drunk asian neighbor posted:

(Zen Xtra, 40GB, removeable battery which was awesome)

Squashy Nipples posted:

Here is my first digital player, a Sony S2 Sports Walkman.

Great design, great interface, nice and light, was perfect for jogging (which is what I bought it for). So what sank it? loving Sony had to implement a proprietary music format, ATRAC (Adaptive Transform Acoustic Coding).

Nope, MP3 was just too popular for them to use.

Bonzo posted:

Buying a copy of RedHat (and the install manual) at CompUSA in 1997

Buttcoin purse posted:

The days when you didn't need a cooler on your video card, and CPU coolers looked like this:



(if they even had a fan!)

Snuffman posted:

Sorry, this was pages ago, but were you the same goon who posted in a similar thread about repairing the old iMacs?

How you had to make sure to discharge the CRT before you could get at something as simple as the motherboard? It kind of blew my mind when I read it. I mean, its so obvious when you think about it just looking at the old iMac, but the fact that the stupid thing could kill you was pretty amazing.

1000 Brown M and Ms posted:

He was interesting. He also refused to use flat screens because he didn't like the aspect ratio and it was harder to read papers/documents. Instead he had a couple of massive old crts.

sinking belle posted:

Come play my lord

CaptainSarcastic posted:

Some of this is more recent, but there used to be a number of things that let me guess with 90% accuracy if a computer was virus-riddled just by glancing at the desktop. Animated cursor? Viruses. Weatherbug? Viruses. Limewire? Viruses.

dablakh0l posted:

One of the best (unexpected) animations in Battle Chess was when the rook captured the queen

Humphreys posted:

And drat I hate the term 'maker' for some reason.

1000 Brown M and Ms posted:

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.

Powered Descent posted:

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.

WebDog posted:

Did someone leak your rejected interface ideas onto the Windows UI team as a cruel prank?


This site is great in listing some of the UI madness that persisted around 2000.

ColoradoCleric posted:

I divide our generations of children into groups on whether or not they used torrents or mirc for pirating

Doctor Bombadil posted:

Look at all you TI nerds, real men use this:


Even though I haven't had a need for graphing calculator since my uni days, I still use it emulated on my phone. I always get strange looks from people who can't grasp RPN.

A SWEATY FATBEARD posted:

This. Laptops are a current fad, and I don't understand people who eagerly buy them without regard for their long-term serviceability.

Sten Freak posted:

There's a commercial from a while back that shows the inventor of the USB walking through a room while people cheer and hi-five him in slow mo like a sports star or something. USB did do away with so much pain but I got a little irked when I saw it because of the physical design of the port itself - a connector that can fit both ways. How many times have you had to reverse a cable, particularly on a new machine or piece of hardware or if you're in IT and have to deal with racks and new configurations all the time (haven't worked with hardware in years but still)?

It's a huge improvement but a notch or other obvious indicator or better yet the ability to insert in either orientation would have made it perfect.

calvus posted:

What is that thing?

stubblyhead posted:

Lincoln posted:

from a what

feedmegin posted:

Basically everyone does, yeah (because of how CRTs work, as someone else explained). Hence why back in the day us Linux-users had to hand-tune our modelines in the X11 config file to up the refresh rate to at least 70Hz or get a headache.

thathonkey posted:

Oh man good old US robotics. They made solid rear end modems.

Data Graham posted:

Because you have to appeal to market segments.

Social-climbing yuppies won't buy a hooligan 350Z, and street racer kids won't buy a posh G35. But change some badges and interior trimmings and voila, instant doubled market.

Same reason why everybody and I mean EVERYBODY has to make small, medium, and large SUVs, and if you hear they're coming out with another vehicle next year I guarantee it'll be an SUV that fits between the small and the medium or the medium and the large

Stinky_Pete posted:

I remember when I was a kid, I would see these ads for Internet kiosks, the idea being that you, the homeowner with lots of equity and thus capital to spare (), can buy a thing that stands up in a mall and people can pay per minute to go on the Internet. I tried to find the ad, but no luck. Anyone else know what I'm talking about?

stubblyhead posted:

morbidly obese black albino chick's beaver shots?

thathonkey posted:

Remember when everybody was into those weird programs where you run them and they could dedicate idle cpu processing to trying to prove the existence of alien life somehow? seti@home think

whats the story with that? I recall thinking it was bs when i was first finding out about it as a young internet pioneer circa late 90's.

Police Automaton posted:

I ran Seti@home a lot. Think I started with a Pentium and ended contributing on a Pentium 3. That was also the time where I basically never turned off the computer. Today that'd be an expensive hobby, having a modern higher-end CPU push all it's cores to 100% 24/7. That requires financial dedication.

radiatinglines posted:

I played so much DOOM, Blake Stone, Heretic, and Hexen on this thing.

If I tried to play an FPS on a joystick now I would probably throw up.

Mechanism Eight posted:

Oh, windows. How quaint




Not pictured: a working battery

theultimo posted:

Me in college was dc++

Casimir Radon posted:

Old internet could be so un-user friendly and infuriating. New internet is loads more convenient but there are more idiots on it now. I almost can't comprehend pre-cable internet anymore.

thathonkey posted:

as somebody who has been working actively in the web development community for over a decade now i've got to say the state of things right now is bad. very bad. i still try to write for performance first and foremost but the incentive is just not there anymore for most people. there was a brief time when mobiles were starting to have internet access that it became priority again to been efficient with bandwidth and requests but that is quickly fading as 3G then 4G/LTE became ubiquitous in the US. i dont have time to write a long post about it now nor is this the thread for it... somebody should start a new topic to discuss all of these stupid modern web/web app trends.

Police Automaton posted:

What I hate most about the current internet though is how bad the signal to noise ratio feels. Back then you had to dig sometimes because the search machines weren't as efficient, today you do because so much stuff is just so irrelevant or doesn't relay much information at all. Somebody learns how to cook soup out of a can without scolding themselves horribly and they'll register thesoupchef.com and create SupperChannel on youtube with 50 40 minute videos where they drone on and on nasally and which have no information content at all for anyone who ever cooked a can of soup. You want to find an interesting recipe for soup with all-fresh ingredients and you have to dig through pages of crap like that. If you get what I mean.

Germstore posted:

I love that every online recipe has at least one review by someone who "halved the salt" and reviewed it poorly because it was bland.

Lowen SoDium posted:

There was a competitor a few years ago called "Blue Mars" but I don't think it ever went anywhere.

There is a new VR based one call AltSpace that is starting to pick up in popularity, but I don't think it allows for anywhere near as much user created content as Second Life.

Naxuz posted:

There was this whole genre of obscure Finnish multiplayer DOS games back in the mid-1990s. Most of them were 'cave shooters' like AUTS or Wings or V-Wing, in which you flew a V shape ina a cave and tried to murder your friend doing the same thing. It looked like this: