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Running a keep-alive app in the background while you ran a big download on dial-up so you didn't time out from inactivity and disconnect. Free ad-driven dial-up that was actually faster than AOL - Juno and NetZero were a couple.
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Dec 20, 2015 00:35
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Having to remember to prefix dial-up numbers with *70 to prevent call waiting from kicking in and knocking you offline.
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Dec 20, 2015 01:22
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Skeleton Ape posted:Well, ok. Dialup modems. Also yes, I live in the sticks and have a BLAZING FAST line-of-sight wireless setup. Just a dish-type antenna pointed at a mountain and a PoE power injector in the house. I did tech support for an ISP that used those. I wouldn't have described our service as "BLAZING FAST."
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Dec 20, 2015 03:36
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Skeleton Ape posted:Haha, no it's not. It's pretty drat good for what it is though, when I moved here I was pretty much convinced I'd have no choice other than satellite with data caps. I get a rock solid 8 Mb/s which is good enough for HD Netflix, I'm happy. Yeah, the service is definitely better than satellite. Then again, smoke signals would be competitive with satellite. Our service wasn't bad, but it really was best-suited for places that couldn't get anything else. While I worked there I kept my DSL at home because it was faster and more reliable than our own service.
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Dec 20, 2015 05:14
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Had a 300 baud modem hooked up to our Commodore 64 to dial up local BBS servers. Had one of these bad boys, too: And a third-party fan which sat on top of it to keep it from literally melting down.
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Dec 20, 2015 06:01
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Hot Cosby posted:that pic doesn't do it justice, those things were like 18" front to back and weighed 15 pounds That, and the interior mechanics were such a Rube Goldberg affair that we actually had a program that would make it play music. The motors and heads would vibrate to actually sound like a fuzzy midi speaker.
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Dec 20, 2015 06:13
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Is that a DVD-RAM cartridge missing the actual DVD part? I think I only ever saw one or maybe two computers that actually used DVD-RAM - that was an idea that pretty much died a well-deserved early death.
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Dec 21, 2015 07:36
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Bloody Hedgehog posted:Nah, just a CD caddy. Before CD-drive manufacturers had settled on a standard for physically mounting discs in the drive, some manufacturers went with a caddy system. Put the CD in the caddy, caddy slides into the drive. Well, I think my confusion is understandable - that looks a lot like a DVD-RAM cartridge: 
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Dec 21, 2015 07:52
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Back in the distant days of the pre-Internet past, one of the local BBS systems was based on board games, and the site itself written in BASIC. I dialed in once, successfully connected, and then got dropped to a command prompt. I knew just enough BASIC to figure out how to fix the error that was occurring and get the site to load up, but it logged me in as the person who had presumably crashed it. Being an obnoxious teenager, I proceeded to change his information, adding -Leek to his last name and changing this address to Hell. I then declared wins in all the games he was playing and posted a bizarre anti-vegetarian rant on the main discussion page. I didn't change his password, though, figuring he would log in, see the mischief I had wrought, and realize that his account was not secure. Instead he logged in and whined in confusion on the main page, changing nothing. I took this as a cue to log back in using his information and post more weird anti-vegetarian nonsense, which I continued to do for several days until he finally realized that he needed to change the password to his drat account. Good times.
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Dec 21, 2015 23:41
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This game. This loving game. I could play this for about 15 minutes before arriving at what seemed to be an impossible jump across a lava pool and died. Every single time. It wouldn't even let me murder my sidekick, Raoul, which I tried to on numerous occasions out of frustration. I think it would let you beat him up a little, but the memory is vague.
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Dec 22, 2015 03:14
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I was trying to remember the first video card I ever installed, but can't bring it to mind. I put in the first computer I bought for myself, an HP Pavilion Pentium II that was 350mHz at the fastest. I upgraded the RAM to a whopping 96MB and put in a 3D card that had to have that funny VGA to VGA bridge to the onboard video. When I eventually upgraded to a P4 running Windows XP, installed an ATI 9600 Pro and 768MB of RAM, I felt like I was in the future. 
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Dec 22, 2015 23:27
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I remember pirating games for the Commodore 64, and being pretty SOL sometimes with no manuals or any way to figure out basic things in a game. We have some 2.5D flying game where you started off in a closed hangar, and could not figure out how to the get the doors to open. A friend of my brother's said "put something heavy on 6" and this actually worked, even though it was awkward finding something that would hold the key down while not pushing all the keys around it. We eventually figured out you had to hit F6 to open the hangar doors. 
