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This guy looks at different electronics and every now and then does teardowns of old computers and calculators. Here's a portable Tandy TRS-80. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Prl6D7bqQo8
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Jun 28, 2015 07:13
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His videos would be a lot better if he came up with a vague plan before doing them, and made them half as long.
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Jun 28, 2015 12:45
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Yaos posted:This guy looks at different electronics and every now and then does teardowns of old computers and calculators. Here's a portable Tandy TRS-80. Wow, I've got one of those, in perfect shape with its original case. When I was 16 and working at Radio Shack, those were $999 in 1983-ish, They were really cool, the first REAL portable computer I ever saw, since Osbournes and Kaypros weren't very portable(luggable?)
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Jun 28, 2015 13:12
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Around late 90s I remember downloading ps2rate.exe. it was a resident program that increased the polling rate of mice in Windows from 200 per second or something to like around 1000. Remember writing papers in word like a boss after that.
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Jun 29, 2015 03:44
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EVIR Gibson posted:Around late 90s I remember downloading ps2rate.exe. it was a resident program that increased the polling rate of mice in Windows from 200 per second or something to like around 1000. Remember writing papers in word like a boss after that.
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Jun 29, 2015 03:46
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First computer was one my dad built, an 8088 with a green monochrome screen. I was just a few years old, so I didn't really know what I was doing, I just used it to play Reader Rabbit and Math Blaster (and eventually, Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego). 5.25" floppy disk drives, ahoy! First 'laptop' (though even the proper term of 'portable' is stretching it, considering it weighed 10-15 pounds) was an Epson. Yes, the Epson that now makes (only) printers. It had no hard drive, just two 3.5" floppy drives rated for 720kb each. My dad made me learn to type on this motherfucker, and even word processing was a bit of a palaver. Boot using an OS floppy, then insert the WordStar application floppy, then remove the OS floppy and insert the data floppy where your document lived. Until I got into middle school (say, around 1995) the computers I used were my dad's work computers. I remember he had a 286 laptop with a docking station that looked like a full sized desktop case, and you actually slid the loving laptop into it. Jesus. The first computer we got with a CD-ROM was a 486 Toshiba laptop. The next proper 'family' computer we owned was purchased in 1996. It was a Compaq Presario 166mHz Pentium 1 (WITH MMX INSTRUCTIONS OMG), a 48x CD-ROM, something like 24MB of memory, and a 2.5GB hard drive. It had a 14" CRT monitor. Remember when optical drives were a thing? And they came with speed ratings? And when Pentium was like OMG ITS A PENTIUM? And Compaq still existed? I remember trying to install a PCI NIC into this box, only to find that Compaq was weird about hardware and had to trial and error a few cards until I found one that worked. I remember wanting to play video games with my friends and was so excited about the CD-ROM so I could install Warcraft 1/2 and eventually Starcraft. I remember using it to play LAN Starcraft with my friends, and having my computer load SO SLOW that it almost booted me from the game after my friend's computers had the 45 second disconnect countdown. I remember my jealousy at not being able to play Diablo II with my friends. I used this computer for six years, until summer 2002. When I graduated high school, my parents offered to buy me a computer to take to college with me. With the limited budget I was afforded, I could purchase a Compaq (yes, another Compaq) with a 1.4gHz AthlonXP processor, 128MB of RAM, a 40GB hard drive, and 17" CRT. Some kind fellow in my dorm lent me an 'old' Radeon 7500 video card so I could game, and someone donated me a second 20GB hard drive. This computer only lasted me 6 months before I sold it to another dorm friend of mine (for about what I paid for it), and I used the proceeds to build my first computer. Which brings me to the beast. 