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DNova posted:OK I tried to not to sperg out after TomorrowComesToday's post but now I can't help it anymore. I was going to do this too. Old school CRT stuff is really cool Another thing about the image quality. While the lens at the front and the setups narrow viewing angles had a lot to do with poor image quality, a lot of it was also calibration and maintenance. Poor calibration, poor convergence, and one of the CRT's dying all contributed to really poor quality images. Basically most people just didn't know how to or realize they needed to maintain the things to keep them looking good. You used to see them in arcades all the time. The new machines would look great with a gorgeous screen, and 6 months later it would like like a dim, tinted, fringy pile of butt because they were on non stop and no one bothered to do upkeep on the display.
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May 6, 2013 08:08
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Groke posted:This also requires us to mention one of the worst nuclear-age ideas ever, and here I'm talking about one of the very worst ideas from an age full of very bad ideas: Ahhh, the good ol' flying crowbar. Anywhere it flew over would be rendered uninhabitable - and this is by 1950s standards, none of this mincing "oh you should leave because you'll have a 0.01% higher chance of developing cancer at some point" that passes for "uninhabitable" these days.
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May 6, 2013 13:50
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Juriko posted:You used to see them in arcades all the time. The new machines would look great with a gorgeous screen, and 6 months later it would like like a dim, tinted, fringy pile of butt because they were on non stop and no one bothered to do upkeep on the display. Is THAT what caused that? I used to think I just remembered them being better than they were, like looking at N64 games these days.
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May 6, 2013 14:11
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Groke posted:This also requires us to mention one of the worst nuclear-age ideas ever, and here I'm talking about one of the very worst ideas from an age full of very bad ideas: Well, it wasn't a total wash, since the guidance systems from Pluto were eventually refined into modern cruise missile tech.
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May 6, 2013 14:23
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Groke posted:Project Pluto - the nuclear ramjet cruise missile. This is like some ridiculous concept that was too silly to put in a Fallout game or something. Who thought this was a good idea? I suppose it can be attributed to nuclear power being all the rage those days- once an important new technology is discovered there tend to be a lot of dumb ideas that utilize it. Fortunately, they often lead to legitimately useful/non-earth-salting applications.
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May 6, 2013 16:07
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WebDog posted:I was messing around the other day with putting Blood Dragon through an old mac Monitor. Windows 8 is surprisingly scalable. That's not an Apple IIc?
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May 6, 2013 16:36
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Monkey Fracas posted:This is like some ridiculous concept that was too silly to put in a Fallout game or something. Who thought this was a good idea? It would have worked wonderfully at its intended purpose, and so isn't really ridiculous: Nuke us and we send this your way, so Do Not Nuke Us. This thing would have done Mach 3 at ground level, even the shockwave of its passage would have broken things. The reason it wasn't built wasn't because people realized it was a dumb idea, it was because ICBMs turned out to be a lot easier to develop than expected. So stuff like this, and the nuclear-powered B-36 bomber (yes, that's right, a big fuckoff airplane with a nuclear reactor in it, it was actually built and actually flown with an operating nuclear reactor on board, although at that point in the R&D the reactor was just along for the ride, not actually keeping the plane in the air), ended up being canceled because if you did want to salt the earth there were easier ways that also couldn't be defended against.
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May 6, 2013 16:51
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Phanatic posted:It would have worked wonderfully at its intended purpose, and so isn't really ridiculous: Nuke us and we send this your way, so Do Not Nuke Us. This thing would have done Mach 3 at ground level, even the shockwave of its passage would have broken things. Jesus, the Cold War was scary as hell.
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May 6, 2013 16:55
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Groda posted:That's not an Apple IIc? Nope just the monitor hooked up via graphics card and a S-Video to composite cable.
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May 6, 2013 16:56
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WebDog posted:Nope just the monitor hooked up via graphics card and a S-Video to composite cable. I mean the monitor of an Apple IIc, and not a Macintosh monitor.
