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Collateral Damage posted:The Colossus was the first true programmable computer used to defeat the Lorenz cipher. Wasn't the Z3 the first programmable computer? Or, if it wasn't, what made Colossus the first? I'm not very savvy with early computer stuff 
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Sep 12, 2016 23:51
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Platystemon posted:One field that comes to mind is time motion studies, but they attacked the problem from the opposite direction, using decimal stopwatches (marked in hundredths of a minute) to ease computation. A couple pages back, but is there an article or something about decimal stopwatches that'd explain what they were used for and by whom? I found one in one of the physics teaching labs at work and not a single person I've asked knew why that thing was purchased.
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Nov 24, 2016 21:13
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rndmnmbr posted:I don't miss rotten.com, but I do miss the rotten library. It was a surprisingly insightful and well-written for the site. You can just use the wayback machine, the library seems perfectly readable there, at least the random articles I've had to look up in the past few years.
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Nov 30, 2020 04:58
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I know I had one of those Questron type pens as a child, but sadly I don't remember what it was for, just the device itself, sorry. As a kid I loved a) space b) dinosaurs, so a book about either would be my guess.
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Dec 14, 2021 17:34
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LifeSunDeath posted:getting neutron beam to the dome doesn't give you powers. Neutrons are very bad for you, but the real life dr. Manhattan didn't turn up with super powers either.
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Feb 16, 2022 01:47
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Teriyaki Hairpiece posted:They're just the floppy disks of their time. I was clearing out boxes of childhood junk (essentially), and ran across a box of floppies that purported to contain copies of save games. I was a bit shattered that I haven't had a floppy drive in years, because as a dumb kid I spent hours lovingly crafting Settlers 2 custom maps for my dream kingdoms, but they never survived my computer migrations. They were decent-ish mid-90s floppies too, so they may have worked, dammit 
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Apr 12, 2022 06:36
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barbecue at the folks posted:You do realize that USB floppy drives exist, right? I hope you didn't throw them away just because of that. I have even seen these devices in the wild. But didn't / don't own one, and didn't know any of my pals did either, so do I throw away a box of poorly labeled floppies along with other video gaming junk, or store them somewhere in the hopes I will need them one da----- Oh. Oh!  A lot of the video game junk was old game demo CDs, do those count as obsolete if not exactly failed technology?
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Apr 12, 2022 13:48
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Wipfmetz posted:That's a cute issue. The discs themselves weigh fairly little, you'd think mechanical grabbing etc. would be more reliable than trusting that weight would, erm, pull its weight in the design.
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Oct 28, 2022 10:58
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I object. Kitties are not obsolete or failed technology 
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Dec 27, 2022 20:31
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Hah, thanks! This helped me find some long lost software toy junk, a newtonian celestial mechanics simulator from 1993 that I found cool as a kid  Is there a way to download everything from a page like that with just one click?
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Jan 6, 2023 11:12
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Xerol posted:I wanted 2 mouse pointers so I could cheat at windows 3.1 solitaire by lifting a card with one mouse and then getting the card under it with the other. Settlers 2, a city-builder game from 1995, had a multiplayer mode that was split-screen, and both players had to use their own mouse.
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Jan 30, 2023 06:15
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barbecue at the folks posted:Lots of dos games installed the whole game on hard drive for shorter loading times and then just played the music from CD. I used to play Micro Machines 2 while listening to Offspring This, but Settlers 2 and the Mechwarrior 2 CD 
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Jul 2, 2023 03:11
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Armacham posted:Anyone else have this bad boy? Hell yeah! I have that map, still, too, it's pretty dang rad. Haven't tested the CDs in ages, wonder if they've rotted out by now. 
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Jul 2, 2023 14:08
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Humphreys posted:If anyone has any Intel PIII-S 1400Mhz 1.4Ghz 512K SL5XL CPUs for cheap I need a few! Totally not for my time machine.  Does the train at the end of BttF 3 make the DeLorean obsolete?
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Jul 3, 2023 17:20
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Oh boy, a big box copy of The Dig? Other good adventure games in the adventure game portion, too, but the Dig is just the bee's knees.
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Jul 4, 2023 13:14
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barbecue at the folks posted:All good sci-fi is more about philosophy than technobabble, and Alpha Centauri is exceptionally good with painting the philosophical differences between the faction leaders and making them actually mechanically relevant to gameplay in ways that hasn't been done since. It's just such good writing and design! As much as I hate Miriam as a faction leader, her speeches in the later stages of the game really paint a picture of how hosed up the world is getting. The game makes a really compelling case for how the other leaders like Deirdre and Zhakarov are actually pretty sinister when you think about it. Yang sort of obfuscates this, and the game mechanics let him spam colonies a lot, but none of the factions in SMAC are really what you'd want to live in.
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Jul 5, 2023 06:02
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Poor George Orwell, thrown into the bin of obsolete 
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Jul 24, 2023 01:47
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quote:I've also learned that "perineum click divination" basically means he asks a question and waits to see if his butthole twitches. If this is the obsolete and failed technology, what is the current replacement?
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Nov 7, 2023 09:01
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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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Dick Trauma posted:She died last month. But now I see her as all of her ages. Dick Trauma has become unstuck in time But seriously, sorry about your mom, that is a rad picture
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Feb 3, 2024 21:01
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I mean, the Knights Templar made credit work during the Crusades, I'm sure the same principle could be applied to telegraphy as well. I guess this is slightly off-topic since banking isn't an obsolete or failed technology, but rather one of the big organs of the system that's set the globe on fire.
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Feb 24, 2024 21:48
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SniperWoreConverse posted:Apparently there's no way to get sc2k running unless you run the dos version or actually just install an entire virtual machine os, which is loving insane to me If you can run something in Dosbox, that's a win. Which includes Windows 3.1 and sundry. The lovely bit is the stuff that came out circa Windows 98 and relied on some stuff there
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Mar 25, 2024 11:05
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wesleywillis posted:Does anybody really know what time it is? Timekeeping is a minefield of obsolete and failed technology. We have synchronous time and whatnot, but some absolute morons decided that we should have a prime number of days for the week. And don't even get me started on what the Romans did to the months.
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Mar 30, 2024 07:47
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Cojawfee posted:What are any of those things? The last one looks like a conjoined twin x-ray tube, though neither would actually work
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May 6, 2024 10:17
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Pham Nuwen posted:"Roentgen" Induction Coils and other X-Ray Apparatus Huh, so it's functional? What the hell is the second gap for in the Queen tube?
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May 7, 2024 13:43
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