Tech Relics: Now integrating PIII processors for the wank factor.

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EVIL Gibson: Mar 23, 2001; Internet of Things is just someone else's computer that people can't help attaching cameras and door locks to!; Switchblade Switcharoo

Legit good tech that creative took and reamed it up the rear end by putting it into eax but only in name only.

I had the Screaming lady edition

# ¿ Jan 11, 2016 14:47

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# ¿ May 6, 2024 20:26

EVIL Gibson: Mar 23, 2001; Internet of Things is just someone else's computer that people can't help attaching cameras and door locks to!; Switchblade Switcharoo

Feedback Agency posted:

When I was a kid my dad used to pirate PSX games off Usenet for me to play. I remember him getting pissed that I didn't like Small Soldiers (probably because he spent so much loving time downloading a whole CD's worth of data.)

I had a pretty huge collection of pirated games, but the only one that survives to this day is Duke Nukem Time to Kill.

Also, Battlezone. I spent so much time playing this game and it's sequel it isn't funny.

Man I hated the gently caress out of the sequel. utter garbage. The thing I liked was you were fighting in space in those dopey as hell spacewalk suits. In comes the sequel where the designers forgot the cold war poo poo stuff worked great. gently caress the storyline.

Also the tanks were easily the closest to feeling that I was in full control of its movement at high speeds.

In recognition of your awesomeness I found this link recently. Someone has a copy of battlezone 1 online updated to work on modern machines with no graphics bullshit and networking games actually is very drat easy without having to use heat online.

http://www.battlezone1.com/

Btw remember the game browser/server wars? That was until every single multiplayer game need to be hosted on official servers beyond your control.

# ¿ Jan 25, 2016 20:00

EVIL Gibson: Mar 23, 2001; Internet of Things is just someone else's computer that people can't help attaching cameras and door locks to!; Switchblade Switcharoo

an AOL chatroom 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.

One of my best friends worked at the college IT department and they recently upgraded all the labs from BNC to ethernet. So.. they had a ton of BNC cables.

We had BNC wires hanging out of the windows, going to the second floor, hitting the two pcs up there, and then running down the stairs to my room where my box was running 24/7 proxying everyone on my DSL.

That stuff was heavy duty. Hung outside the window during winter and none of it stiffened or lost signal.

(this was before wireless being affordable.. or even existing. Forget hah)

# ¿ Jan 26, 2016 06:17

EVIL Gibson: Mar 23, 2001; Internet of Things is just someone else's computer that people can't help attaching cameras and door locks to!; Switchblade Switcharoo

Snuffman posted:

Do people still look for the cuecat for scanning? I know at one point they were all the rage. I assume there's better options today.

Hell, I bet there's an app that does it.

Barcode scanners were on the Android Market Day 0. The one I installed way back when is still on the, now, Play Store.

Difference is that the cue cat could interact with PC/Mac applications to do things like keeping your own inventory or, for some reason, you are too lazy to type and just want to print barcodes to go to your favorite sites on the World Wide Web.

# ¿ Jan 30, 2016 04:53

EVIL Gibson: Mar 23, 2001; Internet of Things is just someone else's computer that people can't help attaching cameras and door locks to!; Switchblade Switcharoo

There was a killer screensaver right around when the matrix came out that dynamically built buildings on a flat landscape for up to 16 connections whenever a socket was opened.

Printed on the side of each building was scrolling text of the contents of the packets (data minus headers) for that specific connection. Whenever a connection was closed, the building flattened to nothing.

# ¿ Feb 8, 2016 16:22

EVIL Gibson: Mar 23, 2001; Internet of Things is just someone else's computer that people can't help attaching cameras and door locks to!; Switchblade Switcharoo

Rupert Buttermilk posted:

Oh god, playing Heretic with my friend all night, and wishing for another phone line or broadband so I could play during the day

E1M5 (the level that looks like a town) is still one of my favourites.

Q2 - The Edge was my jam. I was really good at Q2, but I took that level to another ... level. I would listen for pickups and could launch rockets at where a guy would be 10 seconds later.

