Cream-of-Plenty posted:Yeah, I still think it's really surprising. I mean, if anything, schools have consumed more Scantron-style materials since 1997, what with all the emphasis on standardized testing (at least in the United States). Even outside of a school environment, that whole "bubble in" technology is used on a lot of government forms and for various applications, to help eliminate errors. Beyond JediTalentAgent's post, I'm not sure why anybody would think they'd been replaced with anything. They require paper and #2 lead. They are the cheapest, fastest thing available to public schools and government departments. Maybe everybody just remembers them from highschool and college and figures they disappeared with [expensive new technology here] after they graduated? It just seems so ancient. I worked at a university until 2010 and it wasa lot more high tech than my high school. No chalkboards (replaced by rarely-used whiteboards), no lovely CRT tvs and VCRs on stands (projectors hooked up to the prof's computer), etc. People barely used paper since every student brought a laptop and USB drives and hooked up to 50mb/s school wifi.
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# ? May 10, 2013 12:08 |
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# ? Mar 28, 2024 19:53 |
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I've been in school forever (I'm 31 years old). When I was in the class part of grad school a few years ago, it was the first time I ever saw someone take notes with a laptop(/gently caress off online during class). I guess I never moved past writing on PowerPoint printouts (which was way better than traditional note taking).
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# ? May 10, 2013 20:45 |
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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. The B-36 is a cool piece of obsolete technology itself. Development started in 1941 when the US decided that in the event Britain fell, they would need a bomber that could hit Germany from bases on the eastern seaboard. This never happened, and the completed aircraft didn't fly until 1949 but now there was a new threat: a nuclear armed Soviet Union. The B-36 was the only aircraft with the range to reach the Soviet Union and back. It was a truly massive aircraft- 185 feet long, with a 230 foot wingspan, and a 72 000 lb bombload. It was powered by 6 3500-horsepower piston engines, when even these proved to be not enough, a 4350-hp thrust turbine engine option was examined, but it was instead decided to go with four jets modified to run on aviation gasoline, for a total of 10 engines. It still holds the record for largest mass produced piston-engine airplane, largest bomber, and longest wingspan for a production airplane. In the mid-1950s, it was the only aircraft large enough to carry the early H-bombs, which wouldn't fit into the B-47 or pre-Big Belly modified B-52. The final version, the J-3, had 3800-hp engines, were fitted with only tail guns, and could fly up to 50 000 feet. The final recon version, the H, could fly for up to 48 hours continuously. It had its faults, though. Piston engines can only be made so large, and the larger they are, the greater the risk engine fires pose. The B-36 carried some of the largest ever made, and due to the wing design (very thick, smooth and long to produce a lot of lift), had to be installed in a pusher configuration, which exacerbated the risk of fire. It also burned through massive amounts of engine oil. The largely magnesium airframe burned easily too. It was also slow, being a piston-engine airplane that only used its jets to assist takeoff and over the target. It didn't have aerial refueling capabilities, relying on its size for endurance. Fighters were another threat. It initially carried 15 20mm cannons in turrets, but even when directed with radar, were no match for jet fighters. No fighter had the endurance the B-36 had, so the USAF thought: "Why not bring the fighters with them"? There were several plans, including putting 1 or more XF-85 Goblin parasite fighters in the bomb bay (the Goblin was no match for MiGs); TIP-TOW, which consisted of attaching 2 F-84s to the wingtips (turbulence was too strong, and the risk of a crash too high); and FICON, which consisted of a specially modified RB-36 and RF-84, in which the fighter was carried by a trapeze under the bomber. All were failures. Then it was thought to simply fly over interceptors, or so high that by the time they were scrambled it would be useless. To achieve this, Project Featherweight was introduced in 1954. Featherweight 1 involved removing guns, 2, involved removing underutilized crew comfort features, such as bunks and a kitchen. This enabled them to fly much higher, but when the SA-2 missile was introduced by the Soviets, it was reliable to 60 000 feet, and fighters began carrying missiles too. The B-36 was finally phased out in 1959, with the second generation of H-bombs now able to fit in a B-52 and with ICBMs and supersonic jet bombers on the way.
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# ? May 10, 2013 22:52 |
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Whoa! Thanks for the cool history lesson. I love aviation tech/history.