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May 6, 2013 17:05
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Groda posted:I mean the monitor of an Apple IIc, and not a Macintosh monitor. That is definitely a //c monitor. Stared at one of those for quite a while growing up.
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May 6, 2013 18:27
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While we're on the subject of the Cold War, let's talk first-generation spy satellites. The Corona Program ran from June 1959 to May 1972, with a rapid increase in pace after Francis Gary Powers' U2 spyplane was shot down over the Soviet Union in 1960. The program was hugely successful in reducing the need to violate our adversaries' airspace with manned flights, and even more so in disproving the existence of the "bomber gap," slowing the arms race, and calming public fears surrounding Soviet first strike capability. The program launched 39 satellites, 35 of which carried a total of 148 camera systems, which returned images 161 times. The project achieved several milestones in human spaceflight, including Discoverer 1, the first man-made object placed in a polar orbit Discoverer 2, the first three-axis-stabilized satellite Discoverer 3, the test capsule from which was the first Discoverer 13, the first successful aerial capture of an object returned from orbit Discoverer 14 was launched on August 18, 1960, and returned the first usable images taken from a reconnaissance satellite. And A whole lot of mission failures The Corona Program included 8 generations of satellites designated Key Hole 1 - 4, 4A, 4B, 5, and 6. The 4B looked like this.  Part of the reason it took so long to return a usable image was that this was the era of film, and it came back in a container that looked like this ...  ... and was recovered like this. This is a photo of the recovery of Discoverer 14's film capsule, which contained the first film recovered from space  Simply put, the Corona Program spent 13 years and almost $800,000,000 (adjusted for inflation to 2013) to develop, build, and launch really big disposable cameras into space.
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May 6, 2013 19:05
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Phanatic posted:The reason it wasn't built wasn't because people realized it was a dumb idea, it was because ICBMs turned out to be a lot easier to develop than expected. So stuff like this, and the nuclear-powered B-36 bomber (yes, that's right, a big fuckoff airplane with a nuclear reactor in it, it was actually built and actually flown with an operating nuclear reactor on board, although at that point in the R&D the reactor was just along for the ride, not actually keeping the plane in the air), ended up being canceled because if you did want to salt the earth there were easier ways that also couldn't be defended against. In Richard Feyman's autobiography he mentioned getting a patent on a nuke powered plane. Apparently Los Alamos was gung-ho to get as many nuke patents as possible and his was a plane. Sure enough after the war some company came along and tried to get him to build it. Even though it was at best a theory and at worst several square miles of irradiated wasteland. I'm really not sure how a nuke would power a plane. Would it boil water to create steam to push the turbines like a nuclear power plant?
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May 6, 2013 19:29
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Krispy Kareem posted:Would it boil water to create steam to push the turbines like a nuclear power plant? Basically the reactor would generate heat, and instead of a turbofan burning jet fuel to propel the aircraft forward either the bare core itself (in a direct air cycle setup) or a heat exchanger (in an indirect air cycle setup) would heat air in a nuclear "jet engine", and the rapidly expanding hot air would provide thrust. In theory this isn't much different from the way a turbofan jet engine works now - the majority of its thrust comes from rapidly expanding exhaust gases. Geoj has a new favorite as of 19:54 on May 6, 2013 |
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May 6, 2013 19:47
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IIRC the idea was to use the reactor to heat an intermediary, either liquid metal  or water, and that would use a heat-exchanger to heat up air in the combustion section of the turbines.Wikipedia has an image of the test setup:  Obviously, with the materials science of the 50s and 60s, it was unworkable.