# ¿ Feb 14, 2016 18:55

EVIL Gibson: Mar 23, 2001; Internet of Things is just someone else's computer that people can't help attaching cameras and door locks to!; Switchblade Switcharoo

I have an old IBM AT case that ive kept not for the look but for the way you access the inside.

There are two buttons on either side. Press them both and lift. It opens the top like a car hood.

My dream would be to put a LCD monitor on the bottom of the panel so I could take it to a lan party as an all in one package.

Plus with all the space inside putting two atx boards plus two supplies in there is not beyond reason.

# ¿ Mar 2, 2016 22:03

EVIL Gibson: Mar 23, 2001; Internet of Things is just someone else's computer that people can't help attaching cameras and door locks to!; Switchblade Switcharoo

Mak0rz posted:

Hell, id themselves did this in Enemy Territory.

I am mad no one has made an as-good implementation of the flame thrower as Wolfenstein ET. The thing was so elegant in design and huge in power they made sure to let players target the fuel tanks to instantly kill them.

If no one ever played it, instead of being a simple cone it was, instead, a stream of fire that expanded in size and could easily bounce around an enclosed area. It was even dangerous to the user who had to angle it to not have the stream simply bounce straight back into their own face.

# ¿ Mar 10, 2016 22:26

EVIL Gibson: Mar 23, 2001; Internet of Things is just someone else's computer that people can't help attaching cameras and door locks to!; Switchblade Switcharoo

Buttcoin purse posted:

My modem had cool switches on the front like this:

I can't respect a modem that doesn't.

One thing I loved that we left in the gutters since 2000 are jumpers and dip switches.

# ¿ Mar 20, 2016 10:15

EVIL Gibson: Mar 23, 2001; Internet of Things is just someone else's computer that people can't help attaching cameras and door locks to!; Switchblade Switcharoo

The Kins posted:

A friend of mine runs a reasonably popular blog about old CD-ROM multimedia stuff, and he's ran into something interesting that he can't get his claws into yet.

He's found a video on an old MacAddict demo disc of the magazine's editorial staff going out to a baseball game to see a team that no longer exists play at a park that no longer exists. Unfortunately, it's a .moov file, which appears to be an older Mac OS version of the old Quicktime .mov format.

Any ideas how he'd go about converting this to a format that Youtube wouldn't just kind of stare at in confusion? My knowledge of video codec conversion starts and ends with dropping stuff into AVIdemux or a FFMPEG batch file.

First try playing the video into VLC and see if it can play it. If it can't you got some real work to do. You'll be able to convert it if you can get it into vlc

# ¿ May 14, 2016 21:54

EVIL Gibson: Mar 23, 2001; Internet of Things is just someone else's computer that people can't help attaching cameras and door locks to!; Switchblade Switcharoo

FilthyImp posted:

Computer Relics - Before the Age of Autism we were just Nerds.

Somehow typing that out made me remember how much fun it was to Telnet into the LA Public Library catalog system to see if the book I wanted was at my local branch. Sweet sweet command line interfaces.

Sometimes I compile linux open source or kernels just because I think my CPU isn't working hard enough and I want to watch it burn.
:cripes:

# ¿ May 15, 2016 21:56

EVIL Gibson: Mar 23, 2001; Internet of Things is just someone else's computer that people can't help attaching cameras and door locks to!; Switchblade Switcharoo

Regular Nintendo posted:

Their magical mouse is a dream for doing work but just plain unsuited for gaming, it's like using a knife to eat soup

Well on mac osx 10.3674 it's good, idk how it plays w windows

I would agree with you in non-gaming tasks the magic mouse is pretty awesome. Have been using one for the first time at my new job. But what makes it terrible for someone that reads source code or text documents that it doesn't have is free scrolling mouse wheels. I think it does have that function but my mouse I use lets you press a button to switch the wheel from freespin mode to click scroll mode.

Makes it so I never have to remember the five hotkeys combo or whatever to do the simple action going to bottom of document and dream a little dream its the same hotkey on all applications.