1.6gHz Athlon XP, nForce chipset (I even remember the model, it was an Asus A7N8X motherboard), 256MB of RAM, and 80GB Western Digital hard drive (with the 8MB onboard cache, which was a big deal at the time). I found the money to get a GeForce4 Ti4200. I used the 20GB hard drive as an OS drive, and the 80GB to store media and applications. I purchased a second 17" CRT and dual monitored with them (which meant the ambient temp in my room was always a good 4-5 degrees above the rest of the house or apartment). I bought a ridiculous speaker set, a Logitech 5.1 400-watt dorm blaster. And for reasons that can only be explained by a 19 year old boy who still thinks like a kid, I had a bright blue Antec case with a loving window cut into the side, into which I put a CCFL light and as many loving LED's as I could afford. Very gauche. No wonder I was single! I even used a dremel to cut out a blowhole on the top for better airflow. Over the last 12 years, that computer has been upgraded and upgraded. Make no mistake, none of the parts in my current machine are the same as were in that original box, all those years ago. But at the same time, at no point can I really say I got a 'new' computer. Some component has always carried over, some element of the machine's soul; sometimes it was the case that remained the same, or the hard drive. Probably the biggest operation would be the open-heart surgery of complete chipset, CPU, and memory transplant. Over time, it has become more sensible: gone are the days of the gaudy lights and LED's, the fan-and-airflow-oriented blue case was replaced with an Antec Sonata, that has since been replaced by a quiet Corsair black model; gone are the ridiculous CPU coolers to give me enough thermal envelope to overclock the processor to ridiculous speeds; gone are the idiotically overpowered speakers. In many ways, it is now just another quiet, unassuming black box; apart from the lack of insignia or branding, it could be indistinguishable from any number of computers sitting underneath the desks of families and businesses around the world. The glory days of LAN parties and all-night gaming sessions and dorm 'power hour' blasting music are behind it, and nothing remains but memories hidden deep within the machine's soul. But it's still my box, my machine, my computer.
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Jun 29, 2015 20:24
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wintermuteCF posted:Boot using an OS floppy, then insert the WordStar application floppy, then remove the OS floppy and insert the data floppy where your document lived. drat I would have thought you could make a 720K floppy that fit both DOS and WordStar, but maybe WordStar was bigger than that. quote:I remember he had a 286 laptop with a docking station that looked like a full sized desktop case, and you actually slid the loving laptop into it. And an eject button that actually used a motor to eject the laptop? I've got one of those, a Compaq Smartstation. The plastic has gotten pretty brittle, every single place there was a clip holding the station together there's now a hole. And why did they have non-standard half-height 5 1/4" drive bay sizes so you need to mount your drives in there using sticky tape? Well obviously because you were meant to buy Compaq-branded drives. quote:I purchased a second 17" CRT and dual monitored with them (which meant the ambient temp in my room was always a good 4-5 degrees above the rest of the house or apartment). The Athlon XP probably could have done that, even without overclocking 
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Jul 1, 2015 10:27
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http://www.trendingbuffalo.com/life/uncle-steves-buffalo/everything-from-1991-radio-shack-ad-now/ Part of the reason for Radioshacks demise. I found this looking for a device that I was sure existed at some point in my life but haven't been able to find a picture of. It was like a pocket calculator that had a little foam speaker/earpiece on the end and you could program numbers into it. So if you wanted to call home you could pick up a payphone press the dial button on this device and then the phone would somehow recognize those tones and place the call without you manually punching it in. It was a legitimate device I'm pretty sure, you still had to pay to place the call. But this thing would remember all of your numbers and speed dial them for you.
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Jul 21, 2015 19:23
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It's called a phone dialer, and all it was was a phone num pad, some memory, and a DTMF tone generator. You could also use them to navigate touch tone IVR trees with your pulse phone.
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Jul 21, 2015 19:28
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Clever people could make long distance calls with them for free. A big deal before skype.
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Jul 21, 2015 20:30
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BaseballPCHiker posted:http://www.trendingbuffalo.com/life/uncle-steves-buffalo/everything-from-1991-radio-shack-ad-now/ There's no intelligence or logic in a phone. All the number buttons on the phone do is send audio tones down the line to the exchange, where all the switching magic happens. The exchange has no way of knowing (and doesn't care anyway) whether the tones were generated by the phone or by any other device.