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May 6, 2013 19:50
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It looks like a robot trying to poo poo on my floor
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May 6, 2013 19:52
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MRC48B posted:IIRC the idea was to use the reactor to heat an intermediary, either liquid metal It wasn't the materials science that made it unworkable, actually. It was the much more mundane reason that there was no way in hell to make a nuclear-powered aircraft a viable proposition (under anything other than experimental conditions, at least, because by all accounts the X-6 would've flown just fine) because it's a goddamned flying nuclear reactor. Vincent Van Goatse has a new favorite as of 20:29 on May 6, 2013 |
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May 6, 2013 20:24
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You Are A Elf posted:I'm sorry, I grew up poor and didn't see many big-screen TVs or even an HDTV until I was given my first 720p HDTV in 2006. Until then, I was using used CRTs. I have virtually no idea about the inner workings of large projection TVs, but I really meant the burn-in happened, not that it was a myth. People would just yell at you "DON'T PAUSE IT TOO LONG OR YOU'LL BURN THE IMAGE IN! I didn't grow up poor but we never had any bigscreen tvs, and my first "hdtv" was a store brand (dynex) 720p 32" affair that I got as a hand-me-down in 2011 or so. I sold it when I moved and I still haven't had anything better. I'm sorry you were offended by my use of punctuation, but it was appropriate in context and I even apologized for being pedantic about it. What more can I do? Qotile Swirl posted:Maybe they weren't the most common type, I don't know, but CRT rear-projection HDTVs certainly did exist in that time period. My mother has one and still uses it. Bought it in 2002, I think. I don't believe this at all. If I am wrong, I would really appreciate being set right (model information, etc) because I am always willing to learn. I've never heard of such a thing though. Johnny Aztec posted:I saw an example of something posted in this thread waay back. I was out at a flea market and saw a stack of something in the corner. Seemed like I had seen them before. Found me a stack of Video-discs. "Videodisc" (whoops I'm using quotes again; please don't get offended) is a generic term. Based on your description, you're talking about CEDs, which use a stylus to form an RC circuit with the disc to reproduce the recorded signal. It was a whacky system that never gained widespread adoption. The discs and players are gaining value in collector circles.
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May 6, 2013 21:20
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" all the time, so you listened. I used to take apart old broken CRTs as a kid and found the inner workings fascinating since there were these Radio Shack comics I used to collect and read about how electronics work. 
" When you're a small kid and only see a projection TV like the ones I'm talking about maybe twice in your short childhood life, then try to remember back to how they worked, those miniature CRT screens sure do look like a red, green, and blue stage light v
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Vincent Van Goatse posted:It wasn't the materials science that made it unworkable, actually. It was the much more mundane reason that there was no way in hell to make a nuclear-powered aircraft a viable proposition (under anything other than experimental conditions, at least, because by all accounts the X-6 would've flown just fine) because it's a goddamned flying nuclear reactor. It might have flown just fine once. But since aircraft are weight-critical there was no way they could carry enough shielding to shield the entire reactor, all they could do was to stick a big heavy shield in between the reactor and the crew. Which is bad for the rest of the airplane. It's bad for hydraulic fluid, which the irradiation would have turned to ooze. It would turn the tires into crumbling blocks of rubber. The metal structure of the aircraft would be neutron-activated and embrittled. And how do you service the damned thing? Answer: land, taxi over a specially-excavated pit, and jettison the reactor, and now ground crew can come and hook up a tow line and pull your airplane away from the pit of red-hot radioactive death. There was actually a research facility down outside of Atlanta, containing a completely unshielded 10-megawatt reactor. It was mounted on a hydraulic lift, in a pit, and samples of stuff they wanted to irradiate to see what the radiation did to it would be arrayed near the pit. Raise the reactor, zap the hell out of everything nearby. They did this enough that the surrounding area received more radiation exposure than it would have received via the direct effects and the fallout from a full-scale nuclear war. Grass died, trees dropped their leaves. The reason we stopped spending money figuring out how to get things like that to work was because we figured out how to get ICBMs to work. You can shoot down a bomber, even a nuclear-powered one, shooting down a ballistic missile coming in at Mach 25 is a difficult problem, even today. We didn't know what the easiest way to go was, so we threw money at everything; if building Pluto turned out to be easy, we'd have built fleets of nuclear-ramjet-powered death-spewing cruise missiles. If the nuclear B-36 turned out to be easy, we'd have done that.