Side note: what the gently caress apple, why all the loving loving insane hotkey combos that don't even stay the same between applications. Why do I need to press three hotkeys to create a newline that doesn't break paragraphs or lists?

# ¿ Jun 22, 2016 18:22

EVIL Gibson: Mar 23, 2001; Internet of Things is just someone else's computer that people can't help attaching cameras and door locks to!; Switchblade Switcharoo

reagan posted:

Pharmacies are loving terrible when it comes to computer equipment and software. Hospitals too.

To be clear on this lots of hospital equipment are really out of date because those are the only computers have been cleared to handle patient information and other critical resources.

there was a story heard from somewhere where a person was trying to replace a piece of equipment for this one device and the manufacture said "did you really try to do everything to fix it?" . This is because they only had such a amount of cleared supplies to repair at that if they ran out they would have to pay millions to actually recertify a whole new device.

Every piece needs to be exactly the same. So if you had an geforce 460m gpu in your system and you couldn't find anymore 460ms you couldn't repair it even though there a ton of 470ms.

That might be a weird case but just to make it obvious why you can't replace just replace a psu with another psu of a different brand or make. The original psi was put through its paces, not any other.

# ¿ Jul 2, 2016 20:22

EVIL Gibson: Mar 23, 2001; Internet of Things is just someone else's computer that people can't help attaching cameras and door locks to!; Switchblade Switcharoo

Tubesock Holocaust posted:

Old people who aren't good with computer get fooled by official looking websites and official sounding phone calls.

This in combination of the scammed never warning their friends of the scam because they don't want to reveal they got tricked.

# ¿ Jul 6, 2016 18:06

EVIL Gibson: Mar 23, 2001; Internet of Things is just someone else's computer that people can't help attaching cameras and door locks to!; Switchblade Switcharoo

Alan_Shore posted:

OH GOD

It tops itunes convoluted ui at least.

# ¿ Aug 13, 2016 05:38

EVIL Gibson: Mar 23, 2001; Internet of Things is just someone else's computer that people can't help attaching cameras and door locks to!; Switchblade Switcharoo

Hello

In the year 2004 this fan blower made sense.

"I have a lot of empty slots, why not get lots of air moving between them!"

I forgot if those fans blow out or suck in; pretty sure it was the latter.

# ¿ Sep 3, 2016 19:00

EVIL Gibson: Mar 23, 2001; Internet of Things is just someone else's computer that people can't help attaching cameras and door locks to!; Switchblade Switcharoo

Humphreys posted:

More things need oscilloscopes.

Here's Quake being rendered to an oscilloscope.

https://youtu.be/aMli33ornEU

The graphics were converted to noises dynamically and then rendered. There is a link somewhere of what the noise actually sounded like but if I remember it was very shrill and fuzzy.

# ¿ Sep 6, 2016 04:49

EVIL Gibson: Mar 23, 2001; Internet of Things is just someone else's computer that people can't help attaching cameras and door locks to!; Switchblade Switcharoo

All this arcade talk makes me interested. I have a ultra wide screen monitor. Are there hacks to emulate the ultra long screen in the X-Men machine that worked by outputting to three different monitors and then relying on physical mirrors (or something) to merge them together?

# ¿ Sep 18, 2016 19:17

EVIL Gibson: Mar 23, 2001; Internet of Things is just someone else's computer that people can't help attaching cameras and door locks to!; Switchblade Switcharoo

EVIL NOONER posted:

its not, its just that goons are terrible about some things.

Humphreys posted:

The 'emoji' name really irks me for some reason. And I have no idea why.

Edit:

Welcome, you are a goon!

Now have nitpicks about every little thing and you'll be good

# ¿ Nov 4, 2016 14:43

EVIL Gibson: Mar 23, 2001; Internet of Things is just someone else's computer that people can't help attaching cameras and door locks to!; Switchblade Switcharoo

Computer viking posted:

I don't think that's entirely doable. I'm not sure what speed it transfers at, but I'd guess 9600 baud. That's way more transitions/second than a 60fps webcam can capture.