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Jul 21, 2015 21:21
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BaseballPCHiker posted:http://www.trendingbuffalo.com/life/uncle-steves-buffalo/everything-from-1991-radio-shack-ad-now/ As a former employee I can say the biggest two reasons for Radio Shack's demise were the selling off of all the manufacturing and utter inept upper management for about 20 years. Before the early 90s pretty much everything that Radio Shack sold was designed and manufactured by the company itself, which is why a lot of that stuff had the good quality it did. Then one of the bozos decided it would be a great idea to sell it all off. Fast forward to 10 years later and the advent of the internet where everyone has the same access to the same cheap goods from China the ship had started to sink. They were able to starve off death for about another decade from smartly going heavy into mobile as the cell phone because affordable to the average consumer but as the profit went away from mobile coupled with several stupid moves dealing with mobile carriers during that time really sunk the company completely as they had nothing else going for it at all. All the profit margin were on the small items like cables and parts which weren't being sold in high enough volume anyone to keep the lights on. There was nothing in a larger ticket items the company had for sale that made any money unlike in the 80s where you had stereo equipment, computers, etc made by the company that would make hundreds of dollars in profit per sale. People would also complain about how the quality and knowledge of employees had gone way down which is also a symptom of the utter screw ups from management. See back in the 80s and 90s employees could make obscene amounts of money a year, from talking to a longtime former manager the lowest amount of money one of his people brought home a year was about $45,000 back in the early 90s. If you were a store manager at that time you were almost guaranteed to be a millionaire do to bonuses and stock options. So with that kind of pay going around you could attract the best and the brightest to work for you. Go forward to when I was going around fixing stores it was next to impossible in some areas to get people to even apply, since they paid minimum wage and in most markets paid store managers under $30,000 a year. Both were treated as disposable by the company.
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Jul 21, 2015 22:53
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Besides cell phones, which were incompetently sold to the exclusion of all other products, Radio Shack failed to capitalize on literally every single important consumer trend from the mid-nineties on. Car audio and electronics, post-Tandy personal computing, big-screen televisions, integrated home theater, digital photography: you name it, they did it wrong. Given their history, you would think that the maker movement, with stuff like 3D printers and Arduinos and GoPro drones and whatever, would have provided a silver platter for Radio Shack to retake their brand, but they managed to totally gently caress that one up too.
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Jul 21, 2015 23:01
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Vulture Culture posted:Besides cell phones, which were incompetently sold to the exclusion of all other products, Radio Shack failed to capitalize on literally every single important consumer trend from the mid-nineties on. Car audio and electronics, post-Tandy personal computing, big-screen televisions, integrated home theater, digital photography: you name it, they did it wrong. Oh they jumped on all of this stuff but not in any significant way or at a competitive price. Everything in the former they had but in lowest possible end so no one would want it and charge too much for it. Seriously the only time I ever sold a television was when it was clearanced down to a obscene level. Digital photography was another major blunder, they had invested heavily in point and shoots when that market had evaporated due to the rise of decent smart phone cameras. Instead of having a decent DSLR option and perhaps a few accessories I still had a bunch of crappy Nikon and Canon P&S until the day we closed up shop. At all the stores I was at, which was quite a few, all of them had a pretty fair Arduino selection. The prices were not quite as good as you could get online which meant you never sold a lot due to many people who are interested in such devices tend to buy their stuff online. The other big problem with the company is they just had way too many retail locations. It was around 5000 before everything started to fall apart. To give you a idea there were more Radio Shacks than Walmarts. It was next to impossible to get anything done with that big of a retail footprint in today's retail environment. For instance most stores did not have WIFI for the store, even though we needed it to activate cell phones and other sales related needs. They just couldn't afford to roll out 5000 WIFI AP. Around 1250 stores had WIFI which were decided by the highest amount of tablets sold. To try to prop up stores they started a program where they had guys like me get sent to problem stores, fire everyone, fix the problems, hire new staff, rise and repeat. Most other retailers have a fixer program like this but there were so many problems and not enough people that you would stomp out one fire and two more would be created. Working for them took a couple years off of my life though. I am just now starting to recover from it all.