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May 6, 2013 21:47
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DNova posted:I don't believe this at all. If I am wrong, I would really appreciate being set right (model information, etc) because I am always willing to learn. I've never heard of such a thing though. 319lbs, I can't imagine this tech went very far. http://www.hometheater.com/content/hitachi-ultravision-65xwx20b-rear-projection-crt-hdtv
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May 6, 2013 21:48
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AlternateAccount posted:319lbs, I can't imagine this tech went very far. http://www.hometheater.com/content/hitachi-ultravision-65xwx20b-rear-projection-crt-hdtv Haha, this is amazing. Thank you.
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May 6, 2013 21:59
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DNova posted:I don't believe this at all. If I am wrong, I would really appreciate being set right (model information, etc) because I am always willing to learn. I've never heard of such a thing though.
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May 6, 2013 22:19
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Qotile Swirl posted:I think this is the one my mom has. It's a beast of a thing, but the picture is very nice so long as you're sitting directly in front of it and the room isn't too bright. I think the difficulty posed by getting it out of the house is a large part of the reason why she still has it. This is really fantastic. I read that whole review and they seem quite impressed by it and it has a lot of cutting-edge features for the time. I would have lost money in a bet that such a thing existed, but now I know better.
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May 6, 2013 22:26
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You guys are all missing the most interesting part of the nuclear plane technology. Check out the "Nuclear Airplane" doco, it's 45min long. Google it. Briefly: The NB-36 reactor was too low powered to fly the aircraft, primarily because of the weight of the heat exchange and the reactor shielding (which was just a barrier between the reactor and cockpit - nothing else was shielded) The TU-95 reactor was plenty powerful enough to fly the aircraft, and it actually did. The russians replaced 2 engines with the 2 reactor engines. They did this by saving weight on a heat exchange (I think it was a direct cycle clean-air-in-radioactive-air-out, but it's been a while since I read up on it), and shielding (pilots are just another replaceable component)
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May 6, 2013 23:22
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DNova posted:This is really fantastic. I read that whole review and they seem quite impressed by it and it has a lot of cutting-edge features for the time. I would have lost money in a bet that such a thing existed, but now I know better. My dad had a larger version of this one. It never had an actual HD source connected to it, but my brother worked at bestbuy and got a deal on it. In his old age he has stopped sperging out about av, we had one of the first commercial laser disc players and VHS before it was the clear winner against beta, don't know what happened.
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May 7, 2013 03:12
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GWBBQ posted:... and was recovered like this. This is a photo of the recovery of Discoverer 14's film capsule, which contained the first film recovered from space The reason it had to be recovered in midair like that is because the package was designed to self-destruct if it wasn't recovered, so that the Soviets couldn't find out what the Americans were spying on. There was a plug in the bottom of the canister made out of salt, and after a few minutes floating in the water the salt plug would dissolve, allowing water in. The film would be ruined and the whole thing would sink to the bottom of the ocean.
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May 7, 2013 03:33
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Sagebrush posted:The reason it had to be recovered in midair like that is because the package was designed to self-destruct if it wasn't recovered, so that the Soviets couldn't find out what the Americans were spying on. There was a plug in the bottom of the canister made out of salt, and after a few minutes floating in the water the salt plug would dissolve, allowing water in. The film would be ruined and the whole thing would sink to the bottom of the ocean. Phanatic posted:There was actually a research facility down outside of Atlanta, containing a completely unshielded 10-megawatt reactor. It was mounted on a hydraulic lift, in a pit, and samples of stuff they wanted to irradiate to see what the radiation did to it would be arrayed near the pit. Raise the reactor, zap the hell out of everything nearby. They did this enough that the surrounding area received more radiation exposure than it would have received via the direct effects and the fallout from a full-scale nuclear war. Grass died, trees dropped their leaves.