You get a dedicated 38khz ir receiver then.

The challenge is figuring out how to talk to it.

# ¿ Feb 17, 2017 15:23

EVIL Gibson: Mar 23, 2001; Internet of Things is just someone else's computer that people can't help attaching cameras and door locks to!; Switchblade Switcharoo

Casimir Radon posted:

I was poking around in my Amazon recommendations and I guess Texas Instruments still makes the TI-108. I don't think I've seen one since before 2000.

TI has such a stranglehold on calculators in schools it's not a surprise.

Still paying 100$ for new TI83s directly from the school: it's more likely than you think!

# ¿ Feb 21, 2017 07:05

EVIL Gibson: Mar 23, 2001; Internet of Things is just someone else's computer that people can't help attaching cameras and door locks to!; Switchblade Switcharoo

mobby_6kl posted:

We should change the default to /dev/null, instead.

Always thought CD to /dev/null should play an animation that sucks in all the characters on the console leaving a smiley face ASCII and a box. You have to move you face over to the door to get back to the previous directory.

# ¿ Feb 25, 2017 22:57

EVIL Gibson: Mar 23, 2001; Internet of Things is just someone else's computer that people can't help attaching cameras and door locks to!; Switchblade Switcharoo

FilthyImp posted:

Just remember that most of us were watching videos online through RealPlayer and its shitfuck codec and you'll see why and MPG expansion board might have been a good investment for someone with some cash that didn't want to get a new computer.

As others noted, this was back when you chose to do word processing or play an MP3, but maybe not both if you wanted to type in real time or have steady music. The limitations of systems in the 90s were very real and very much not geared to multimedia browsing or multitasking. Hell, iirc they actually marketed a FPU expansion board for my Mac Performa at some point.

Thankfully, the jump from like 500Mhz to 1+Ghz processors, and the more spacious RAM, evened things out a bit.

Remember my windows system being so on the edge of mp3 playing I had the choice of either playing the mp3s or move a mouse. Moving the mouse was an instant hiccups.

I still have those mp3s and listen to them. One of them has this weird audio effect of like a tiny skip but just really sped up music for that part because the encoder was just garbage doing that part. I got so used to it that when I listened to the album digitally later on from Google play, it felt off when it got through that part without the skip.

# ¿ May 29, 2017 19:47

EVIL Gibson: Mar 23, 2001; Internet of Things is just someone else's computer that people can't help attaching cameras and door locks to!; Switchblade Switcharoo

Star Man posted:

By the time I had a CD burner in 2002, the issue with bad discs and being unable to do anything seemed to be gone. I rarely had any issues with the CDs that I made.

There were still problems especially with the ever increasing burn rates. Finding a good burner drive and then the media that works well with it (that could handle the burn speeds) was like trying to find two specific needles out of a haystack of needles of too many brands and types.

I took the "LiteOn" as a good drive and the first to really fix the buffer underrun problem (think it was called Burn Proof?) And just looked for discs that it would be able to handle.

To be honest, I was okay at burning at 4 or 12 (since CD ROM s at the time read the slower burned rates) and waiting longer than trying to hit the 32 -48x write speeds.

Now that I am talking about it, around that time manufacturers tried to increase the read and write speeds and found a hard limit when generic CDs/DVDs we're used . Like above 52 or maybe 54 discs kept shattering and ruining drives from the plastic shrapnel.

# ¿ May 30, 2017 00:59

EVIL Gibson: Mar 23, 2001; Internet of Things is just someone else's computer that people can't help attaching cameras and door locks to!; Switchblade Switcharoo

Last Chance posted:

hell yes. would have loved to have that back in the day.

it reminds me how happy I was when I realized DVD players could play VCDs and I could burn my... off-air.. recordings to normal CDs and watch them in my living room

I got a CD/DVD machine that played normal vcds and DVDs (region less after a button combo on the remote which was awesome) but I paid more since it was able to "play" Xvid and divx videos from burned discs.

