was a slightly less annoying, but no less loud sound if you made it to the perceived margin. Perceived as in, the margin recognition was horrible. Behind me on a cabinet is a Xerox 645 Memorywriter, a sort of niche device called a "Desktop Typesetter"; it's basically a highly advanced work processor that uses a Diablo Wheel to make "perfect" characters. It has two 5 1/4" disk drives and a tiny monochrome monitor, and two distinct modes of operation, one that emulates a basic typewriter, and another where the rest of the electronics are powered up and you can do all the "computer" tasks like composing documents on-screen, spell-checking them, format the type and save files and templates and such to disk, etc. I have LaserDisc! One of my earliest memories of recognizing superior technology was when I went to the shop with my parents to buy a copy of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie, and I saw the giant cover art for the LD version and picked it up, and was amazed that it had chapter stops. Disk media is non-linear, which makes it very convenient, which is why it shows up a lot in education. You'll find tons of second-hand LD players with RS-232 ports on them to interface with computers, and the odd barcode pen interface to scan codes out of a textbook. They also saw limited use as data media, although my knowledge of them as such is second-hand so I'm not sure how that worked out; i.e. were they storing actual digital data or images encoded as NTSC frames (LDs have two "speeds", CAV (Constand Angular Velocity, except it's really Constant Angular Acceleration) and CLV (Constand Linear Velocity). CAV allows 30 minutes a side and perfect still frame and smooth speed changes are possible, they are only possible on CLV discs on players with a frame store), and if it's encoded digitally weather or not it was done as something akin to a data CD or something akin to PCM recording on videotape. I have CED! It's exactly as bulky and crazy as prior posters have made it sound, and unlike LaserDisc, it doesn't have vastly superior picture quality (a GOOD LD pressing looks almost as good as a DVD); picture is about as good as SuperBeta (An improvement on Betamax; didn't look as good as S-VHS but doesn't need special tapes, wasn't restricted to high-end decks). Also a shitload of the players were real bottom-end units without A/V outs or, peculiarly, the random access that makes disk media so tempting. There's a story to it, though. RCA went through a change in management while it was in development and it got set on the back burner and revived much later on; it's thought that if development had carried on as intended it would have captured the market because it was slated to come out in the 70s, instead of 1981, by which point VHS and Beta were duelling for the mass market and LD had the high end. It couldn't record like tape and didn't have LDs quality, so it sunk. Given what's involved, though, it's amazing that it works at all. Iomega, the people behind the Zip and Jazz drives, made something called the "Clik!". It was a miniaturized disk drive that fit in a PCMCIA cardslot and took silver-dollar sized disks which held 40 MB each. I bought mine right before inexpensive flash memory made it obsolete. Of course I also bought an Mp3 player that used the disks... It was horrid and slow and the less said of it the better.
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Jul 14, 2012 09:04
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Dogan posted:I just threw away a box of these I just turned up my camera for these. It's a very nice Sony model, still in its shipping box. But the reason I came here today, goon sirs, is to present you with the Dialoc!  Pictured here with what could perhaps be called its nearest rival, the Simplex lock. Both do the same job; namely, allowing access to a space without the need for a physical token like a key or keycard. Typically these are supplemental locks; both of these locks are meant to work with latches as evidenced by their knobs, in many settings they would be supplemented by a deadbolt to lock out code-havers but not keyholders. Notice also that the Simplex lock has a key by-pass. The Dialoc (If it isn't obvious by now, it's the righthand one, with the, um, dial, and big "D"...) seems to present a nice solution, the mechanism, after all, is one that everyone is familiar with and inherently understands, and this was even more true in the time period when these were sold widely. The action is smooth and simple; the thing itself is attractive and well made, why could it fail? Some of you probably already know; either because you're some sort of security professional, or just one of those folks with the "Adversarial mindset". Upon operating the lock a few times, some things beyond its good quality and ease of use come to light. The combination is dialed in broad strokes; a casual observer can fairly easily discern, if not exactly what numbers are being dialed, where they fall on the dial. Worse still, either by desire to perfectly emulate the telephone dial, or by some necessity of the mechanism (I've not had it apart far enough to tell), the thing clicks as the dial returns home. Given the right circumstances, someone not even in sight of the lock could learn its combination by ear. Between the ease of "shoulder surfing" and listening for the numbers, the Dialoc is revealed to have some non-insignificant weaknesses. The Dialoc, to the best of my knowledge, never received D.O.D. (Department of Defense) certification. The Simplex did. There is little market for combination door locks in the consumer world, and, as far as I can tell, these were marketed to the average consumer. For that setting, they are ideal; it's highly unlikely that a potential attacker will be near enough to the homeowner as he runs the combination to observe it by sight or by ear, but again, the market for consumer-use combination door locks is just a very small one. There are other concerns, minor ones, mostly to do with recombinating the lock; the Dialoc uses a pack of wheels, each corresponding to a dialed number. To introduce new numbers into the combination requires that more wheels be acquired, and what little I can learn about these suggests that they didn't come with the full complement of ten, just the four that made up their initial combination. The Simplex can be recombinated without extra parts. The Dialoc requires a fairly large cut-out in the door, while the Simplex lock pictured here requires only that a small hole be bored in addition to the likely pre-existing door knob hole.
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Sep 11, 2014 21:49
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Pham Nuwen posted:And if it worked at about the speed of a telephone dial, putting in a combination would be pretty goddamn slow compared to punching it in on a Simplex lock. That's one of the things it gets right. The dial return is quite speedy, but the clicks are still discernible.
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Sep 11, 2014 22:05
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cowtown posted:Hide a microphone near the lock, record everyone's combination... fantastic lock! Well there's only one combination, I'm not aware of any purely mechanical combination lock that supports more than one combination, but it does have an advantage over the Simplex -the way the mechanism works means there is no factory default combination, like Simplex has (2 & 4 together, then 3). I'm sure we're all aware of the fact that people leave digital passwords set to defaults all the time, so of course they do this with other things as well. And before anyone says anything, the manual on Simplex's web site tells you this combination. And I wouldn't be surprised if some keypad on some ostensibly-a-security-product item (most likely an alarm keypad or the like) produced discreet tones with each keypress. I do know that the DOD spec for such locks states that each keypress must sound alike. Red_October_7000 has a new favorite as of 03:27 on Sep 12, 2014 |
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Sep 12, 2014 03:25
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El Estrago Bonito posted:I know security guys who use Dialocs because they actually avoid many of the common brute force attacks that work on a lot of key locks. They do suffer from the weakness of most door locks, which is that no matter what kind of insane $300 lock you put on your door, most household door frames break easily if someone kicks them or smacks them with a relatively small heavy object. The Simplex however has a really simple picking attack IIRC that targets the key backup making the actual dial method pretty obsolete. The Simplex pictured was an Ebay score and I needed the SFIC core out of it as I had no keys for it. So whilst waiting on dinner the other night I had at it with a "City" rake and in five minutes managed to somehow find the control shear line and out popped the core. I literally stared at it and said "That's not supposed to happen". Real bitch of a keyway, too, very para-centric. The pins were basically sitting on the little shelf the warding makes in the middle of the keyhole there. The key by-pass is only as strong as whatever you put in it. If it had been a Medeco or something like that it would have been electric drill time. I've seen Simplex locks with no key by-pass at all, just like the Dialoc. If you bide your time you can find a fancy one with a flap that covers the dial. And you can bet your rear end that mine is getting installed on a door!
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Sep 12, 2014 22:19
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