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1000 Brown M and Ms posted:Not computer/internet, but my family had something like this, but it was a VHS cassette, to clean your VCR obviously. Did they actually do anything useful? Or were they just a gimmick? I remember that our VHS one didn't really do anything noticable, but then again our VCR was old and on its way out at the time. Head cleaner. They actually did do something, but 99% of the time it was unnecessary. Say your kid spilled their apple juice into a VHS tape, and later that night you put that tape in the player. The gunk all over the magnetic tape would get smeared onto the VCR's read heads, and suddenly you'd find that not only did the gunked-up tape not play clearly, NOTHING would play clearly. A head cleaner tape would take care of that in short order, often in just a few seconds -- put it in, press play, and wait for the test-pattern picture to clear. The other way to deal with it was to put in any old tape, like a blank or something, press play, and leave it for a couple hours to let the gunk gradually get worn off the heads. Regular tape wasn't as efficient as a special head cleaner, but it'd eventually work, and the tiny amount of gunk spread over a huge length of tape wouldn't make any visible difference in its quality. My first job in high school was at a video rental store, and every now and then someone would come in furious that a tape they'd rented had "broken" their machine. We'd apologize profusely, mark the dirty tape for replacement, and offer them free use of a head cleaner. Worked every time. There was no reason to use a head cleaner unless your VCR had visibly gunked-up read heads.
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Jan 16, 2016 04:07
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My first PC joystick was one of these, a Kraft KC3: Worked fine for light use in things like MS Flight Simulator. Then I got Wing Commander and the poor thing only stood up to the abuse for a few days, tops. I replaced it with a CH Flightstick:  That lasted a LOT longer.
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Jan 16, 2016 08:36
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Angry Birds Suicide posted:Does anyone remember "hackoo"? If you sent like 10$ they'd mail you a CD full of Trojans and various viruses/" hacker tools" A couple of the BBSes I was on had the "Virus Creation Lab" software available in the files section. But just downloading it wasn't enough, you also had to have connections in the 1337 h4x0r community to learn the password to unzip it.   It was "Chiba City", which I'm pretty sure was a Neuromancer reference.
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Jan 17, 2016 18:17
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Here's my contribution to hard drive failure chat. Sometime around the turn of the century, I picked up a Quantum Bigfoot drive. I knew about their reputation as being very prone to sudden death, but hey, it was cheap, it was enormous (20 gigs!), and I wasn't planning to use it for anything important, just as a place to dump files and media that I hoovered up from people at LAN parties. At the ones I went to, most of us had a publicly-shared folder full of  . The easiest strategy was just to grab anything that looked remotely interesting, then go through it all later and figure out what was worth keeping. Saved you precious gaming time during the party, but it took a lot of "scratch space". This was hardly mission-critical, so I figured when the Bigfoot inevitably died on me, I wouldn't be too broken up.It never died.  It soldiered on even as higher-quality drives in the same machine bit the dust. I eventually took the Bigfoot out of service because the enormous 20 gigs stopped being enormous. I've kept that drive around in my pile o' parts (it's easy to spot, it's the only 5.25" hard drive I've ever had), and every few years I dig out a PATA adapter, plug it in, and see if ol' Bigfoot is still alive. It is. That beast will outlive us all. 
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Jan 25, 2016 17:49
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Mak0rz posted:
Other animals like... people?  Life and Death was an awesome game despite the CGA colors.
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Jan 26, 2016 00:00
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do you get to dissect any more animals besides frogs? I'd play the poo poo out of this
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EVIR Gibson posted:Around 2001, we were trying to network out apartment that was made of two floors. Getting ethernet wire to run all the way around was lovely, but I could hit everyone on the first floor. It was the upstairs people I couldn't get. Right about that same timeframe, my neighbor and I networked our places together so we could play games against each other and also share an Internet connection. (I had a DSL, still fairly rare at the time.) I made a huge ethernet cable, ran it out the upstairs window, between the buildings like a clothesline, and in his window. It worked great. Never got struck by lightning or anything.
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Jan 26, 2016 06:36
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garfield hentai posted:They're doing an HD remake Wait what https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Kgj_rPON80 Oh my god
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Feb 3, 2016 19:15
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kecske posted:The first time I encountered any kind of DRM was a copy of the Settlers I borrowed from a friend. The manual had sequences of runes or symbols on each page, and every time you fired the game up it would prompt you to enter rune 2 from page 19, rune 1 from page 30, and so on until it was satisfied. I always liked the games that would get creative about it if you failed. Like the code wheel for good old Starflight:  If you put in the wrong code when you launch your spaceship, a little while later the Interstel Corporate Police would catch up to you. They'd give you one more chance to put in a valid code, and if you fail that they'd blow you out of the sky. In the same kind of thing, Gold Rush! would have you look up a word in the manual, and if you got it wrong, your character got hanged for claim-jumping before the game exited back to DOS.