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Dec 26, 2015 09:27
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thathonkey posted:ah I almost mentioned that but I couldn't think of a good way to describe it. the voice sample is really distinct in my head though. iirc it spawned infinite windows of itself until it crashed your computer so that the audio would get stuck looping most of the time until you could scramble for a hard reset. It used javascript to infinitelly spawn windows every time one was closed, and the audio sample I remember "Hey everybody, I'm looking at gay porn!" Knowing how to use the task manager was helpful, as was keeping the sound muted as a matter of course on your work machine. I think there was another variation that used "You are an idiot. Hahahahahaha." The original Rickroll site used javascript to pop up windows with song lyrics in sequence, but just as many as needed for the song - if you clicked them through fast enough you could get rid of it pretty quickly.
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Dec 27, 2015 05:34
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gagelion2 posted:who here played a-10 cuba I played a lot of A-10 Tank Killer. It was made by a local company, and the city you have a mission or two around is clearly Eugene, Oregon.  It also let you do fun things like murder the B-52s you are supposed to provide ground support to. http://www.abandonwaredos.com/abandonware-game.php?gid=MTc=
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Dec 27, 2015 22:55
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The Taint Reaper posted:I really hate the fact that we still have QWERTY keyboards. QWERTY was made in order to impede typing because the original alphabetical setup they had for typewriters was too efficient and wound up breaking the typewriter mechanisms. Keyboards don't have this problem and would probably benefit from the switch to alphabetical order. 
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Dec 29, 2015 01:17
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JediTalentAgent posted:Didn't Rambus RDRAM have a short burst in PC popularity around the late 90s/early 00s until DDR RAM came out? There was. I used to do computer service and reselling, and we had some RAMBUS machines come through from time to time. Trying to hoard memory for them was a pain in the rear end.
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Dec 29, 2015 03:26
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you were warned posted:
I'm the six-inch mouse cord.
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Dec 29, 2015 06:14
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Dec 29, 2015 06:31
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1000 Brown M and Ms posted:
I worked in a Mac-centric office in the early part of this century, and we had a bunch of the drat jelly iMacs with those idiot mice. We actually had a bunch of third-party add-ons that clipped to the stupid puck mice to give them a more usable shape. When I realized that normal two-button USB mice worked just fine it made the whole Mac experience much more tolerable. edit: I found a picture: 
CaptainSarcastic has a new favorite as of 07:01 on Dec 29, 2015 |
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Dec 29, 2015 06:57
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Data Graham posted:Surely that's only if you've forgotten about this: I absolutely hated having to do any kind of service on those goddamn things. Not only are they are a pain in the rear end to take apart, it seems like a good portion of the interior structure is composed of razor blades. No model of computer was more consistent about literally making me bleed while working on them. From the same time period was the short-lived eMac. It was also a pain in the rear end to work on, even worse than a jelly iMac, but at least it tended to cause fewer flesh wounds. 
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Dec 30, 2015 00:07
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I used to play a lot of Tribes, AVP2 online and America's Army (especially v2.1). I liked the friendly fire system and autokicks in America's Army - I once was on a team where the whole squad was teamkilled at spawn by one idiot with an RPG. Good times. I think I was accused of cheating more often in that game than any other, pwning noobs all over the place. Cheating in online games is one reason I never really played Counterstrike - I have no patience with cheats. Why even play an online game if you need cheats in order to be competitive? Trolling people is only fun for so long, and it is much more satisfying to just beat the hell out of people by way of skill alone.
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Dec 30, 2015 06:53
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I remember on the Colecovision port of Pitfall that you could run up to one of the walls in the underground area, quickly tap the controller in the opposite direction, then reverse it, and slide through the wall. Didn't help that much as far as exploits go, though. 
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Dec 31, 2015 01:44
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If you never harvested porn from BBS servers at 1200 baud then you don't really understand the struggles we used to go through.
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Dec 31, 2015 03:22
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I remember that! pepito sanchez posted:i played a few of the super classic games posted here when i was a kid but tribes needs a mention And I did mention Tribes earlier, but didn't post a screenshot. Arguably the best multiplayer FPS of all time.
