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Does Shareware still exist like it used to where you were drat well expected to pay if you used it beyond the trial period, or is it just mostly paid versions and "free, this is totally free, but PLEASE donate via Paypal"?Bagarthach posted:I waited in a line at Computer City at midnight for that. I'm pretty sure I still have it, mine is the blue upgrade CD though (not at home or I'd check.) I also picked this up: Did the plus disc have video files of Buddy Holly by Weezer and the Rob Roy trailer on it? I seem to remember some MS extras disk I had for W95 that included those.
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Dec 21, 2015 04:40
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I seem to remember that now. This too, since I had a Packard Bell. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=18YsgfzfWCQ
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Dec 21, 2015 09:37
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Wasn't the web game "Snowcraft" from about the late 90s? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Docnckr_wbQ I seem to recall a small bit that might have added to its popularity was that character design was similar to the then relatively new South Park, which I think prompted a few people to call it a South Park game. Also, icebox.com Home of all sorts of flash animation that was super hot 16 years ago. I seem to recall it had an additional novelty of some known actors contributing voices for series, but I don't think anything ever really caught on.
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Dec 27, 2015 07:56
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Didn't Rambus RDRAM have a short burst in PC popularity around the late 90s/early 00s until DDR RAM came out? I seem to remember being in a message forum one night when a PC parts store online accidentally priced it at something like $20 a stick and people were buying as much as they could before it was changed back.
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Dec 29, 2015 03:11
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On the subject of Wing Commander, though, from a bit earlier, I remember some computer magazine article about some of the most important PC games of all time and I think they ranked WC having some added importance in that it sort of overnight made people start upgrading their hardware specifically to play it. Would that sort of mean that it maybe helped jumpstart the direction of PC gaming in the early/mid-90s by helping get more people into having better hardware, which games over the next few influential years prior to the launch of the PS1 would have benefited from?
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Dec 29, 2015 05:23
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Packard Bell had a "V' shaped desktop. I think the term that I'm seeing for it is 'Packard Bell corner case', but if you had it facing you none of the drives or anything would actually 'face' you. They'd be veered off in either 45° angle. If you wanted to have one bay of drives facing you, the other bay of drives would be facing 90° away.
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Dec 29, 2015 06:12
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How ATT thought the future would look in the 1993: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TZb0avfQme8 You will, and the company that will bring it to you will likely be your local cable and cell phone providers.
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Dec 29, 2015 23:19
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I like how depressing they considered the future to be, though. Except for the guy who is at the beach, I think literally every other thing just looks murky, dreary, rainsoaked, dark, dim, shadowy, etc. I guess being part of the 1% affords you the luxury of real sunlight.
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Dec 29, 2015 23:45
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It's sort of funny that when flight sims were at probably their highest popularity, the hardware to run them just wasn't there. Now that the hardware can likely do incredible flight sim stuff there's seemingly little interest in them anymore.
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Dec 30, 2015 00:11
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I seem to remember just after 9/11 weren't there some patches to make it impossible to crash into buildings and versions of things like MS Flight Simulator pulled off the shelf? edit: Maybe not, though. JediTalentAgent has a new favorite as of 01:23 on Dec 30, 2015 |
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Dec 30, 2015 01:19
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Mr Music from the Art Institute https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oyT9gT0fs3Q
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Dec 31, 2015 08:09
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I used to have this, but never got around to be able to use it well enough as a kid: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_poX1_we5z0 I remember TrueSpace used to be pretty big, too. I was mentioning it and some other CG programs from the 90s/early 00s to someone in a store one day and they had no idea what any of them were. Oh, and Poser, which found a second life creating fetish porn.
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Dec 31, 2015 08:14
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The Million Dollar Homepage: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Million_Dollar_Homepage This is the sort of idea that should have never worked, but did.
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Jan 2, 2016 07:09
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Do any major movies still have websites that you can download a copy of a trailer to your computer's hard drive in avi, mov or wmv format rather than just streaming it from an embedded Youtube link?
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Jan 3, 2016 08:25
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http://news.yahoo.com/star-trek-cre...WQDBHNlYwNzcg-- Roddenberry's old floppy disks from nearly 30 years ago are finally opened. quote:While these disks contain just 160 kilobytes of data each, they’re likely to be of great interest to fans of the series and of Roddenberry himself. However, it seems that there are currently no plans to share the files at present, as the contents of the disks are still under the possession of the Roddenberry estate. I'm sort of wondering if it's not so much that they were custom PC/custom OS but just some oddball computer that was little-used and obsolete even by the time of his death and the software was saved in a strange format. JediTalentAgent has a new favorite as of 06:54 on Jan 6, 2016 |
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Jan 6, 2016 06:50
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I started a thread a while ago that's still ongoing over in PYF on obsolete and failed tech, also. http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3495621
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Jan 7, 2016 03:25
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MDK for PC in the 90s seemed to run pretty well on even relatively modest systems at the time. I never played more than the demo, though, and have little idea how well it held up over the last 20 years.
