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evol262 posted:Terrifying to work on, as were emacs. Nobody ever wants to open a crt Can confirm, I used to be a certified Apple tech. The service guides for those things were a pants-making GBS threads read, and if you got any one of the CRT e/iMac questions wrong on the cert exam it was an instant fail. As I can remember it, you had to use an 18 inch acetal rod with a discharge probe on it to discharge the tube while holding your arm behind your back (so you wouldn't be killed by an accidental shock going through your heart).
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Jun 2, 2015 14:48
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Woolie Wool posted:Why would you do that? HDMI is used in professional applications now where you need to have connection reliability. The last thing you want is a HDMI cable wigging out of something in a rack because someone is trying to fish a wire out, or the input to a high mounted projector / tv / monitor comes out and you need a loving ladder or lift truck to fix it.
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Jun 2, 2015 14:57
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ReelBigLizard posted:Can confirm, I used to be a certified Apple tech. The service guides for those things were a pants-making GBS threads read, and if you got any one of the CRT e/iMac questions wrong on the cert exam it was an instant fail. Tell me more.  BTW did you need to discharge the tube do do any work on the iMac at all? So the user can't even add more RAM?
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Jun 2, 2015 22:18
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Woolie Wool posted:Tell me more. There was actually a little door on the bottom that you could open to access the RAM slots and, iirc, the AirPort card.
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Jun 3, 2015 00:41
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mayodreams posted:HDMI is used in professional applications now where you need to have connection reliability. The last thing you want is a HDMI cable wigging out of something in a rack because someone is trying to fish a wire out, or the input to a high mounted projector / tv / monitor comes out and you need a loving ladder or lift truck to fix it. Also, the long good quality HDMI cables used in medium length runs (before you start needing to use Cat-5 adaptors) are pretty thick/heavy, certainly heavy enough to possibly work their way out of a horizontally-aligned socket over time. Woolie Wool posted:Tell me more. Not only was RAM user-accessible, but the entire logic board was in a completely different section on the underside. You could replace it or the hard/optical drives without going near the CRT. The original Rev A/B iMacs were reasonably moddable. From memory, there were logic board headers for ADB and RS-422 serial. You could solder on the correct connection and dremel a hole in the case to use them. I can't remember whether there was a floppy port header. There was also a PDS (?) slot, but I think that was up near the CRT. You could install a customised Voodoo 2 in there to play Unreal 1 better. Funnily enough it also accelerated PC games run in a VM, which would not be repeated until recently.
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Jun 3, 2015 01:32
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Woolie Wool posted:Tell me more. You should look up arcade machine repair safety videos or gently caress-ups on YouTube. Those things can kill you. I remember back in high school my friend was obsessed with the what-if scenario of taking a chainsaw to a currently operating and plugged in CRT. His assumption was that it would probably explode and take a quarter of the house with it. That would be a dumb thing for Mythbusters to do at some point if they've not already done it.
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Jun 3, 2015 01:46
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~Coxy posted:I can't remember whether there was a floppy port header. There were. 
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Jun 3, 2015 01:59
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~Coxy posted:Voodoo 2 Oh man you just reminded me how good Warzone 2100 looked in 3dfx glide mode. I miss not being able to play that any more, d3d just doesn't pop like glide did. I have no idea how it worked but it just looked better than d3d or opengl at the time. Shame it died out.
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Jun 3, 2015 02:47
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Does anyone have links to PDFs of magazines from the era? I am always interested in learning more about the industry. I also find bad predictions funny, like Cringely's Y2K.
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Jun 3, 2015 02:51
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Lord Windy posted:Does anyone have links to PDFs of magazines from the era? I am always interested in learning more about the industry. Try this - https://archive.org/details/computermagazines
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Jun 3, 2015 03:17
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OwlFancier posted:Oh man you just reminded me how good Warzone 2100 looked in 3dfx glide mode. I miss not being able to play that any more, d3d just doesn't pop like glide did. Get a Glide wrapper. I can play old games in Glide mode on my GTX 970. 
