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One obselete thing I just remembered about PC's was turbo buttons, and displays on the case showing the clockspeed. Remember those?
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Dec 15, 2012 00:38
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I don't recall setting IRQs with jumpers being that bad until plug-and-play cards came about but mixing plug-and-play and non-plug-and-play cards seemed to be a complete nightmare involving trying every possibility for the IRQs.
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Dec 15, 2012 01:03
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wipeout posted:One obselete thing I just remembered about PC's was turbo buttons, and displays on the case showing the clockspeed. Remember those? Man, I remember that. That was the height of coolness at the time.
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Dec 15, 2012 02:03
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DicktheCat posted:Man, I remember that. That was the height of coolness at the time. When I was 8 my family briefly had a computer, already outdated, that had a turbo function. It was the best turbo function I have ever seen solely because to activate it you had to insert a key and turn it like it was on a nuclear submarine or something.
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Dec 15, 2012 02:13
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kastein posted:But but the itanium chips these days have up to 32MB of L3 cache per die... oh. I thought the problem with Itanium is that while it was a really promising idea, nobody could figure out how to make a compiler that would be able to properly take advantage of the instruction parallelism and without that it had worse performance than everything else. It is however my favorite example of diminishing expectations: 
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Dec 15, 2012 03:08
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wipeout posted:One obselete thing I just remembered about PC's was turbo buttons, and displays on the case showing the clockspeed. Remember those? poo poo I finally remember what those were actually for. It's like the opposite of what you'd expect. A lot of old programs weren't speed limited if you had a higher clock speed than was originally intended for the program, so turbo buttons could step down or up your clock speed on your processor (usually between two speeds) so your programs wouldn't gently caress up.
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Dec 15, 2012 03:25
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Kwyndig posted:poo poo I finally remember what those were actually for. It's like the opposite of what you'd expect. A lot of old programs weren't speed limited if you had a higher clock speed than was originally intended for the program, so turbo buttons could step down or up your clock speed on your processor (usually between two speeds) so your programs wouldn't gently caress up. This was necessary for a decent number of DOS games, the most well-known being the first two Wing Commander games, as well as Ultima VII (although Serpent Isle actually had a frame limiter option).
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Dec 15, 2012 03:31
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Natural Joe posted:When I was 8 my family briefly had a computer, already outdated, that had a turbo function. It was the best turbo function I have ever seen solely because to activate it you had to insert a key and turn it like it was on a nuclear submarine or something. Was it a Gateway 2000? our first PC was one of those, and yeah, it required one of those keys. 386, 4 MB or RAM, no CD-ROM or sound card...yet somehow still managed to get X-Wing and TIE Fighter to run...at pretty appalling frame rates, but beggars can't be choosers.
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Dec 15, 2012 04:44
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univbee posted:This was necessary for a decent number of DOS games, the most well-known being the first two Wing Commander games, as well as Ultima VII (although Serpent Isle actually had a frame limiter option). 
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Dec 15, 2012 04:47
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Parallel Paraplegic posted:I thought the problem with Itanium is that while it was a really promising idea, nobody could figure out how to make a compiler that would be able to properly take advantage of the instruction parallelism and without that it had worse performance than everything else. That's also true. I mostly hand-rolled my own code in assembly language as I was on the test/debug team, though we did also use C and C++. I didn't personally deal with the compiler team very much. Itanium was one of those awesome ideas that got shot down by reality and people requesting things they didn't really need very much (see also: full backward compatibility with everything back into the bad old DOS days.) Either way, it was an awesome platform to work with as a computer engineering/embedded systems/low-level software nerd and it changed how I view microprocessors in a fairly significant way. I really wish I'd gotten a chance to work with PA-RISC, another very best of obsolete technologies, but it was fully obsolete by the time I was anywhere near done with school. 3-operand instructions 
kastein has a new favorite as of 06:39 on Dec 15, 2012 |
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Dec 15, 2012 06:35
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Kwyndig posted:poo poo I finally remember what those were actually for. It's like the opposite of what you'd expect. A lot of old programs weren't speed limited if you had a higher clock speed than was originally intended for the program, so turbo buttons could step down or up your clock speed on your processor (usually between two speeds) so your programs wouldn't gently caress up. Sometimes it did that. Sometimes it would turn off the processor cache, or the copro if there was one. But yeah, Turbo "on" means the computer's working normally, Turbo off means it's crippled.