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Jul 22, 2015 01:41
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A true honest to Bill Gates DOS game released today. http://www.retrocityrampage.com/msdos_retail.php If you have Retro City Rampage on Steam you can get it out of the install folder for the game. You can also buy a floppy disk version which comes with a Steam key as well. If you want to play it on a real DOS computer rather than DOSBox you'll need a 486, 4 MB of RAM, 3.7 MB of HD space, and Dos 3.3 or above. You can play it on a 386 with a math co-processor, but you'll have to limit the frame rate to 15 fps.
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Jul 29, 2015 20:54
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Yaos posted:A true honest to Bill Gates DOS game drat, I thought you said "honest Bill Gates DOS game" as in DONKEY.BAS.
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Jul 30, 2015 12:07
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dorkanoid posted: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. I remember this era well as it's when I was first getting into PC building seriously. Yes there were the panasonic/sony/mitsumi interfaces which used 34 pin connectors, and then IDE/ATA which were 40 pin. You could actually use a floppy drive cable to hook up those propietry interfaces so long as you used the B: connector as the A: connector worked by twisting part of the cable around. I got rid of a mitsumi drive and a poo poo Aztec Sound Galaxy 16 (terrible SBPro clone) by showing it in an old Pentium 75 that work scrapped, and selling it as a multimedia system. MiniSune posted:Impressive. Yes, and quite a few other areas. A lot of how much UMB you could get depended on your system's BIOS.
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Jul 30, 2015 19:29
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http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs...y-on-classrooms The classic TI-84, apparently still get's used by the majority of highschool students everywhere. Someone in the article estimates that it only cost $15-20 and that TI's whole calculator division has a profit margin of over %50.
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Aug 5, 2015 14:01
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BaseballPCHiker posted:http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs...y-on-classrooms I used a TI-84 in college math classes just 2 or 3 years ago. The majority of calculators there were Ti-84's. I don't think it'll ever die.
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Aug 5, 2015 14:09
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chocolateTHUNDER posted:I used a TI-84 in college math classes just 2 or 3 years ago. The majority of calculators there were Ti-84's. I don't think it'll ever die. I used the TI-89, primarily because the whole algebraic equation solver was a godsend in class. The thing about TI calculators is you basically can't kill them. I remember dropping my calculator down whole stairwells without any problems.
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Aug 5, 2015 15:34
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Party Plane Jones posted:I used the TI-89, primarily because the whole algebraic equation solver was a godsend in class. Yeah, mine got abused pretty badly bouncing around in my backpack and still works great.
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Aug 5, 2015 16:24
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Thanks Ants posted:Definitely don't hold a soldering iron like that I didn't even see that 
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Aug 6, 2015 02:19
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Party Plane Jones posted:I used the TI-89, primarily because the whole algebraic equation solver was a godsend in class. What I don't get is that those calculators cost about the same as a student license of Maple or Mathematica, both vastly more capable and easier to use. My only fond memories of using a TI-8x was playing Drug Wars in geometry.
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Aug 6, 2015 07:07
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Yudo posted:What I don't get is that those calculators cost about the same as a student license of Maple or Mathematica, both vastly more capable and easier to use. My only fond memories of using a TI-8x was playing Drug Wars in geometry. There are apps for smart phones that do more and are easier to use as well. The first problem is that the schools aren't comfortable with students using a smart phone or computer for tests, which as a adult I find even more insane because I can't think of a single time in my entire adult life where if I didn't know something absolutely that I didn't second check myself or research the answer using something else. I think we are doing a disservice by not teaching kids problem solving skills which probably explains all sorts of problems with society today. The other problem is Texas Instruments was really smart and got the schools and teachers in bed with them years ago and continues to do it. It's hard to fight against it when all the educators are given free instruction and equipment. Like if you are just comparing TI to Casio's offerings Casio has been making hardware that is leaps and bounds better and more capibile for years but you hardly ever see it not because it is more expansive because it is not but because TI has such a stranglehold on the market.