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May 7, 2013 03:58
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Sagebrush posted:The reason it had to be recovered in midair like that is because the package was designed to self-destruct if it wasn't recovered, so that the Soviets couldn't find out what the Americans were spying on. There was a plug in the bottom of the canister made out of salt, and after a few minutes floating in the water the salt plug would dissolve, allowing water in. The film would be ruined and the whole thing would sink to the bottom of the ocean. Unless it falls onto Arctic ice and has to be recovered by Rock Hudson. Apparently Ice Station Zebra was sort of based on a real event.
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May 7, 2013 04:11
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Monkey Fracas posted:Jesus, the Cold War was scary as hell. Yah, this was the era that brought us Dr. Strangelove and all. That movie was a satire but you can bet your rear end there were at least done some serious feasibility studies of similar doomsday devices.
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May 7, 2013 12:12
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My family moved to New Zealand out of fear of nuclear war. It was considered inevitable by a lot of people at the time. And to tie it all together, it was easy for my dad to transfer there because he worked for a large computer company most people under 30 probably have never heard of: Wang. It was destroyed by IBM and its wacky new invention called "personal computers."  "At its peak in the 1980s, Wang Laboratories had annual revenues of $3 billion and employed over 33,000 people." - wikipedia
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May 7, 2013 12:29
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GWBBQ posted:
For anyone who's really curious, there's a good deal about it in this book: http://www.amazon.com/Atomic-Awakening-History-Future-Nuclear/dp/B008SLIAJ6
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May 7, 2013 17:36
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leidend posted:And to tie it all together, it was easy for my dad to transfer there because he worked for a large computer company most people under 30 probably have never heard of: Wang. I actually worked for Wang Global for a while back in the 1990s and it was one of the most unpleasant experiences of my career. A far cry from the original Wang Laboratories.
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May 7, 2013 17:44
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Dick Trauma posted:I actually worked for Wang Global for a while back in the 1990s and it was one of the most unpleasant experiences of my career. A far cry from the original Wang Laboratories. Well, that doesn't surprise me coming from you.
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May 7, 2013 17:57
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Phy posted:Well, that doesn't surprise me coming from you. Perhaps he should change his name to Wang Trauma?
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May 7, 2013 20:44
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leidend posted:My family moved to New Zealand out of fear of nuclear war. It was considered inevitable by a lot of people at the time. Martin Prince was certainly a fan. 
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May 8, 2013 09:52
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That's one alarmed-looking cassette drive.
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May 8, 2013 09:59
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You might want to get your Wang checked. It's lumpy and green.
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May 8, 2013 15:03
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Ladies and goons, the Alphasmart.  A tough little device that solves one problem: word-processing on the go. It boots up instantaneously, runs for days on 2 (later 3) AA batteries, and you have 4 lines to type in. You can't get to the Internet. You can't play Minecraft. You can't even obsess about that paragraph you wrote 10 lines ago. All you can do is move forward. I used mine on the train for years before I got my first netbook. You could have precisely 8 files on an Alphasmart, each of which had 12.5 pages. Then you synced them, deleted them, and moved on. I had the bright and shiny Alphasmart Dana, which ran  PalmOS . (note Palm stylus) They're still sold (although I suspect not very often) to schools. I couldn't bear to throw mine away; it's still in my Graveyard of Computing. Just thinking about it gives me a rush of affection. I should find it and give it a spin. In fact, if I ever commute by mass transit again, I may rely on it again: it doesn't let you do anything but write, and that's a good thing. $30 on Ebay. e:okay, okay, fix the blinkenlights Arsenic Lupin has a new favorite as of 20:14 on May 8, 2013 |
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May 8, 2013 18:46
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Arsenic Lupin posted:Ladies and goons, the Alphasmart. Weird, I was just thinking about these the other day. These were the only things that allowed us to do any sort of word processing in middle and high school if the computer lab wasn't available. It's amazing to think that even many public schools nowadays have carts of MacBooks that serve the same purpose. How'd we ever survive?
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May 8, 2013 18:54
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I remember having one of those! IIRC you sent files to your computer by plugging it in and hitting a 'send' button, and it would then essentially act as a keyboard 'typing' out the document very quickly.
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