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Jun 3, 2015 03:40
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Woolie Wool posted:The Antec Nine Hundred I have has the most irritating drive cages where you have to unscrew them using eight thumbscrews per cage with BOTH side panels off and then pull an entire third of the front of the case out to get at the hard drives, and then you have to screw them in with long bolts, and these require a screwdriver. You can easily get by with half or less of the screws if you're in and out of there often. I just put the four in on the left side so I only need to open the one side when cleaning the dust screens and it's easy enough.
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Jun 3, 2015 03:42
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Samuel L. ACKSYN posted:There were. I think I've still got every issue of MacAddict until they rebranded 
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Jun 3, 2015 04:16
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blugu64 posted:I think I've still got every issue of MacAddict until they rebranded This dude is scanning every single back issue
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Jun 3, 2015 11:13
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ElCondemn posted:Ah I wasn't aware of any of that, I was more of a fan of that other balding guy and the guy who built cool computers and stuff for them. Patrick norton has had several other shows now http://www.tekthing.com/ he also appears on tested and the TWiT network often
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Jun 3, 2015 15:12
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This is amazing. I used to subscribe to MacWorld, MacUser, and MacAddict as a kid.
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Jun 3, 2015 16:10
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http://www.engadget.com/2015/06/14/amiga-controls-school-district-hvac/ Pretty cool if no one has seen it. An old amiga 500? keeps running a schools HVAC system. I love the fact that it uses old RF technology to speak to the thermometers throughout the building.
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Jun 15, 2015 20:14
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Samuel L. ACKSYN posted:There were. Definitely don't hold a soldering iron like that
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Jun 15, 2015 20:44
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Number Two Stunna posted:You guys ever watch the Computer Chronicles? It's the best show ever for old computer stuff.
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Jun 22, 2015 07:18
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Mr Chips posted:Co-hosted by Gary Kildall! Thanks, you convinced me to watch it. For anyone who hasn't, it's about the introduction of the IBM PS/2, with frequent mentions of how "operating system two" is still on its way. lol @ John Dvorak trying to put that PS/2 back together in the background.
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Jun 22, 2015 09:39
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OH. MY. GOD. I had a lot of those mags and would read and re-read them being all jealous at being stuck down under in Oz (and having to copy all my games for free at swap parties, guess I helped kill Commodore). Thanks for this link, getting a massive nostalgia buzz. BastardAus fucked around with this message at 13:58 on Jun 22, 2015 |
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Jun 22, 2015 13:31
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Sweevo posted:I've always thought the soviet stuff was interesting. Some of the clones were more advanced than the real thing, and they kept using and improving them long after everyone else had moved on to other things. Plus it's cool what people can make using whatever they have available - like a Romanian Spectrum clone built into a surplus phone housing. My favorite Soviet PC is the Agat. It looks like the designer was inspired by an old Bakelite radio from the '40s or something. Also, apparently it was advertised using some hosed-up eye torture picture? 
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Jun 22, 2015 15:51
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Jun 22, 2015 21:59
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I'm the eBay thread at an e-waste recycler. Tomorrow I'm installing Mac OS 8.1 on some Quadra 700s. I am living this thread.
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Jun 25, 2015 09:25
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atomicthumbs posted:Quadra  quote:700s Googled them, I had never seen 68k Macs in a mini tower configuration (including ones just turned on their side) before! Back then I had probably never heard of the crazy idea of not having the monitor sitting on top of the case.
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Jun 25, 2015 10:53
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Make sure you have a lot of RAM (not too hard if you can gather a lot of SIMMs from a bunch of them) if you're going to run 8.1 on a 68k.
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Jun 25, 2015 11:03
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~Coxy posted:Make sure you have a lot of RAM (not too hard if you can gather a lot of SIMMs from a bunch of them) if you're going to run 8.1 on a 68k. I've been stripping SIMMs from every garbage LC and Performa that I see for a year now.
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Jun 25, 2015 18:54
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Also be sure to grab any PPC upgrade cards/DOS/IIe cards, and mathcoprocessors. If you're building the ultimate 68k Mac go with a Quadra840, and max that sucker out.