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Aug 6, 2015 08:12
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Yudo posted:What I don't get is that those calculators cost about the same as a student license of Maple or Mathematica, both vastly more capable and easier to use. My only fond memories of using a TI-8x was playing Drug Wars in geometry. SATs. You get the calculators for SAT testing basically because smartphones and the calculator computers (TI INSPIRE if I remember right) can be used for cheating. ACTs don't allow the computer algebraic solver TI-89 equivalents though. Funnily enough SATs and ACTs never had you wipe your calculator memory before you started testing so you could load it up with all sorts of formula and tips beforehand.
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Aug 6, 2015 13:11
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I got the TI-89 when it first came out in 98 and like one other person at my high school had one. I LOVED that god drat thing. I would write programs to do the repetitive homework crap for my math and physics classes. I played the poo poo out of DrugWars and other games. I had this rear end in a top hat pre-calculus teacher that would wipe my memory before every test and quiz so I wouldn't 'cheat'. I still got A's without needing to cheat but he continued his war against me and my calculator with the Purple Button. In my day, most everyone had TI-83's and some people had the TI-82. I got the usb cable and typed my notes in my computer and transferred that poo poo to my calculator in college. Also wrote a program that did a bunch of EE unit conversions to help in labs, homework, and tests. I still think it's crazy (less so 16 years later) that the TI-89 is a Motorola 68000 processor at 10MHz and 256kb of memory, which is faster and double the memory of the first Mac only 14 years prior. Apple used the 68000 until 92 with the original PowerBook 100. I can't even imagine using a 6 year old computer processor in a handheld now, which would be the original Intel Core i5/i7 procs. Even our smartphones aren't quite that fast.
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Aug 6, 2015 14:37
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Djarum posted:There are apps for smart phones that do more and are easier to use as well. The first problem is that the schools aren't comfortable with students using a smart phone or computer for tests, which as a adult I find even more insane because I can't think of a single time in my entire adult life where if I didn't know something absolutely that I didn't second check myself or research the answer using something else. I think we are doing a disservice by not teaching kids problem solving skills which probably explains all sorts of problems with society today. Sure, after you're employed you'll often have all kinds of reference materials to draw on, but even discounting the college prep role that has come to dominate most high schools, there are still plenty of certifications and training regimens out there that will prohibit you from being able to do so. What's coming to mind for me is when my father was in training to become a light rail train operator, and the training included weekly no-notes testing. Even if schools were to embrace a more open format, there'd still be a lot of agencies and employers out there that won't, and kids should probably be prepared to handle those. Do schools actually enforce calculator selection these days? I remember when I was in high school there was always a fraction of the class that had HP graphing calculators.