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# ? May 10, 2013 23:38 |
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AntiPseudonym posted: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. Yep, rear projection crt's require regular maintenance to look good. A big issue is convergence and uneven wear. CRT's have a shelf life, they just happen to last way longer than a projection bulb. In Arcade usage though you were putting them under tons of stress. They were left on for 12+ hours a day non stop, often in a hot area, and were getting bumped and shifted a lot. The 12+ hour a day thing meant some times you had one CRT that hit a half life (the point it was half as bright as when it was new) while other elements hadn't so even with color calibration it would be dimmer and a bit off color wise, but of course no one ever calibrated them so you always ended up with wonky color push. People hitting and bumping the machines non stop would also slowly drive the convergence off on the 3 crt elements meaning the three color pixels didn't fully overlap, which made the display fuzzier and gave it weird color halos or even resulted in double vision. They still made CRT projection sets well after DLP hit because they were cheaper, and early DLP had a ton of its own issues. CRT's stayed popular in things like arcades because they were tough. They would take a beating and still work, even if they looked like crap.
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# ? May 10, 2013 23:56 |
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Sunshine89 posted:The B-36 is a cool piece of obsolete technology itself. The B-36 is just enormous. Here's it beside the B-29, which was a pretty huge plane itself in its day: Some years ago I visited Pima Air & Space Museum in Tucson, where they had this sitting out in the work area, waiting to be restored and put on display: I need to visit there again some time when I'm in AZ. Checked Google Maps and looks like it's right out in the center of the yard now if you zoom out, though the close-up shots are older photos with it still out to the side half assembled. They had/have three B-52s too, which are also just huge to walk around/under. Those are neither failed nor obsolete: they've been in service 55 years, and are going to stay there another 30.
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# ? May 11, 2013 00:12 |
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Sunshine89 posted:Awesome B-36 stuff Big planes are the coolest. Here's a 1930s Soviet aircraft, the Kalinin K-7 Just look at it. What an ugly mofo. It definitely counts as failed tech. It had crazy vibration problems starting from the first test flight, and the seventh flight crashed, killing 14 people. Then the project was canceled, and then just to add insult to injury (or vice versa?) the designer was executed for being an enemy of the state.
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# ? May 11, 2013 00:12 |
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Not to mention that during the 90's when the home market was really killing Arcades sales the push for better, faster, and stronger everything put huge strain on the monitors and the people making the games weren't taking that into account because they needed to have the best possible looking thing on the market. So you have poo poo like the X-men game were the left screen is ALWAYS burned out compared to the right screen because of all the crazy strobing effects they crammed into the bosses.
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# ? May 11, 2013 00:18 |
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This might be age talking but especially for X-Men that was part of the charm. As a little kid I thought they were made that way on purpose with one screen slightly different.
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# ? May 11, 2013 00:24 |
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ol qwerty bastard posted:Here's a 1930s Soviet aircraft, the Kalinin K-7
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# ? May 11, 2013 00:32 |
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thedouche posted:I wonder if anyone has made the correct answers to a test come out as a design. Young me would have been freaked out if a perfectly answered two column scantron looked like a Christmas tree or a person with a big butt or something. Community has you covered. By the way, that was a surprisingly difficult clip to find.
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# ? May 11, 2013 04:40 |
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ol qwerty bastard posted:Big planes are the coolest. I'm fully convinced that its sheer ugliness is what destroyed it- matter cannot stand to be arranged like that! As for the B-36, here is a clip from the 1955 Jimmy Stewart movie Strategic Air Command of a B-36 takeoff, using real planes. The actual movie was mainly a recruiting tool for the USAF, SAC in particular, and has some cool shots of planes with a pointless story that is as boring as watching paint dry. As a side note, Jimmy Stewart was a bomber pilot in WW2. Here is a witness' take on an incident in 1957 when a 42 000 lb, 10Mt Mark 17 H-bomb fell out of the bomb bay of a B-36, and, if it had been armed, would have leveled Albuquerque
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# ? May 11, 2013 05:15 |
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Sunshine89 posted:
The big problem was that the engines weren't designed for a pusher configuration. In a normal, traction configuration, where the engines are mounted so that the props are in front of the wings, the intakes are behind the cylinders. So the incoming air has passed over the cylinders, cooling them and warming the air, before being ingested by the carburetors. But in the pusher configuration, it's the air intake that's out in front of the wing, so the carbs are ingesting cold, high-altitude air. So the carbs would slowly ice over, and as their intake got more and more restricted, the fuel/air mixture entering the cylinders would become more and more rich, and eventually there'd be so much unburned fuel leaving the cylinder that the engine exhaust would catch fire. Which is Bad. The Wasp Major engined powered a bunch of aircraft, the engine fire issues were pretty much the result of mounting them in a pusher configuration. Conventional tractor configuration, the engine worked decently. And, yeah, the B-36 was loving enormous. Later configurations had 10 engines, 4 jet engines in addition to the 6 piston-engine props. Here's one flying in formation with a B-52: B-36 is larger, by about another 40' of wingspan. It's huge. Phanatic has a new favorite as of 08:16 on May 11, 2013 |
# ? May 11, 2013 08:11 |
Code Jockey posted:Also I've been to a few stations that play the Sonic "pick up a ring" sound when the register processes an order. It's awesome. Wired remote control car. This technology must have been obsolete when I got it in ~1989. The cable was too short and you had to walk around and follow the car. It was terrible.