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Jan 13, 2016 02:36
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Data Graham posted:Haha. Most dope-rear end logo in the world. And it will always say "Psychosis" to me and my brother Also, they had the best box art, if I remember correctly.
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Jan 15, 2016 07:52
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Troma in the late 90s used to have a site called Tromaville.com that ran in that incarnation for a very short period of time. Separate, I think, from their main site, I think they offered a free e-Mail address (not a huge deal, but sort of interesting at the time), but it only seemed to function for a few weeks before vanishing. I think that or the main Troma site proper is where they tried to create a new Class of Nuke'Em High script that eventually went off the rails and became unfilmable. Premise was that every week or so, readers to the site would submit the next few pages of the script and one would get chosen and tacked onto it and the cycle would continue. They were hoping to get 120 pages, I think, but I believe the project ended well before that and never got made. Probably one reason it didn't ever come to be was logistics in cost/casting. Time rolled forward and that script was eventually tossed aside for other "Class Of..." projects. Also, Sega released a program in the 90s for PC called Web Vengeance. It was a thing that let you vandalize a web page on your home computer with eggs, rocks, bullets, tomatoes. It was sort of fun and if you put a line of code on your page then anyone who was trying to vandalize it would have to deal with a tray trying to block their shots. I think it probably only ran on a few early versions of IE and then after that it probably never worked ever again.
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Jan 18, 2016 18:19
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I've mentioned this in a few threads before, but I might as well mention it again here: MAJESTIC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Majestic_%28video_game%29 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=977-j94VzDI From 2001, it is partially described as "an ARG, the game was played by phone, email, AOL Instant Messenger, BlackBerry messages, fax, and by visiting special websites" I remember articles about the game talking about how the plan seemed insanely cool, a game that followed you into the real world. But a combination of subscription fees and 9/11 probably helped end it very early before it the entire sequence was completed. Today, however, this game could likely be done much more easily as the access to smartphones and wifi and Twitter probably gives it a much larger audience that is more comfortable with being saturated with digital content from all sources. JediTalentAgent has a new favorite as of 09:05 on Jan 20, 2016 |
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Jan 20, 2016 09:02
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Hillary Clintons Thong posted:an even better FMV type game was Prince Interactive Along these lines, too: Peter Gabriel also had a computer program thing, too, in the mid-90s. I think it was called Real World. Todd Rundgren had Todd Rundgren Interactive, which I think was supposed to allow you to have remixes of songs. Billy Idol released a floppy disk (I think) with early copies of one of his 90s CDs called Cyberpunk that had some digital content on it. The Residents released some computer game called Freak Show (I think) and I believe Aerosmith had a very, very early version of something like Rocksmith on computer. Finally, I think Information Society had a release that had a a small computer program in the at the end of the tape that you could play on older tape-drive models of certain computers. There was some other early 80s group that did something similar that I can't remember.
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Jan 20, 2016 19:00
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That picture is of the 1000 HX (and maybe the cat one is the 1000 EX) which were sort of oddballs in the Tandy 1000 line. Unlike most other computers in their line that used somewhat standard design, they required the use of a proprietary upgrade cards which had WAY more options produced by third-parties sold through magazines than by Tandy/Radio Shack itself. Also, the Tandy Color Computer line which still has a following with some folks.
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Jan 22, 2016 22:08
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Waffle! posted:The original creator's copy is probably lost to time, but still a classic: This is one of the first videos of this sort that I ever saw and I think it did a lot to really get people into Halo and the original XBox who probably wouldn't have paid all that much attention to it, otherwise.
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Feb 1, 2016 07:47
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Jerry Cotton posted:There was a game (I'm thinking 80s) where it would delete a character from the diskette every time you died. I don't know what would have happened if you ran out of player characters About 10-12 years ago, someone in the game industry (I want to say Peter Molyneux, but I'm not 100% sure) said something about disliking how people don't read the instructions to a game before they start playing it, leading them to make a lot of bad criticisms and bad playing habits. I don't know if they were serious or not, but whoever it was said something like if they could make a game that you only had a single life in, and once you died, you had to buy it again, they would. The logic being something like that people would be forced to understand how to play the game before they even tried it, they'd spend time reading the manual, understanding the mechanics, paying attention to tutorial levels until you were 100% certain on how to play, etc.
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Feb 13, 2016 07:47
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I was trying to find the quote to see who to attribute it to and have discovered there are games in recent years doing just that. http://kotaku.com/if-you-die-in-this-game-you-can-never-play-again-ever-1690928265 http://steamed.kotaku.com/new-first-person-shooter-will-lock-out-your-steam-accou-1737430269
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Feb 13, 2016 11:26
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Mak0rz posted:I kind of miss the processors that were shaped like video game cartridges Back in the 90s, I seem remember Best Buy selling some computers that had a strange color-coded/boxy upgrade system for them. It was designed I guess as DIY computer systems and the components were more expensive than traditional but they were I think set up for more easy end-user upgrade. I can't find anything on them, now, but I seem to recall a sort of push with the design was that you could replace a lot of hardware components without needing to fully open up the system.