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Jun 25, 2015 19:34
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Why did CDROM drives get hooked up through the sound card originally? Also, when I was young our computer equipment was what I now think came from the 'throw' pile at my dad's work. There was a CRT monitor without the back plastic shell on it and one time I was playing around with the suction cup thingy while it was plugged in and got a giant zap and tingly arm for awhile. I'm glad I didn't die.
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Jun 26, 2015 02:14
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Danith posted:Why did CDROM drives get hooked up through the sound card originally? To play Red Book audio tracks on CD's. They were making use of the DAC in the CD-ROM drive itself and then piping the audio directly to the sound card. This made sense because it was more efficient than trying to use a software DAC. Some of the early generations of external CD-ROM drives even had RCA outs on the back of them.
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Jun 26, 2015 03:02
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Lum posted:CD, Mouse, Keyb, DosKey, ANSI AND Windows networking, and still over 600K of conventional memory to play with, on DOS 6.2 (though admittedly I stole a few drivers from FreeDOS to do this) Impressive. Did you include i=b000-b7ff ? That sorta obsolete monochrome/cga framebuffer came in mightily handy i think with apache longbow.
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Jun 26, 2015 03:56
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ErIog posted:Some of the early generations of external CD-ROM drives even had RCA outs on the back of them. Don't forget CD-ROM drives (internal or external) that not only had the RCA/headphones jack on the front with a volume dial but also play/pause and/or next/previous track buttons, because you might want to skip tracks or whatever but be in an application running under DOS and not be able to use the TSR (which I assume probably existed) to do these things with a hotkey. I assumed the question was actually about the bus interface ribbon cable, not the audio cable. If that's what the question was about, then: I read something recently (I was sure it was on http://os2museum.com/ but can't find it) about how a lot of people probably just had only one IDE connection on their motherboard or I/O card, and in the early days of IDE you couldn't always get two devices to happily share a single bus even though they were meant to, so a second IDE bus was pretty useful to provide on the sound card. However, I think there is at least one other explanation: from reading https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_ATA and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ATA_Packet_Interface, it sounds like the very first IDE/ATA bus standard(s) didn't support the commands required for CD-ROM drives, and it was only when ATAPI was created that they worked. So maybe sound cards were providing ATAPI interfaces because you might own a PC that only has an ATA interface. Given that some sound cards had three different CD-ROM interfaces, maybe those cards were actually from prior to ATAPI being created, and so there wasn't a standard yet?
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Jun 26, 2015 10:51
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Your interpretation of his question makes more sense Buttcoin purse. I didn't know about the IDE/ATAPI thing. That's interesting.
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Jun 26, 2015 12:02
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Some early CD-ROM/sound card bundle packs also had proprietary connectors instead of ATA - it's hard to find details, but this post seems to mention 3 types of connectors: "Creative / Panasonic, Mitsumi and Sony". My first CD-ROM was a Creative/Panasonic on a SB 16 Value, I think. Later cards had the ATA port, and some even had SCSI controllers. Danith posted:Why did CDROM drives get hooked up through the sound card originally? So I'm guessing it was due to using ports that a normal computer didn't have, and the whole "Multi-Media(tm)" thing of that age.
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Jun 26, 2015 12:32
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Macs used SCSI for all drives until like 96-97 as some of the consumer level machines (Performas) started using IDE to cut costs. The Power Mac G3 was the first workstation with IDE IIRC.
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Jun 26, 2015 12:39
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My first and best CDR was a TEAC SCSI. I miss that thing still.
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Jun 26, 2015 17:53
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I spent a fortune on a Plextor burner. It was good to be fair, but probably not necessary.
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Jun 26, 2015 20:37
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Thanks Ants posted:I spent a fortune on a Plextor burner. It was good to be fair, but probably not necessary.
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Jun 26, 2015 21:45
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Number Two Stunna posted:You guys ever watch the Computer Chronicles? It's the best show ever for old computer stuff. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hx2xb_lD92g - this episode had Skate or Die! Also other stuff that was interesting to me as someone who didn't have a C64 but played with them at K-Mart.
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Jun 27, 2015 05:04
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BaseballPCHiker posted:I can even remember the crazy marketing bullshit of this guy: I still use one to quickly enter stuff on ebay for selling. Mine is usb.
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Jun 27, 2015 18:57
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