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# ? May 11, 2013 09:47 |
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UltimoDragonQuest posted:I've heard the Sonic ring sound. I think it was Virginia. Ughhhhhhh this. I had a really awesome monster truck as a kid... which was wired, meaning I had to chase it everywhere. It only had like a 3-4' cord. Phanatic posted:The big problem was that the engines weren't designed for a pusher configuration. This is totally awesome, thanks for the info. I never really knew how engines iced over/caught fire, but this makes total sense.
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# ? May 11, 2013 09:57 |
Code Jockey posted:Ughhhhhhh this. I had a really awesome monster truck as a kid... which was wired, meaning I had to chase it everywhere. It only had like a 3-4' cord. I had blocked out my RC car phase. They seemed so cool but only ran for about 10 seconds before I flipped it over and 15 minutes before running out of batteries. That didn't stop me from getting half a dozen of them though. This was my favourite I think https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S9FpyEpX4Gc This one predictably disappeared since the closest body of water was the Pacific ocean https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vd1IBdfL3fs
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# ? May 11, 2013 11:24 |
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UltimoDragonQuest posted:I've heard the Sonic ring sound. I think it was Virginia. At least it wasn't one of those cheap-rear end ones that could only turn by going backwards. Stupidest RC car ever.
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# ? May 11, 2013 16:52 |
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I'll confirm another use of the ICQ Uh Oh sounds at a Shell station in Stamford CT. I believe it's also a sound effect used in the Worms games.Krispy Kareem posted:So yeah, you can't totally erase a Scan-Tron answer, but the grading computer is smart enough to tell the difference. As far as detecting cheating, Freakonomics has a chapter on how cheating on standardized tests is detected. Basically, you look for a string of right and wrong answers that occurs in a particular set of questions more often than it should by chance, indicating that teachers quickly changed a bunch of answers but didn't want to make them look too perfect. You can also compare performance between sections, between difficulty levels of questions, and compare them to a normal distribution. Altering students' answers on standardized tests is a lot harder to get away with than you would expect.
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# ? May 11, 2013 19:44 |
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I'm 28 and I don't think I'll ever escape Scantron cards. I'm in university right now and there's always one or two teachers every semester who insist on using it, even if it's only a small portion of the test. On my statistics final, for instance, there were 10 multiple choice questions worth less than 10% of the exam that were answered on a scantron card. I've only had a couple of courses out of 24 where a midterm or final had a significant amount of multiple choice. One of them (Impact of Science and Technology on Society, where most of the final grade was actually locked away in a research paper) had all-multiple choice testing but that we answered them on our laptops in class using a special secure web browser. The others used Scantron cards. And I don't mean knockoffs or generic brand bubble sheets, I mean honest-to-God Scantron branded cards.
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# ? May 11, 2013 22:10 |
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UltimoDragonQuest posted:I've heard the Sonic ring sound. I think it was Virginia. I'm glad I only had one sibling; I wonder what would have happened if we'd needed three of them, besides violence.
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# ? May 11, 2013 22:50 |
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Zemyla posted:Remember how wireless remote controlled cars had two frequencies, 27 MHz and 49 MHz, and you had to get two of them with different frequencies if you had two kids? I think the non-lovely ones had a switch to select the frequency?
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# ? May 11, 2013 23:03 |
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Computer engineers of yesteryear, UNITE! (click for big so you can read the part numbers off the chips!) I just found this in one of my moving boxes. The funny thing is, I do this stuff as a hobby too, in fact I have an 8088 system I built on 5 breadboards in college sitting here that I need to finish debugging, so it might actually be useful shortly!