The word play is in quotes because if you thought you could dump Matrix.avi on a DVD and get it to automatically play oh ho ho wait a second there, is that audio VARIABLE BITRATE MP3? How dare you, I only accept constant bit rate so your audio will be 4x as large without any added quality.

Okay, that audio is good but HOLD THE gently caress UP, did you expect me to PLAY something not using the standard Main Profile DIVX codec? You want to try Xvid? Well, hold on a bit there, this WAS proper Xvid Patented and NOT that hacked one with customized profiles and poo poo?

Next you'll be telling me you are going to use DVD+R or something rewritable...

# ¿ May 31, 2017 07:47

EVIL Gibson: Mar 23, 2001; Internet of Things is just someone else's computer that people can't help attaching cameras and door locks to!; Switchblade Switcharoo

Lowen SoDium posted:

That reminds me, the dad of a friend of mine had a DVD-RAM based DVR system that he used from 2005-ish until about a year or so ago.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ApN2eLI4d-4

That video reminds me of wandering through the computer open market looking for cheap upgrades and seeing that video in every other stall playing tp try to draw people to buy fully built computers the small stalls built right then and there after you ordered it.

# ¿ Jun 2, 2017 03:15

EVIL Gibson: Mar 23, 2001; Internet of Things is just someone else's computer that people can't help attaching cameras and door locks to!; Switchblade Switcharoo

I am always impressed with 8088 MPH for the IBM AT because it demos capabilities on a machine made in 81 with features waaaay beyond spec through the dirtest hacks. My Dad had one and it couldn't run Ghostbusters because there was no mouse support.

https://trixter.oldskool.org/2015/04/07/8088-mph-we-break-all-your-emulators/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yHXx3orN35Y

# ¿ Jul 11, 2017 16:29

EVIL Gibson: Mar 23, 2001; Internet of Things is just someone else's computer that people can't help attaching cameras and door locks to!; Switchblade Switcharoo

roffels posted:

I've never heard a 5.1 track off of a laserdisc, but their 2.0 stereo tracks in PCM sounded amazing compared to the Dolby Digital 2.0 tracks on DVD.

There were for sure 5.1 dts sound tracks in laserdisc but they came during when the tech had the most popularity.

https://www.lddb.com/list.php?format=ld&list=dts&sort=date,asc

# ¿ Aug 1, 2017 21:59

EVIL Gibson: Mar 23, 2001; Internet of Things is just someone else's computer that people can't help attaching cameras and door locks to!; Switchblade Switcharoo

Cojawfee posted:

I thought laser discs had analog sound. Though maybe I was just misunderstanding the person who was explaining to me why she loves laserdisc so much compared to modern video storage.

Ntsc laserdisc could support

two mono analog
one stereo analog
two mono analog + two mono PCM
two mono analog + one stereo PCM
one stereo analog + two mono PCM
one stereo analog + one stereo PCM
AC3 + one mono analog + one stereo PCM
DTS + one stereo analog

The ac3 actually surprised me lol

# ¿ Aug 1, 2017 22:27

EVIL Gibson: Mar 23, 2001; Internet of Things is just someone else's computer that people can't help attaching cameras and door locks to!; Switchblade Switcharoo

roffels posted:

I recognize, I just never had a decoder/modulator for it and haven't heard it myself.

Gotcha.

I was wondering because it looks like all the surround sound formats for laserdisc came with another audio track which , I hope, we're still accessible with machines without the proper decoders.

# ¿ Aug 1, 2017 23:25

EVIL Gibson: Mar 23, 2001; Internet of Things is just someone else's computer that people can't help attaching cameras and door locks to!; Switchblade Switcharoo

oohhboy posted:

I enjoy his ever growing contempt for The Sims.

My brother and his wife were really into The Sims and they basically came to the same conclusion that it was obvious maxis was phoning some expansions in.