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Dec 15, 2012 06:46
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univbee posted:This was necessary for a decent number of DOS games. Leisure Suit Larry 3 was infamous for having an unintended bug where part of the game had you have to use exercise equipment and the amount of reps you did was tied into the computer's clock speed. Back in 1989 at 16mhz it amounted to around 21 reps on each of the four machines. Leap ahead to the Pentium years and that number started to get very insane. A 233 had you have to press up and down 510 times per machine.
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Dec 15, 2012 06:48
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Kwyndig posted:poo poo I finally remember what those were actually for. It's like the opposite of what you'd expect. A lot of old programs weren't speed limited if you had a higher clock speed than was originally intended for the program, so turbo buttons could step down or up your clock speed on your processor (usually between two speeds) so your programs wouldn't gently caress up. The PC running the horribly ancient security system at work has a turbo button that I have to force myself not to press multiple times a day. Now I know not to touch it. If that fucker dies we'll need a time machine to replace it. 4:20 back up with 3.5" floppies erryday
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Dec 15, 2012 06:58
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Back in the 90's my dad and I went to this computer show (THE MARKET PRO COMPUTER SHOW AND SAAAAAALE, as the loud-voiced announcer on the TV described it). There was this old used parts dealer there who sold all sorts of assorted bits. The best part was, at the end of the show he'd always just start giving everything away because he didn't want to haul it back home. My dad picked up this big tall beige server case which he still uses as his main computer case to this day. It has totally modern hardware inside, but the case still looks like its straight out of 1995. Plus he loves lots of useless drives and has tons of old media - the thing has a Zip drive, a 5.25" floppy drive, a 3.5in floppy drive, and a multi card reader that can read every kind of memory card we've ever owned, all the way back to the giant absurd ones in our first digital camera. He also has another computer that has both a turbo button and that little LCD screen that shows the clock speed. He managed to get the screen to work with a fairly modern motherboard (like circa-2004-2006) and now it's just pegged at 99 all the time. He loves unnecessary displays though, so he hasn't disabled it. Also it's hella fun to push the turbo button, especially in front of friends who don't know what it is 
Shame Boy has a new favorite as of 07:15 on Dec 15, 2012 |
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Dec 15, 2012 07:13
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Zip disks... absolutely unbreakable, at least until you dare to put them in a Zip drive 
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Dec 15, 2012 07:19
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DrBouvenstein posted:386, 4 MB or RAM, no CD-ROM or sound card...yet somehow still managed to get X-Wing and TIE Fighter to run...at pretty appalling frame rates, but beggars can't be choosers. I can still remember riding my bike across town with a friend to borrow X-wing on floppy from another friend of ours. The "I swear I did not just borrow this from a friend" EULA has hilarious.
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Dec 15, 2012 07:54
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SG-83 posted:Playing WC2 on my Pentium 90 was...an experience. I remember playing Quake 2 on an old rear end Acer Pentium 100Mhz box back in the mid-90s, all of 4MB of EDO RAM and no dedicated video card. I think I played it in a 320x240 window because anything higher res than that ran literally like a slideshow
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Dec 15, 2012 08:16
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All you people complaining about running games on a 90MHz machine should have some idea what it was like rendering 3D animations on a 7MHz Amiga. As in loving slow. I paid over $2000 for a 33MHz expansion. Woo.
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Dec 15, 2012 09:15
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I paid about $2000 for my Pentium 200 upgrade when I did it. I paid extra so I could get MMX. Welp. 
