Snuffman posted:

I remember there was one...was it Space Quest? If you loaded the boss key it, yeah, it looked like a spreadsheet but when you tried to get back to the game, the game would admonish you for playing a game when you should be working and kicked you to the DOS prompt.

EDIT: It was Leisure Suit Larry.

Space Quest 4 just made fun of you when you selected the option.

Data Graham posted:

Here's another entry from the Apple Hall of Shame: the PowerMac 6100.

Bear in mind that:

a) The power button powered off the machine immediately

b) Mac floppy drives were 100% software-controlled; there was no hardware eject button. you ejected a disk by dragging it to the trash (or using a paperclip in the hole in an emergency)

c) Frequently moving between Mac and PC camps meant that it was easy to forget both a) and b)

Data Graham posted:

Remember when screens had to be saved????

Humphreys posted:

For some reason this post reminded me of another blog written by a possibly crazy but certainly homeless at times man who was trying to code the best Gameboy Advance RPG. It was a very interesting read. I recall the URL being *hisname*game.com but my googlefu is weak.

Humphreys posted:

EDIT: On the Dreamcast - maybe it's a region thing but I could never get ISOs to work properly without patching the ISO with a bootloader thing called Utopia. I did find out I could do a swap disc from a Utopia CD-R and use all the broken non-modded CD-Rs though - so not all was lost.

Lowen SoDium posted:

Gabe Newell (Valve Software, Steam) said that piracy is a service problem. Basically he thought that as long as you offered a good user experience, people would be willing to pay a reasonable price for it rather than pirate it for free.

error1 posted:

Hot drat Techmoan always finds the best hifi junk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RJo13FP4UpI

thetzar posted:

Sorry to interrupt Cable Box Chat, but does anyone else remember dittos? When I was in elementary school, xeroxes were still hella expensive, so we got our handouts and worksheets done via spirit duplicators ("dittos"), in purple ink that smudged onto your hands if you weren't careful.

http://atomictoasters.com/2012/03/what-ever-became-of-ditto-machines/
http://www.retroland.com/dittos/

Lowen SoDium posted:

Does anyone remember Vivo? It was a very early streaming video player. Mostly used for porn in the 90's. Blocky, low res, buffering porn...

Computer viking posted:

It's got a lump of BSD kernel code (mostly FreeBSD, now) grafted onto a Mach microkernel, with a userland that's a weird mix of BSD stuff and Apple in-house projects, with a strong NextStep inheritance. No Linux kernel code in there, though they've grabbed some GNU userland tools.

Rashomon posted:

Sounds like they need someone to help with...

Debugging.

Kelp Me! posted:

Pirated DVDs are (or at least were) a huge thing in lower-middle class urban areas. 10 years ago you couldn't have a meal at a restaurant in Newark without at least one person walking in with a backpack and going around to all the tables selling VCDs of popular movies and/or terrible cams of movies currently in theaters.

e: also http://www.nickselby.com/2013/08/25/software-pirates-rule-in-russia/

A Pinball Wizard posted:

Neither Windows nor Linux is a tech relic, much as we might wish.

That "bloat" is the parts of the OS that do things like running 16 bit software and 64 bit software and modern sound and video cards and hard drives and etc. Seriously, tell me what you consider to be "bloat" in a modern OS.

Powered Descent posted:

Oh, the goggles existed, just maybe not on a home system. Back in the 90s there was a VR place in the same mall as the Battletech Center. You stood inside a circular railing to keep you from falling over and wore a really uncomfortable goggle headset, and had a gun-handle-shaped thing in your hand. The game was pretty much running around on a few low-res checker-textured flat planes floating in a black void, shooting at the other players. (You used another button on the gun handle to move.) I was pretty pumped to try it out, but it didn't work very well and I was left kind of underwhelmed.

doctorfrog posted:

Yes, I remember Majestic, and I always wanted to check it out.

Anyone remember the screensaver for The Game? This was a movie that came out in the late nineties starring Michael Douglas as a rich douche canoe who gets himself involved in a ~game~ that starts getting scary and creepy. The movie was roughly 7/10 but the promo Win '95 screensaver would also start screwing with you. You'd install it and it would run for a while, and then you'd discover an icon on your desktop. You'd double-click it. Then things would happen to lightly mess with you, asking questions about stuff. I mostly forget what, because I had no computer at home and had only installed it on a PC at my job, and I soon moved to a different workstation. Also because it was 20 years ago.

e: only thing a quick YT search comes up with is this guy who has the floppy disk:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5idB39vuf4Y

Jerry Cotton posted:

Haritsoppa.

Jerry Cotton posted:

The only good webcomics is Hitmen for Destiny Targ the Organized Stalking Target

Frozen Pizza Party posted:

I actually threw out my Sansa about a month ago while thinning the hoard,

spaceblancmange posted:

I don't think I can sleep tonight unless I know whether Techmoan voted for Brexit

Bargearse posted:

I didn’t think any TI-99/4A software came on tape, I thought they were all ROM cartridges so TI could retain full control.

Jim Silly-Balls posted:

Look at this weird old thing that came across my desk!

Blue Moonlight posted:

Don’t forget US, EU, and JP versions of each game, where the only difference between the US and EU versions are the number of “u”s in game text and replacing “ninja” with “hero.”

3D Megadoodoo posted:

Finally dug out my old 1541, that was stored in a cold chicken house for over a decade, then on my cold veranda for... maybe a decade. Opened it up to do a cursory bug cum mouse piss check and it seemed pretty clean - no rust or anything either!

So now it can sit in my heated spare room for a decade or so!

Humphreys posted:

I haven't heard of this, thanks! I will try to track a copy down.

flavor.flv posted:

My first smart phone was half an inch thick, smaller than a deck of cards, and it had a headphone jack, slide out keyboard and a trackball

Every phone since has been a disappointment

CaptainSarcastic posted:

I spent years and years with these as my main speakers - they were actually pretty good.

Doccers posted:

Sweevo posted:

So everyone had cassettes, and everyone pirated those cassettes using their £9.99 twin-deck cassette player.

r u ready to WALK posted:

I'd love to own a giant stupid old stereo rack from the 90s if people weren't trying to sell them for $texas

This guy wants $3000 for the lot

3D Megadoodoo posted:

I thought I raised my bid on a VIC 20 from 61 to 75 € but apparently I now have a winning bid of 61 € on one VIC 20 and a winning bid of 75 on another.

I am not good at computre.

Code Jockey posted:

in case of emergency, tug the butt cord

snorch posted:

Minicomputers, in the museum section