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Feb 11, 2016 18:33
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archive.org has put up another collection of old programs that run inside your browser -- this time it's all your favorite Windows 3.1 apps! https://archive.org/details/softwarelibrary_win3_showcase&tab=collection I went straight for WinRisk. Oh, the memories...
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Feb 13, 2016 06:22
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You whippersnappers with your TI-83s. In my day we had to get through pre-calculus with only a TI-81, and we liked it!  
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Feb 15, 2016 00:02
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I was in the very last typing class at my school that used typewriters instead of computers. (At least they were electric typewriters. They even had a real backspace, with a little whiteout roller to cover up your mistake.) To this very day I put two spaces after a period, because that was the convention back then.GI_Clutch posted:Then we moved on to designing pictures on graph paper and writing in BASIC to plot all of the points so we could draw them on screen. That was the closest thing to programming taught in our school district. We did the same thing. Dozens of PLOT, VLIN and HLIN statements, all in a row. Man. I wish they'd thought to tell us about the most basic loops or branches...
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Feb 17, 2016 06:33
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Police Automaton posted:For reliability I'm using a Model M. Also usable as a club. For anyone who's still a fan of good keyboards, there's an entire keyboard megathread that's surprisingly active. Cherry and Topre mechanical keyswitches get most of the attention but a few of us worship at the altar of the buckling spring and love our Model M / Unicomp boards. 
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Feb 17, 2016 22:58
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Data Graham posted:you ejected a disk by dragging it to the trash I have never understood what they were thinking with that one. I would have expected doing that to delete everything on the disk. It got a lot better when they made the garbage icon change to an eject icon when you click and drag something ejectable, but it's still not exactly obvious. Imagine if your house worked that way: "To go out the front door, simply chuck your keys into the garbage disposal. How did you not already think to try that?"
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Feb 21, 2016 02:59
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CaptainSarcastic posted:I had some success running Linux on older Mac hardware, but there are some things which just won't really work, like Flash. You can still get Debian and several Ubuntu flavors for PowerPC machines. If you're putting a GUI on it, you'll definitely want something light like LXDE or Mate. And you're right, a few things (like Flash) just aren't going to happen. I still have an ancient first-gen Mac Mini from 2005. It's running Debian and still works great as a light-duty server at home -- mostly just handling incoming ssh connections plus a bit of torrenting. Every now and then I think about replacing it with something a little more modern, but there's no actual reason to. It's been rock-solid stable for years and years and years. I have to admit Apple makes really good hardware.
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Feb 21, 2016 06:08
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Computer viking posted:Cellphones have recently started doing voice over data in better quality, under assorted branding. Availability depends on phone / network / country /signal strength, but it's apparently much better when it works. You can also get a similar experience with any VoIP app, e.g. Skype. I actually prefer to make calls via the Signal app instead of the regular phone-call way. Come for the paranoid encryption, stay for the superior sound quality...
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Feb 24, 2016 18:09
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Data Graham posted:Just dial 10-10-220 Cojawfee posted:Oh jeez, these 10-10 numbers. John Lithgow's 10-10-321 commercials. I always wondered if the IT people at those companies set up their internal office networks to use the 10.10.220.xxx or 10.10.321.xxx IP ranges. I hope so.
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Feb 26, 2016 01:16
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The Bible posted:Not 10.10.321.xxx for sure. Good point. 
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Feb 26, 2016 01:59
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computer parts posted:Oh and even though we have 7 digit numbers, we don't have all of the available options. Certain number combinations (at least historically) were cordoned off depending on official use. For example, 911 is the emergency number here. A lot of numbers with the combination "911" are not in use (like 208-555-9113) because people might be trying to dial for help instead of that number. That last bit is incorrect. My old landline phone number that I've had since the late 90s (since moved to VOIP) literally has a 911 in it, at exactly the same place as in your example. No one has ever gotten an ambulance when they tried to call me. And now if anyone figures out my area code I guess I've just 1/10000th doxxed myself.  torgo posted:Can someone who knows about 911 and POTS explain if that could really trigger a 911 call? I always figured kids were prank calling 911 and using that as an excuse. Can I just dial 911 in the middle of a regular call and get connected to 911? No, it has to be dialed like a regular number. I occasionally punched in my 911-including number when paging people, back in the day of pagers, and I never got an ambulance either. Also, it was common "pager speak" to tack 911 on the end of the number you sent to mean "this is an emergency, call me right now." So yes, I'm old... but not QUITE old enough to have gotten in on the fun of phone phreaking. The various-color phreaking boxes and the 2600-Hz Captain Crunch whistle and all that good stuff had all stopped working by the time I was in grade school, but that didn't stop people putting the plans for them up on BBSes for the next decade and a half.  