# ¿ Aug 25, 2017 23:48

EVIL Gibson: Mar 23, 2001; Internet of Things is just someone else's computer that people can't help attaching cameras and door locks to!; Switchblade Switcharoo

Buttcoin purse posted:

Admittedly someone convinced me to use bootstrap once (the only time I touched it) for an internal tool that almost nobody was going to see. If they hadn't done that it would have looked more like babby's first HTML written in Notepad, so I guess it's sometimes better than nothing.

I feel the same way about Web 2.0 with the fanciest of JavaScript. There are just so many now and they all have different ways of how to use them to the fullest extent. Like one is CSS focused while another builds the CSS for you.

It's confused out there now but people just throw things out like yo grundle your react after building with npm the requirements

# ¿ Nov 7, 2017 17:22

EVIL Gibson: Mar 23, 2001; Internet of Things is just someone else's computer that people can't help attaching cameras and door locks to!; Switchblade Switcharoo

Jerry Cotton posted:

A:? B:? You mean ,8,1, right?

The apples we used had two floppies for disk to disk copying.

On the bombcast, Jeff was talking about how lovely floppies read speeds were since each system seemed to have it's own idea of how to load data. He said that this nonsense was used in DRM where you could not play a game unless the firmware in the floppy could spin it at the exact rate the system could only provide

# ¿ May 14, 2018 02:37

EVIL Gibson: Mar 23, 2001; Internet of Things is just someone else's computer that people can't help attaching cameras and door locks to!; Switchblade Switcharoo

jojoinnit posted:

Anyone remember total conversion games? Stuff that would just slap new textures and palettes on existing games? There was an X-Men one for Doom (iirc) that I wanted so bad back in the day...

What you described is a partial conversion where you just replace the things you mention. Total conversion was something over the top like new mechanics, new maps, new weapons, etc.

Total conversion would be like how Heretic came to be. Partial conversion is replacing all the imps with Beavis and the cyberdemons with Barney the Dinosaur.

Quake was a bit more complicated since everything was not just a Ms paint away from making a change but I considered things like Superhero Quake as a partial conversion since you use the same multiplayer maps while likes like Jailbreak or Action Quake were total conversion since they had was different mechanics but also had to have total new maps to support them. (Less so action but the action quake maps we're good as gently caress)

# ¿ Jun 10, 2018 04:05

EVIL Gibson: Mar 23, 2001; Internet of Things is just someone else's computer that people can't help attaching cameras and door locks to!; Switchblade Switcharoo

Buttcoin purse posted:

I always wanted to learn the Forth programming language but I never really had to. I was browsing through the Folkscanomy Computer: Books on Computers and Programming collection on archive.org and found this book with a slightly cover trying to make Forth sexy? :germany: (doesn't exist, but should probably involve boobs)

Just your basic Heavy Metal theme.

If you told me back in the 80s there will be a well respected series of guides would have creepy animals on it, I would say the same thing.

EVIL Gibson has a new favorite as of 14:30 on Sep 18, 2018

# ¿ Sep 18, 2018 14:25

EVIL Gibson: Mar 23, 2001; Internet of Things is just someone else's computer that people can't help attaching cameras and door locks to!; Switchblade Switcharoo

barbecue at the folks posted:

I'm beginning to understand why people said Saturn was a monster to code for.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RvRG_v8XpC0

Why would you do this?

Subscribed. I love dumb programming tricks to get new effects .

Say what you will about the Sega Saturday Graphics, the audio filtering and process internals was so overdone that the person that cracked it recently said he wants to make an audio mixer for it because it does some strange and wonderful stuff to audio.

For example you could make a filter that does something with an audio stream then you can tell that result to go to another filter and then even back to the first filter and it does it does it so fast and cleanly the value of that ability would be almost like a Korg or Moog device.

# ¿ Sep 29, 2018 20:04

EVIL Gibson: Mar 23, 2001; Internet of Things is just someone else's computer that people can't help attaching cameras and door locks to!; Switchblade Switcharoo

GI_Clutch posted:

I love how all these YouTubers have the nicely drawn cartoony versions of themselves on their channels, then you see actual footage of them and they are just some gross nerd.