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Jan 1, 2016 00:17
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Played the hell out of The Perfect General on DOS:
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Jan 1, 2016 10:34
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http://www.nomoreaolcds.com/
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Jan 2, 2016 00:22
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We had an Okidata dot-matrix printer at home and I remember swapping out the ribbon with different colors to make colorful banners. I don't miss the noise the drat things made.
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Jan 3, 2016 00:03
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Well into this century I considered Soundblaster PCI cards necessary because I run a lot of Linux, and the driver support for onboard audio used to be really bad.
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Jan 4, 2016 23:22
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Howard Beale posted:Back before the FCC forced AT&T to split up the Bell companies, you not only had to buy your phones from Bell but also pay monthly for each phone in your house. I remember my parents installing an illicit second extension upstairs and my mom playing dumb when The Phone Company called. "You hear a second ring on our line? Oh, sure! When somebody calls, our phone goes ring-ring, ring-ring." I'm old enough to remember those days, and also the pre-modular multi-pin phone jacks. I recall how shortly after Bell was broken up there were a bunch of independent "phone stores" that sprang to life, letting you actually own your own phone and get something other than the Henry Ford-esque line of models that had been established for years.
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Jan 6, 2016 02:44
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I cut my Linux teeth on a distro called Phat Linux, which let you install alongside Windows without partitioning the drive. It was based off Mandrake, and is where I first got my feet wet with a Linux desktop. It died fairly early on, and I started running dual-boots as a matter of course after that. Posted from openSUSE 42.1 running KDE 5
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Jan 8, 2016 04:38
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Code Jockey posted:I know it's been said but the Microsoft Sidewinder pad I had one that I pretty much only used to play Road Rash 2. Now that I think of it, my wife at the time might have used to play some arcade games, too. I'm thinking of getting another one (or whatever the USB equivalent is) for those games I get on Steam and only realize after the fact that the game is really meant to played with a controller. Darksiders with keyboard and mouse is pretty bad, for instance.
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Jan 9, 2016 01:53
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Snuffman posted:Sorry, this was pages ago, but were you the same goon who posted in a similar thread about repairing the old iMacs? I worked at a recycling place refurbishing computers, and worked on literally dozens and dozens of old CRT iMacs, but other than them being a minor pain in the rear end to disassemble I didn't have to do anything particularly special with them. With practice it got to the point I could tear down and reassemble a jelly iMac in just a few minutes, and it mostly just required being careful. The eMacs were much worse to work on, but at least there were fewer of them. The iLamps were the worst, though. I did post about my beloved widescreen Sony CRT monitor at some point in the recent past, and the fact I decided to not try to repair it after reading horror stories not just about electrical discharge but about a faulty repair turning the CRT into a stealth X-ray weapon. Perhaps that is what you are remembering?
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Jan 9, 2016 23:56
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Your Dead Gay Son posted:No browser tabs. I remember running shareware ad-driven Opera, partly because it was the first browser to do tabs.
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Jan 10, 2016 02:11
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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.
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Jan 12, 2016 04:22
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Dr.Caligari posted:Did abruptly turning the computer off pose any real threat of damaging it? I remember my uncle yelling at me for holding the button down on his computer to turn it off. If the hard drive hadn't spun down then there was a danger of data loss or corruption. Older file systems weren't as robust, and losing the file allocation table could hose an entire install.
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Jan 14, 2016 02:17
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I remember wistfully checking this out in stores in 1980:
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Jan 16, 2016 06:03
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Remember using a hole-punch to magically make single-sided 5.25" floppies into double-sided floppies?
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Jan 26, 2016 02:38
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ymgve posted:Generally, hard drives either fail within two years, or they keep going for decades. Laptop hard drives are significantly more likely to fail in that timeframe. If desktop drives make it that long then they do frequently just keep chugging along. I generally retire my HDDs once they start showing signs of wear (usually before there are any noticeable symptoms), and have one drive in my secondary desktop that I probably should swap out on this basis, but most of my HDDs have easily lasted more than 5 years and just keep going.
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Jan 26, 2016 05:42
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Hillary Clintons Thong posted:After my high school shop class got tired of playing Wolfenstein 3D, we moved onto Streed Rod I remember that game - used to play it a fair amount. Was pretty well-done, at least as far as I can recall.
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Jan 30, 2016 23:51
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| # ¿ May 2, 2024 03:16 |
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Sten Freak posted:Dazzle the natives! I played the crap out of that game on the Commodore 64.
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Feb 2, 2016 00:31
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