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Dec 15, 2012 09:27
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Mine was trying to get Jedi Knight running on an 486. LOWEST resolution AND minimised screen estate. I was basically fighting blurry blobby pixels at something like 8 frames a second. I remember once cranking the resolution up to something high and marvelling at the slideshow it produced.
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Dec 15, 2012 09:29
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mystes posted:I don't recall setting IRQs with jumpers being that bad until plug-and-play cards came about but mixing plug-and-play and non-plug-and-play cards seemed to be a complete nightmare involving trying every possibility for the IRQs. As for running games on inadequate hardware: Stunts, on a 4.77MHz 8086. I don't know if that actually reached framerates above 1 fps.
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Dec 15, 2012 13:55
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kastein posted:Zip disks... absolutely unbreakable, at least until you dare to put them in a Zip drive I am an absolute Zip disk hoarder because of these machines:  I was really hoping Zips would go away eventually, but then the new model came out a few years ago, and Zip disks are still the only way to get files in or out without real-time recording them  Im amazed that someone is still making them drives. At least the new ones take 250mb disks. I still occasionally see digicarts with Bernoulli drives.
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Dec 15, 2012 21:44
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eddiewalker posted:I am an absolute Zip disk hoarder because of these machines: I was about to quote that first image and say "Wait, that looks like a very modern piece of equipment" and then I finished your post and just... 
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Dec 15, 2012 22:14
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Storage medium aside, isn't a dedicated rackmount appliance just for mixing in sound effects an obsolete technology?
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Dec 15, 2012 22:33
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Inspector_71 posted:I was about to quote that first image and say "Wait, that looks like a very modern piece of equipment" and then I finished your post and just... I am glad it is not just me who had a complete 'what the f...?' moment. Seriously, ZIP instead of USB? We're talking about more than a decade since that made sense.
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Dec 15, 2012 23:14
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spog posted:I am glad it is not just me who had a complete 'what the f...?' moment.
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Dec 16, 2012 00:06
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El Estrago Bonito posted:This was actually much better than the small 5th gens. Basically the 30 gig 5th gen had an issue where the battery was too close to the hard drive, so the heat from the battery would slowly corrupt the drive over the course of about two years. Its why they have such bad skipping and pausing issues as well. The 60 and 80, and later the Classic got rid of this problem but those 30 gig 5ths were some real lovely ipods. I may have just gotten lucky, but my 30gb 5th gen. was dead nuts reliable for 6 years, and probably is still going strong somewhere (  thieves). I didn't baby it either, it got the poo poo beat out of it and was used at least 4 hours a day.wipeout posted:A friend bought a cheap PC Chips 486 motherboard back in the 90's, and the onboard cache ram was fake, empty, plastic "chips". The BIOS must have lied about them being present. The general consensus in this thread seems to be that PC Chips is a shifty, lovely company, something which is not surprising at all. But once again I must say, the PC Chips mobo I have in my old legacy desktop (Socket A wooo!) has been a really solid platform for me for almost 8 years now.
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Dec 16, 2012 00:29
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 Remember these things? They were big on Ford vehicles 10-15 years ago but eventually stopped showing up. Maybe they were vulnerable to L337 car h4x0rz, I don't know. My car has one and I love it. I intentionally lock my keys in my car all the time when I'm going for a run or doing something where I don't want stuff bouncing around in my pockets.
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Dec 16, 2012 00:41
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Skeleton Ape posted:
They were. 3129 keypresses will unlock any car equipped with it.
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Dec 16, 2012 01:24
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It stops responding after 7 wrong guesses. I'm pretty sure newer fords still have them, but they're a little better hidden. on the new explorer it's hidden in the b-pillar
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Dec 16, 2012 01:41
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Powershift posted:It stops responding after 7 wrong guesses. So, anybody can lock you out of your car.
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Dec 16, 2012 01:46
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Base Emitter posted:So, anybody can lock you out of your car. I'm sure it does not stop responding forever.