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Aug 6, 2015 17:46
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Djarum posted:There are apps for smart phones that do more and are easier to use as well. The first problem is that the schools aren't comfortable with students using a smart phone or computer for tests, which as a adult I find even more insane because I can't think of a single time in my entire adult life where if I didn't know something absolutely that I didn't second check myself or research the answer using something else. I think we are doing a disservice by not teaching kids problem solving skills which probably explains all sorts of problems with society today. Party Plane Jones posted:SATs. You get the calculators for SAT testing basically because smartphones and the calculator computers (TI INSPIRE if I remember right) can be used for cheating. ACTs don't allow the computer algebraic solver TI-89 equivalents though. Farmer Crack-rear end posted:Sure, after you're employed you'll often have all kinds of reference materials to draw on, but even discounting the college prep role that has come to dominate most high schools, there are still plenty of certifications and training regimens out there that will prohibit you from being able to do so. I agree with Djarum on this and this is why there is something of a movement against these testing regimes: the math I do for graduate school and professionally is suicidal by hand and is painful with an old timey calculator. Nothing on the SAT/GRE has bore any resemblance to graduate work aside from just being able to read. Jobs where mission critical calculators must be completed without some reference or computer aid seem relatively few, particularly considering the power and ubiquity of smart phones. Conceptual understanding, rules, and their assumptions and being able to program a computer is critical. Solving things symbolically, sure: important; but I am asked to complete mathematical operations many times a day that just one of which would have been an entire PhD thesis 40 years ago. On topic, somewhat: I am horrible at math, but was started in school on an Apple II and LOGO (all hail the turtle), learning from a young age how to make a computer do the poo poo I couldn't or found frustrating. Kids today should be learning to do the same. Yudo fucked around with this message at 20:32 on Aug 6, 2015 |
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Aug 6, 2015 20:29
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Farmer Crack-rear end posted:Sure, after you're employed you'll often have all kinds of reference materials to draw on, but even discounting the college prep role that has come to dominate most high schools, there are still plenty of certifications and training regimens out there that will prohibit you from being able to do so. What's coming to mind for me is when my father was in training to become a light rail train operator, and the training included weekly no-notes testing. Even if schools were to embrace a more open format, there'd still be a lot of agencies and employers out there that won't, and kids should probably be prepared to handle those. But for most certifications and whatnot you are given extensive training before hand so you should know it without thinking. Like the rail operator should know exactly what to do in a certain emergency or a EMT knowing what to do in situations. For instance to become a submariner you spend months learning about every bit of the ship and what to do. You are constantly drilled over things with no warning. Why, because if something goes wrong it is up to all the people on board to know what to do to save everyone's lives. For probably 95% of employment out there you do not need to have every bit or even much of the knowledge for your position memorized. I think everyone memorizes the important things after a period of time since it is second nature. But, to have our entire education system based upon memorization is insane when you think about it. I can't tell you how many people I have either hired or worked with over the years who honestly have no idea what to do when they don't have the answer in their head. They are not prepared in the least on how to think logically or find a answer for something. From the moment they are in school they are effectively given a book with all the material and what few other tools they may require. The second they are in the real world dealing with real world problems you see them freeze like a deer in headlights. It isn't so much that schools aren't preparing kids for college they also aren't preparing them for the modern workplace.
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Aug 6, 2015 20:44
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Djarum posted:There are apps for smart phones that do more and are easier to use as well. The first problem is that the schools aren't comfortable with students using a smart phone or computer for tests, which as a adult I find even more insane because I can't think of a single time in my entire adult life where if I didn't know something absolutely that I didn't second check myself or research the answer using something else. I think we are doing a disservice by not teaching kids problem solving skills which probably explains all sorts of problems with society today. Most education stresses memorization and doing things the hard way over thinking and problem solving. I had a grand total of one class throughout college and high school that the professor wasn't some die hard memorization fetishist, and that was my intro to web programming course, the professor applauded me for being clever enough to find existing scripts that did near to what I wanted to do and modifying them to my purpose rather than bashing them out the hard way. Efficient use of time I think he said. Like the one tool I'd be crippled without the use of is google. I touch something like a hundred different systems/softwares over the course of a week. I can't remember all of that poo poo.
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Aug 6, 2015 21:32
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If I had grown up somewhere besides rural Alaska, I would have been a shoe-in to enter the IT field. In 3rd grade, Apple IIs and Macintosh personal computers began being standard equipment in classrooms, and I got to learn to program in BASIC and even got special permission to take one of the Apple IIs home with me over summer vacation. When I was in high school, I carried two floppy discs in my backpack. One contained one of the Commander Keen games for PC, the other contained SimAnt for the Macintosh. Not the installers, the entire games. Commander Keen ran like poo poo on the 286s, but these newfangled 486s were like butter. I was also one of the student body that constituted the closest thing my underprivileged school had to an IT department. We weren't an official club or anything, it's just everyone knew if you had a computer problem, talk to one of these guys. Occasionally the librarian or computer teacher would pull one of us out of class, drop some donated hardware in front of us, and say "See what you can do with this." I successfully cobbled together three Macs from five donated computers and a box of random cables. Sadly, technology started to outstrip my experience in junior year when a small lab in the library got a trio of those new iMacs. There was a silver lining, though: We rapidly discovered they were hooked to the internet without going through the rest of the network, and they all faced away from the room. So the incidences of porn surfing increased.