Powered Descent has a new favorite as of 18:35 on Feb 26, 2016 |
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Feb 26, 2016 18:32
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A FUCKIN CANARY!! posted:I've wondered how viable carrying around a tiny desktop computer would be for people who travel for work or are couch surfing, since HDTVs with HDMI inputs that you can use as a display are ubiquitous these days. I could see a suitcase form factor computer with a keyboard that clips to the side like an old timey portable computer actually being useful. Probably only for very specialized applications (i.e. hardcore gamers who are also homeless), ever since laptops started becoming super-common. But speaking of hauling desktops around, I remember going to LAN parties around the year 2000 ( ) using something like this to haul the tower around: Unfortunately everyone's monitor (almost always a 17-inch or 19-inch CRT) was bigger, heavier and more awkward than the computer itself, and the shape wasn't anywhere near standard enough for anyone to make carrying straps for them. Still, for one of the two or three trips to the car, you'd feel like a total pro, carrying your tower with a real handle, while all those other scrubs had to use both arms for theirs. Monitors were the great equalizer -- we ALL had to carry it the old fashioned way, hoping that our ropey little arms didn't give out and let it bounce down the basement stairs.
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Mar 6, 2016 02:30
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Robnoxious posted:Lycos 4 Lyfe! Go get it! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M6x7Xdy8BtY
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Mar 23, 2016 07:43
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Hillary Clintons Thong posted:to bring this back around to the internet relics, I remember a good blog/website circa 2002 or so that used to just post pictures of ricer cars (around when the first Fast & Furious was huge) that would just absolutely tear them up for how idiotic some of modifications were. I don't know if it was popular or not :/ Getting even further back to the topic of internet relics, try http://funroll-loops.info/
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Mar 24, 2016 05:00
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Buttcoin purse posted:My Sound Blaster Pro (2?) seemed to just work with pretty much everything and had some backwards compatibility, I don't remember ever needing to mess around with compatibility TSRs.  I loved my old Sound Blaster Pro. I used that thing for years, moving it from computer to computer, until they stopped putting ISA slots in motherboards. (Which was also about the time motherboards started getting onboard sound, which was a very convenient bit of timing.) I never had a video card with anywhere close to that kind of lifespan. It seemed like they were coming out with a new kind of AGP slot every year...
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Apr 6, 2016 04:52
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drunk asian neighbor posted:Also Treos were the best because they were basically smartphones before smartphones were a thing (and so none of my college professors realized I could access the internet from my phone). Also the Treo keyboards were way easier to type on than the Blackberry keyboards Counterpoint: that loving ActiveSync thing. It was a pain to set up and half the time it didn't work at all. I always wanted to grab the engineers responsible, shake them, and tell them to make their next device show up as a plain old USB mass storage device so at least you could just move files back and forth yourself (perhaps even using something other than Windows), and then make whatever overcomplicated "sync" bullshit they wanted into an (optional!) layer on top of that. I never got the chance to do that, but apparently some of them got the message anyway, because a few years later Android devices came out and that's pretty much how they worked. Apple still hasn't gotten that particular usability memo, sadly.
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Apr 6, 2016 18:00
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Uncle at Nintendo posted:Here is a "version" of the Hub you get from one link: Agony Man is the worst superhero name ever.
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Apr 11, 2016 03:08
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Data Graham posted:AOL and the Internet This is good stuff, but no discussion of AOL and the Internet would be complete without mentioning The September That Never Ended. In the early 1990s, the majority of people on the Internet (which at the time was mostly dominated by Usenet discussion groups) were there through colleges and universities. The Internet was largely by and for academia. And every September, a whole class of new students would arrive at college and be given access to this Internet thingy through the school computer labs. These people would inevitably make asses of themselves for a few weeks until they learned the social norms of netiquette and how to be a good netizen (remember those words?) and then things would generally calm down and get back to normal. But then in September 1993, AOL opened their floodgates and added all the Usenet groups to their list of AOL discussion groups. They didn't make it clear what they'd done, what the Internet was, or that all these new places were not actually part of AOL. And so huge numbers of AOL users descended upon the unsuspecting Internet, still thinking they were within Steve Case's walled garden. They never did learn how to behave, and AOL got its reputation as the home of utter morons who would come barging into a discussion, posting things like "that's against AOL rules, I'm going to report you" or the infamously-useless "me too". The influx of clueless idiots stopped being an annual event in September, and became a permanent phenomenon. The Internet was forever changed.
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Apr 11, 2016 18:14
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Speaking of recipes, did you hear about how Nieman Marcus had the gall to charge this woman $250 for a cookie recipe and you can help her fight back against the man by forwarding the recipe along to everyone you know? (I lost count of how many times I saw variations of that stupid email around 1998 or so...)