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# ? May 12, 2013 00:50 |
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My neighbours growing up had one of those box projection TV's, where it was a permanent installation with a massive 50" plastic screen built into the wall and the middle of your living room had a coffee table built in the rear of which had 3 RGB bulbs aimed at the screen to form the picture. Whenever anyone got up to get a drink they had to walk past the table and block the picture. It was in the house when they bought it and that was in 1995 so it was probably state of the art for the owners in the mid to late 80s but I don't remember anything else about it. I wonder now if they ever got it removed or if they or the current owners are still using that massive fuzzy thing. Removing it was a partial remodel of your floor and at least one wall. It lasted till at least the mid 2000s cause its too much trouble. It was a bit like this but bigger and newer with the screen making up a wall and the projection box separated to aim directly at it and integrated into furniture. jojoinnit has a new favorite as of 04:29 on May 12, 2013 |
# ? May 12, 2013 04:15 |
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Living in a zero lot line neighborhood in the mid 80s was interesting. Everyone had a tv remote, a garage door remote, and a cordless phone. The trick was finding a frequency/brand your neighbors didn't have. I remember my parents checking the phone bill closely for phantom long distance calls.
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# ? May 12, 2013 05:07 |
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kastein posted:Computer engineers of yesteryear, UNITE! You've piqued my curiosity on this dohicky. Is the white box a debugging unit that monitors an 8086 that is installed in the empty socket on the external board or is the 8086 inside the white box and the external board an external debug interface?
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# ? May 12, 2013 05:17 |
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Basically, the bottom of that little PCB on the end of the cable has a set of pins that plug into the motherboard where the 40 pin 8088 or 8086 chip normally would. The 40 pin socket on the top is where you plug the actual CPU in. The whole external board is a sort of interposer / "man in the middle" circuit that monitors what is going in between the CPU and the motherboard, sending any important signals back to the main box. The main box can tell it to halt execution, view register contents, change register contents, view memory data, etc for debugging purposes. This sort of thing was entirely supplanted by JTAG-based debug systems sometime over the last 30 years or so - on modern CPUs, at least since around the Pentium era, probably earlier, there has been a special debug interface consisting of anywhere from half a dozen to a dozen or more pins on the processor that connects directly to a whole specialized test/debug infrastructure built into the processor itself. This makes the processor slightly more complicated, but significantly improves debuggability, which is generally worth the costs.
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# ? May 12, 2013 06:27 |
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Whoa, that is seriously neat. I love interesting old hardware like that.
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# ? May 12, 2013 07:27 |
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Zemyla posted:Remember how wireless remote controlled cars had two frequencies, 27 MHz and 49 MHz, and you had to get two of them with different frequencies if you had two kids? I inadvertantly jammed my little brothers remote signal with my rc car back in the day. It locked on full speed and drove straight into a fishpond. He didn't talk to me for like a week. It was awesome.
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# ? May 12, 2013 09:11 |
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Zemyla posted:Remember how wireless remote controlled cars had two frequencies, 27 MHz and 49 MHz, and you had to get two of them with different frequencies if you had two kids?
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# ? May 12, 2013 14:36 |
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KozmoNaut posted:At least it wasn't one of those cheap-rear end ones that could only turn by going backwards. Stupidest RC car ever. Ha ha, beat me. I was going to comment even though it's wired it has at least two sticks (fwd/rev and left/right). Dumber and crappier late 1970s and early 1980s cars didn't even have two sticks in the common modern configuration like that. They had some poo poo like a transmitter with a go forward button (some were in a gun shape with a trigger),and some reverse and turn switch. Lame on the day it was made.
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# ? May 12, 2013 17:39 |
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Arsenic Lupin posted:Ladies and goons, the Alphasmart. Our college just bought 30 of these to support students with learning difficulties, so they still have some use!
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# ? May 12, 2013 22:15 |
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Buggerlugs posted:Our college just bought 30 of these to support students with learning difficulties, so they still have some use! I had a middle schooler in one of my sub classes with one. He had some kind of disability that make writing difficult so he typed on his Alphasmart. Considering how much money is wasted in special ed its cool to find cheap older technology repurposed like that.
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# ? May 12, 2013 22:48 |
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I don't think I've posted about this in this thread, but when the Commodore 64 was the computer we had at home, Dad bought The Incredible Musical Keyboard. He never bought any further software for it, so it couldn't do the awesome music videos shown in the demos, but you could flip over the floppy disk and play a bit. These are the demos that were on the disk: 3001 A Sound Odyssey (program demo) Music Processor (Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)) Kawasaki Rhythm Rocker (spaceships!)