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Aug 7, 2015 04:40
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Zhiwau posted:There was an awesome documentary a while ago on Slovenian national TV about ''the scene'' in the late 80s. Man, what a time that was! I'm late to the party, but this is relevant: http://hackaday.com/2015/08/03/hacking-the-digital-and-social-system/ It's an article written by one of the greatest Yugoslavian nerds, and covers lots of things about beginnings of home computing in then behind iron curtain Socialist Federative Republic of Yugoslavia. e: Parse URLs should be chekboxed when pasting URLs, apparently.
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Aug 7, 2015 09:45
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Dareon posted:If I had grown up somewhere besides rural Alaska, I would have been a shoe-in to enter the IT field. Where in rural Alaska did you grow up? I spent a lot of years in Western Alaska working in IT and oh god the amount of crazy old technology still in use out there was mind boggling at first. People use computers there like everything else, they use them and keep them cobbled together for as long as they can. I can remember still running into computers running 486's and Windows 2000 just chugging along running some ancient Tribal ID software. You'd open the case and find about a million dead mosquitoes. Interestingly enough I just learned that Intel was producing the 486 until 2007 for use in embedded systems! All this Alaska talk reminded me of one cool piece of ancient technology, the White Alice Communications System:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Alice_Communications_System It was basically a giant microwave repeater network built in the 1950's by the Air Force to expand communications in rural Alaska and also to spy on the Russians. I had old timers in Nome tell me that when they needed to make long distance calls they actually had to schedule time with the base operating White Alice to use the system to make the call. I actually got a chance to walk around inside one of the repeaters and what was left of the base on one of my trips to Wales Alaska. Now writing this I really miss AK and want to go back.
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Aug 7, 2015 15:16
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BaseballPCHiker posted:Where in rural Alaska did you grow up? I spent a lot of years in Western Alaska working in IT and oh god the amount of crazy old technology still in use out there was mind boggling at first. Southcentral, in the Rail Belt, halfway between Willow and Talkeetna. Not nearly as rural as it could have been, but we still had to go a few miles to reach anything really resembling civilization. And yeah, the various things corporations and the armed forces have had to build to get services that most people take for granted out into the wilderness is really impressive. The Trans-Alaska Pipeline (800 miles of 48-inch-diameter pipe, which has had problems with gunshot holes). The Alaska Intertie (170 miles of electrical transmission line so municipal power grids can support each other if one goes down). Hell, just the highways up here are major undertakings. Dig the roadbed down far enough and you hit permafrost. Which melts and now you've got mud. Congratulations.
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Aug 7, 2015 16:05
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Party Plane Jones posted:I used the TI-89, primarily because the whole algebraic equation solver was a godsend in class. Any of you guys own one of these and posted your TI-BASIC programs on https://ticalc.org? All the cool kids in my high school were doing it. 
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Aug 7, 2015 19:53
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Tailored Sauce posted:Any of you guys own one of these and posted your TI-BASIC programs on https://ticalc.org? All the cool kids in my high school were doing it. I totally did. But, since I was a Mac user, I had to use Win98 virtual machine in Virtual PC in order to program the drat thing. I am not sure there were ever Mac drivers for OS X while I was till heavily using it. By then, I had a gaming PC so it wasn't a big deal.
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Aug 7, 2015 20:45
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BaseballPCHiker posted:All this Alaska talk reminded me of one cool piece of ancient technology, the White Alice Communications System: In the book Exploding The Phone, which is about phreaking, there is a story about people using blue boxes (and maybe other techniques) to get from the civilian long distance network into the military network, it sounds like part of it involved those sites. It just said something about them being "radio" sites, it didn't mention it was a crazy network with those huge tropospheric scatter antennas  Also that book was pretty cool.