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Dec 16, 2012 01:49
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Skeleton Ape posted:
Ford still offers them as an option on pretty much anything in their lineup. Considering its little more than a wireless entry remote that's two-side taped onto the door that works via a combination system it doesn't take much to put it on a car, and I'm sure the device costs less than half of what the option costs for a new car. FWIW I would assume the average car thief would break a window before spending 20 minutes loving around with the pad. Or move on to something easier to break into. eddiewalker posted:I am an absolute Zip disk hoarder because of these machines: If I'm reading this correctly, this is a device that pumps audio into a television broadcast? In which case it probably stands to reason that studios using them paid for licensed sound clips and would rather continue to use obsolete storage media rather than paying for new licensed content on a modern storage medium...
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Dec 16, 2012 01:49
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Geoj posted:If I'm reading this correctly, this is a device that pumps audio into a television broadcast? In which case it probably stands to reason that studios using them paid for licensed sound clips and would rather continue to use obsolete storage media rather than paying for new licensed content on a modern storage medium... They're huge in the live sports television where the same theme music in lots of different lengths and a few highlight cuts play a lot. The producer either hands me a zip disk with his show music to load onto the harddrive, or a CD, which I also load, but have to do it by playing each track and manually recording it. The digicart plays instantly and you can use a PS/2 keyboard as a bunch of assignable hotkeys. There are software alternatives now like SpotOn, but that'd involve another dedicated computer, so adoption is glacial. Licensing isn't an issue, because when you license music for broadcast, you're paying for the logged usage, not the medium its stored on.
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Dec 16, 2012 04:12
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Base Emitter posted:So, anybody can lock you out of your car. If that is the only one of the 3-4 unlocking methods available you choose to leave accessible to yourself then yes, at least temporarily.
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Dec 16, 2012 04:25
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eddiewalker posted:Licensing isn't an issue, because when you license music for broadcast, you're paying for the logged usage, not the medium its stored on. In that case, more than likely people get used to something and never want to let it go - "why do I need this new-fangled USB thing when my ZIP disks still work?"
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Dec 16, 2012 05:43
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Geoj posted:In that case, more than likely people get used to something and never want to let it go - "why do I need this new-fangled USB thing when my ZIP disks still work?" Either that or they made a really bad deal with / are owned by a company that also owns a manufacturer that they can't get out of. "Zip disks are going to be the future! OF COURSE I'll sign on to only ever use them in our products forever!"
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Dec 16, 2012 07:07
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Zip disks have one advantage over both USB sticks and SD memory I can think of...they're physically bigger. As in, you could clearly label zip disks and find the one you need much easier then you could say, a micro SD. Obviously there are better ways to do this nowadays (ie hard drives, or just a big USB stick with everything you want on it already), but I could see that being a convenience factor. I don't know though, I'm just pulling that out of my rear end. is that a factor, eddiewalker?
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Dec 16, 2012 11:02
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El Estrago Bonito posted:This was actually much better than the small 5th gens. Basically the 30 gig 5th gen had an issue where the battery was too close to the hard drive, so the heat from the battery would slowly corrupt the drive over the course of about two years. Its why they have such bad skipping and pausing issues as well. The 60 and 80, and later the Classic got rid of this problem but those 30 gig 5ths were some real lovely ipods. Is that what the problem was? The apple guy I used to have replace my iPods wasn't very clear but he told me never to run with the drat thing. Oh man, I think mine died at least 5 times. Worst was when the screen cracked because it slipped between some books in my bag, and the LCD stuff started leaking out and making pretty colours. The tech looked at it, then at me, and then mournfully told me he'd get a replacement for it.
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Dec 16, 2012 13:42
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Light Gun Man posted:Zip disks have one advantage over both USB sticks and SD memory I can think of...they're physically bigger. As in, you could clearly label zip disks and find the one you need much easier then you could say, a micro SD. Obviously there are better ways to do this nowadays (ie hard drives, or just a big USB stick with everything you want on it already), but I could see that being a convenience factor. I was thinking that too. Then I remembered that I had never seen a disk of any kind with anything meaningful handwritten written on the label. except the occasional "3/4" on a single, solitary disk.
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Dec 16, 2012 13:55
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