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# ? May 13, 2013 01:10 |
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Zemyla posted:Remember how wireless remote controlled cars had two frequencies, 27 MHz and 49 MHz, and you had to get two of them with different frequencies if you had two kids? My second oldest brother and I had RC cars with the same frequency, we'd always gently caress with each other when the other was playing with their car. I'd see him out in the driveway playing with his car, and since my room was in front of the house, I could sit by my window and control it while being out of sight. All in good fun though
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# ? May 13, 2013 04:22 |
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Oh man I want one of these so bad.
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# ? May 13, 2013 04:54 |
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Phanatic posted:And, yeah, the B-36 was loving enormous. Later configurations had 10 engines, 4 jet engines in addition to the 6 piston-engine props. Here's one flying in formation with a B-52:
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# ? May 13, 2013 06:30 |
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I installed a brand new Scantron machine at work a couple of months ago. The damned thing had a DB9 on it, and I had to fiddle around with a USB to RS232 adapter, then find a driver to make it work in Windows 7. Ugh.
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# ? May 13, 2013 13:55 |
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This thread is fascinating! I find old technology... endearing, for some reason. All these beige and grey boxes that used to be the bleeding edge of technology 30 years ago, now relegated to the role of toys for nerds... Anyway, here's my contribution (though it's probably already been posted): The Nokia 3410. (also, as a bonus: this image is apparently a .gif? which is an obsolete image format in its own right!) You know all these things you read online about these fuckers? That they'd withstand a nuclear war and the survivors will use them to battle large mutated cockroaches with alongside Thinkpads, AK47s, 1950s Chevrolets and Colt 1911s? Well, this one managed to withstand three years of continuous usage (read: Snake and constant abuse) by a 12 year old, including two Scout camps. I'd say these stories are more than true. Son of a bitch was my first phone. Monochromatic, green and black screen. MIDI ringtones (with a program to compose your own! A friend managed to almost reproduce the Godfather theme with this thing once). A bitchin' pixel art program I played around with on long train rides. Six built in games - Snake, that one side scroller (I used WAP to download an extra set of levels once!), an awesome pinball game with two tables, some bean-related game I never really figured out, a Connect Four-ish game that was a lot of fun, and - get this - a 3D platformer. Obviously, it ran at like 10 frames/second and looked loving terrible, but it blew my mind at the time. Also, animated screensavers. And the ability to store a whole 10 text messages, whoa! (this phone might or might not have been responsible for my obsessive SMS deleting habit, which only went away when I got my current phone). Like I said before, this phone was my trusty companion for three years. It got buried in sand (the keys had a bit more crunchy feedback after that), thrown around, wet (though it never fell in water, I did use it during rain without giving any fucks), fell on the floor (and the pavement, once or twice)... What finally did it in was a badly sealed pack of these baby wipes I had laying next to it in my backpack. Must've been some serious chemicals in these, 'cause the screen started flickering after that and never really worked well again. I switched it for a Sony Ericsson K320i, the only new phone I ever owned and a total POS (OK, it wasn't that bad, and survived several more years of abuse, but it was like made of paper compared to the ol' Nokia, and it had a lovely joystick that stopped scrolling up halfway through the time I had it), and the 3410 is probably still kicking around in my stepfather's cache of useless old mobile phones (including a few very bricklike Ericssons). A few later, I was in middle school. A friend managed to snap his lovely thin Samsung in half (an accident ), so he had to use an old phone he had kicking around instead. What was the phone? Obviously, a 3410. And when he started playin' Snake during a break period? Everyone huddled around him to see how he was doing and whether he'd get a new highscore or not. Some things never change.
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# ? May 13, 2013 21:34 |
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A lot of Nokia phones from this age (and a bit older) are still in regular use. Working in (well, in the vicinity of) heavy industry I see a lot of people using them at work, probably due to superior microphones/speakers and reception compared to modern phones and, of course, the fact that if you break one you can probably replace it for free.
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# ? May 13, 2013 22:05 |
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# ? Mar 28, 2024 19:53 |
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Jerry Cotton posted:A lot of Nokia phones from this age (and a bit older) are still in regular use. Working in (well, in the vicinity of) heavy industry I see a lot of people using them at work, probably due to superior microphones/speakers and reception compared to modern phones and, of course, the fact that if you break one you can probably replace it for free. Yeah, but I think they still count as obsolete tech. Good tech, extremely well done and put together, and the fact they're still being used today is a credit to that, but bleeding edge they aren't. Despite that, I'd totally use one if I worked in a setting you're describing. Hell, I probably should buy one off eBay or something and stick it somewhere as a backup phone anyway, it's a good idea to have something reliable laying around. (plus I'd get a deadly melee weapon in case someone breaks into my flat )
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# ? May 13, 2013 22:12 |