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Apr 12, 2016 00:45
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Pham Nuwen posted:.mod is a music file format. Reported for .mod sass. 
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Apr 29, 2016 23:21
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Speakling of sounds from long ago... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q_A1GNx0M9M
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May 1, 2016 05:42
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thathonkey posted:
 Were they ever NOT voip?
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May 15, 2016 21:34
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SLOSifl posted:The things they suggested all exist in some form. Really, the biggest thing they got wrong is that AT&T wasn't the company that brought any of that stuff to us.
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May 25, 2016 18:55
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Delivery McGee posted:Also lol the way Clarke kinda stumbles over the "work from home, move out into the country" thing -- fucker had been living in Ceylon, one of the farthest-flung corners of the British Empire, since 1956, and continued living in post-independence Sri Lanka the rest of his life. "With computers, everybody will be able to be a scuba-diving hermit living on a tropical beach like me." In the acknowledgements section of his novel 2010: Odyssey Two, Clarke included the following: Arthur C. Clarke posted:This book was written on an Archives III microcomputer with WordStar software and sent from Colombo to New York on one five-inch diskette. Last-minute corrections were transmitted through the Padukka Earth Station and the Indian Ocean Intelsat V. Hey, in 1982, all that was actually noteworthy enough to warrant mentioning.
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May 27, 2016 04:29
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The Time Dissolver posted:in 3001 frank poole is found and somehow revived and later a woman he's about to bang is repulsed by his circumcised dick. owned by the past, 1000 years later And oh yeah all the inexplicable transcendent stuff in 2001 is just a mundane case of the monolith uploading Dave's mind into its computer, and the humans eventually defeat the monoliths by infecting them with a computer virus, and we get that same chapter about the monoliths (the "And sometimes, dispassionately, they had to weed" one) repeated word-for-word AGAIN for like the third book in a row... yeah, Clarke's later stuff was not his best work, was it? 
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May 27, 2016 05:57
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Bubblyblubber posted:I have memories of an old animation / drawing program, probably for Mac. It had a demo of triangles (or possibly squares) jumping up and rolling down snowy slopes while a jaunty music played. I feel retarded even typing it out, but the vocals literally went "la la la, la la la la la la", rising in note until it went down again. The triangle thing doesn't ring a bell, but I know there was an After Dark screen saver module called "Globe" that would let you pick an image to wrap onto a sphere and send it bouncing around. It was particularly cool with a mercator-projection map of the Moon that I had found somewhere. The jumping shapes might have just been another After Dark module from a package that I hadn't
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Jun 4, 2016 00:22
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Negrostrike posted:2003 You used Incredimail!  In the mid-late 2000s I was tech support at a company where a surprising number of people insisted on using that hunk of poo poo. After all, your professional communication simply must be served up by an animated butler.
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Jun 11, 2016 04:26
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Oh man, between the CRTs that are too big for the desk, the big beige tower, the taillight mouse, the Sidewinder, the CD rack and CD-R spindle, the general air of "goon cave"... this is pretty much a picture of my life in the early 2000s. Please tell me the subwoofer is an Altec Lansing. 
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Jun 11, 2016 16:00
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Hillary Clintons Thong posted:I'm pretty sure I posted this earlier in the thread, but After Dark was on like Good Morning America and even local news for being such a thing I genuinely hope that GOG will someday release a complete After Dark collection as their first not-exactly-a-game product. I'd buy the hell out of it. Boris the cat has been absent from my screen for too long.
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Jun 12, 2016 07:28
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Tears In A Vial posted:I had no idea there were people that hated Duke Nukem 3D. I loved it when it was new, and I still love it today. The Quake games were always the ones you wanted for Serious Gaming, but at a LAN party, Duke3D was always riotous fun. It helped that there were so many great maps that people made -- I remember one that looked like Sesame Street, and another one that was a gigantic kitchen, with all the characters about the size of mice. A little later, Carmageddon filled the same hilarious multiplayer niche.
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Jun 13, 2016 04:40
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Cojawfee posted:In the US at least, rural areas do not upgrade very fast if ever. There are plenty of people who are still renting a rotary phone from their phone company.  My parents still have one of these wall-mounted rotary kitchen phones. I actually had to figure out a way to splice a DSL filter in there for them when they finally got broadband. They certainly aren't renting it from the phone company anymore, though. It's been theirs since the breakup of AT&T, way back when. Back in the dialup days, I had a little sign I would hang over that phone saying "modem in use, please don't pick up!" 
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Jul 3, 2016 22:03
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WELCOME TO MY HOME PAGE !!!!!!!!! I KISS YOU !!!!!
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Jul 31, 2016 04:35
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Jyrraeth posted:help You know, for every one that you see, there's a thousand more living in the walls.
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Aug 5, 2016 07:45
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