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Aug 8, 2015 09:34
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JnnyThndrs posted:Wow, I've got one of those, in perfect shape with its original case. When I was 16 and working at Radio Shack, those were $999 in 1983-ish, They were really cool, the first REAL portable computer I ever saw, since Osbournes and Kaypros weren't very portable(luggable?) TRS-80 model 100/102 are pretty rad. I was always fascinated with them as a kid (even as a kid born late-80s, 20h battery life on 4 AAs!) and I'd love to see them recreated on an Atmel PicoPower something. Yeah yeah, raspberry pi, but I want my 1ma/mips.  I think there's a lot of utility to a text-only terminal that lives forever on a couple AAs. Lately I've been thinking about trying to combine a Kindle epaper as a display driven by a Pi (see Kindleberry) or an ATmega and a LoNet board or something. Paul MaudDib fucked around with this message at 06:40 on Aug 10, 2015 |
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Aug 10, 2015 06:07
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Buttcoin purse posted:In the book Exploding The Phone, which is about phreaking, there is a story about people using blue boxes (and maybe other techniques) to get from the civilian long distance network into the military network, it sounds like part of it involved those sites. It just said something about them being "radio" sites, it didn't mention it was a crazy network with those huge tropospheric scatter antennas Tropospheric scatter isn't that novel. Doing it at 900 Mhz is pretty cool, but when you have 10 KW of power you're the gorilla who can sit wherever he wants. Same principle as beyond-horizon communication at HF, just more bandwidth (from higher frequencies) and more energy required. I used to hit 2500 miles on 40 meters at 75 W on 70s era equipment and a wire strung up in a tree, over the top of dozens of other people, when I did that stuff (see: ARRL sweepstakes). I don't have enough power to ionize the magnetosphere as I go, though, nor a gigantic parabolic antenna. The craziest communications strategy was obviously Operation West Ford, which involved dropping 480 million 1.8cm-long copper nails into orbit which could be used as a continuous set of half-wave antennas at 8ghz wrapping around the entire earth. With such an antenna, neither rain nor solar storm nor communist attack could stay our messengers about their duties. This was as stupid an idea as you expect. As planned, most of them were pushed into the atmosphere by the solar wind. Mostly. Many of the bundles of nails failed to deploy properly and remain as clusters of orbital debris. Paul MaudDib fucked around with this message at 06:45 on Aug 10, 2015 |
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Aug 10, 2015 06:20
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Farmer Crack-rear end posted:Sure, after you're employed you'll often have all kinds of reference materials to draw on, but even discounting the college prep role that has come to dominate most high schools, there are still plenty of certifications and training regimens out there that will prohibit you from being able to do so. What's coming to mind for me is when my father was in training to become a light rail train operator, and the training included weekly no-notes testing. Even if schools were to embrace a more open format, there'd still be a lot of agencies and employers out there that won't, and kids should probably be prepared to handle those. Literally the only job where it's realistic to not allow calculators is during pilot-type exams, because what if you run out of batteries? And what you get then is a circular slide rule that's "pre-programmed" with all the calculations you'll ever need. There are speed-drill competitions that thrive on that poo poo. Rote memorization is dumb bullshit. Should you be able to calculate napkin-math, like the bitrate of a 165MHz connector with 30 strands at a given frequency? Sure. Should you have to memorize the band limits of the extra license at 20mhz, or the allowable 2nd-order harmonic emission for a hand-designed radio? Nah, I'll look that up or print it out if I am in that situation. Same poo poo my civil engineer sister has told me - when it matters you look it up. You don't memorize random API specifications that you don't encounter during daily use, do you? The wisdom is that "if you make a stink about syntax on whiteboard programming, you're an rear end in a top hat" - right? Paul MaudDib fucked around with this message at 07:09 on Aug 10, 2015 |
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Aug 10, 2015 06:59
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