I like the techmoan muppet proving no one should make a muppet of themselves.

# ¿ Sep 29, 2018 21:40

EVIL Gibson: Mar 23, 2001; Internet of Things is just someone else's computer that people can't help attaching cameras and door locks to!; Switchblade Switcharoo

Data Graham posted:

I was an iTunes zealot from the day it was announced, the idea of navigating your music by its native metadata through database queries rather than long inscrutable filenames in folders was a nerdy revelation for me.

Every release past about 2.0 made it objectively worse though and now I have simply stopped listening to music rather than admit I was so wrong

In the beginning iTunes really hosed you if you had any mp3s on your system beyond it's own libraries.

When it asked if I wanted to import these mp3s into it's library, I said no thanks.

Then it nuked everything I told it not to import.

I was pretty harsh on it from the beginning.

# ¿ Oct 21, 2018 01:57

EVIL Gibson: Mar 23, 2001; Internet of Things is just someone else's computer that people can't help attaching cameras and door locks to!; Switchblade Switcharoo

Was going to state cool and in the second year there I moved out of the dorms with some friends at work.

Now back to the apartment that was really the floors above a flower shop converted to apartments

DSL was now available to customers but the requirements were strict. You had to be within a mile or two of a switching house at that time unlike today.

The closest switching house to our house was the main reason I investigated it; it was right next door. Full speed as advertised.

Getting everyone on board was easy; hey do you want to throw in some money to share non-suck internet?

Buying Ethernet adapters and enough cable to connect everyone was cost absurb in 1999 (and what wireless?) but luckily my best friend (who was part of the crew) was a tech support which was not just doing phone work but walking out and solving problems.

It happened to be a benefit because the whole campus was going through an Ethernet refit. The network it was replacing was 10BASE2 (or 5?) over BNC cables.

BNC is unlike Ethernet in that every computer needs to be directly connected to another computer and create a long chain until the end where a terminator is needed. Like a token ring but.. not a ring.

So we had access to dozens of pci/isa adapters and miles of BNC. We estimated how many cables and how long they had to be. took those plus some spares.

Basically there was need for two small cables, one medium cable and then the anaconda-mega-loving-long cable from upstairs all the way to my room. Setup a dedicated win98 internet sharing box and it and the modem lived in my room (I gained/was cursed by now, even today, I could not sleep without loud as gently caress computer fan noise. Please see the pc fans of 1999.)

A friend of my best friend wanted to move in and he was given a junky throw away Dell which was still acceptable at the time. . To connect him, we needed to add him the string and the tech Dept already threw out all the cable. He roomed on the same floor as me but beyond the distance of a medium cable. We just had extra mediums and smalls, no loving death-snake-long cables.

We figured out that a medium could connect him if we continued the line upstairs by running it outside a window, down a floor, and into the room right below which happened to be the same room as the new guy.

During one frigid PA night we did our dark run. Did it at night so the landlords did not see it or hear the windows opening since they worked in the flower shop (utilities including heat fully paid with rent would piss them off as we fumbled for the cable outside) .

We got it done and the landlords only asked one time what the hell that cable was.

# ¿ Oct 24, 2018 23:44

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# ¿ May 6, 2024 20:26

EVIL Gibson: Mar 23, 2001; Internet of Things is just someone else's computer that people can't help attaching cameras and door locks to!; Switchblade Switcharoo

I know its not as relic-y as most of the stuff in here, but I was able to find a useful guide on how to get the Mad Catz amBX lights working again on windows 10. These were released in 2011 and required finding the drivers and making sure windows does not put then in power saving mode.

Ive seen other RGB kits, but they are either just static, reacting to audio, but not as dynamic as this (exception with the ambilight project)

I showed this off because that area in Path of Exile has you running through the light and dark fast.

# ¿ Jul 18, 2019 17:24

The Something Awful Forums > Main > Post Your Favorite: Carefully Curated > Tech Relics: Now integrating PIII processors for the wank factor.

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