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Feb 16, 2016 22:07
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Years ago there was a lollipop radio you could buy that vibrated the stick/candy on your teeth you'd literally hear music in your head from FM transmissions. It even came with a non-candy paddle so you could still get the effect without needing to have candy resting in your mouth all the time. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CablPKv_9IQ JediTalentAgent has a new favorite as of 22:49 on Feb 20, 2016 |
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Feb 20, 2016 22:43
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I was needing a pre-paid phone card for long distance calling a while back and was really surprised not only by how hard it was to find one, how few there were and the prices of them seemed odd. I know one time I was out of town, no cell phone, and really needed to make a call home and I very nearly just bought a cheap Tracfone because it was going to end up costing me nearly the same as finding a prepaid card, finding a still-working phone booth, losing a LOT of minutes just for the service fee of using a pay phone, etc. edit: I actually was cleaning out an drawer recently and found a promotional phone card from the ET rerelease from about 15 years ago. Yeah, those minutes are expired.
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Feb 26, 2016 07:21
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We lost most of our PC parts shops in our area, but the funny thing is that the ones that stayed open have the least amount of new stuff on their shelves while the ones that closed had good prices and a lot of selection.
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Mar 6, 2016 00:21
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I remember back in the 90s when computer aisles were full of modems. Where do you keep your modems? In the modem aisle. It's right after the scanner aisle.
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Mar 20, 2016 06:33
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I remember getting a modem that was supposed to get a firmware update to make it work with the eventual uniform 56k format, but it never did. I'm thinking it was a 56k Flex.
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Mar 20, 2016 09:19
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Anyone else have vague memories of I think K-mart offering a free/discounted internet service (Bluelight.com, I think)? It was that or another one that was heavily ad-supported to offset costs, and then users figured out how to kill the ads or something. edit: Found an article on the free internet era of the early 00s. http://www.nytimes.com/2001/01/01/business/days-of-plenty-are-over-at-free-internet-services.html JediTalentAgent has a new favorite as of 06:19 on Mar 21, 2016 |
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Mar 21, 2016 06:16
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Disposable digital cameras that you'd hack so you didn't have to go and exchange them/turn them in at the drug store to get your photos developed.
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Mar 22, 2016 07:40
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theultimo posted:It's sad, hatchbacks are still viable but no one makes them anymore I think the Chevy Spark has a hatchback. It's sort of funny, but I remember in the 80s/early 90s when we had an era of really compact cars there were actually dedicated 'compact car only' parking spots at some locations in town. Essentially, areas around lamp posts and stuff that normal cars couldn't be used by traditional cars but fit really well with a Geo Metro.
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Mar 23, 2016 17:39
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Unctuous Cretin posted:I had a Chevy Metro for a while. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V5z2mrJ6CZQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7PYqnYTXsMA We talk about fuel economy today and these things seemed to do 40+ MPG pretty easily according to the ads, but the trade offs were likely lifespan, safety, comfort compared to a modern car.
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Mar 23, 2016 18:07
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I had an idea several years ago was buying up a lot of used books and then putting vending machines in bus stations, train stations, airports that would dispense small paperbacks, baggies with some crayons and small coloring books, etc. The idea being that prior to internet everywhere, people might spend 2-5 bucks for ANYTHING to read on a long flight, trip, etc. at any hour of the day or night, something to entertain the kids for an hour, etc. Nothing ever came of that idea, though.
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Mar 24, 2016 06:21
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It wouldn't have to be 'just books' either. Even in the modern age, you could have updated the stock to reflect more modern needs and tastes. Flash drives, USB cables, emergency sewing kits, prepaid forever stamped envelopes, etc. in addition to just books.
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Mar 24, 2016 07:31
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theultimo posted:PlayStation underground was the poo poo! Hell they even hid demos with codes http://www.gamespot.com/articles/sony-warns-of-major-glitch-in-holiday-2004-demo-disc/1100-6113984/ They even screwed up memory cards, too.
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Apr 3, 2016 20:44
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There was a little thing that came out about 6-7 years ago called a WikiReader. A small handheld thing that could run for hours on AAA batteries with a touchscreen and had millions of Wikipedia articles in it. They seem to no longer be in production, but there was a point that I wanted to get one just to have around as a novelty. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=80fmaBBRhV0
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Apr 8, 2016 06:13
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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. I wish I could find it, but about a few years ago Yahoo had a Pecan Pie recipe in it as a headline article around the holidays. Just post after post in the comment of what a piece of poo poo Pecan Pie this was, not a true pecan pie, how dare they have (ingredient) in this pie, how their mom's recipe was the best in the loving world and this was a crime, F'n Liberals and their pies, etc.
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Apr 11, 2016 19:44
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