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Ron Burgundy
Dec 24, 2005
This burrito is delicious, but it is filling.

DrBouvenstein posted:

No one ever remembers Scour. :sigh:

Audiogalaxy didn't make the list either.

kastein posted:

The DC++ network at my school was constantly being shut down because the netops group was a bunch of nazis.

The DC++ network was so prolific at my college that it was bringing the rest of the network to a crawl so they had to nuke it.

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Perry Normal
Jul 23, 2010

Humans disgust me. Vile creatures.

Ron Burgundy posted:

Audiogalaxy didn't make the list either.

Was going to mention this one. Audiogalaxy, for whatever reason, had so much more obscure stuff on it than other ones. I remember getting so much indie rock and rare live versions of songs from there.

Pham Nuwen
Oct 30, 2010



GWBBQ posted:

We had a DC++ network, too. Same deal with on-campus addresses and bandwidth only, and the IT department looked the other way because keeping it on campus meant no lawsuits or infringement notices.

DC network. DC++ is the Windows application to access DC hubs, you ignorant slut.

Yeah we had a DC network too. 70+TB and when it was taken down, we saturated all the outgoing links due to bittorrent traffic. Ah, RIT.

BogDew
Jun 14, 2006

E:\FILES>quickfli clown.fli
My first burn-stuff-off-Napster-to-CD was done via an actual physical CD recorder receiving the output from my PC.

Meaning I had to play everything realtime and manually cue the separations between the tracks.
I wouldn't quite call it obsolete as you can still use this for live band recordings (which is what it was meant for).

Light Gun Man
Oct 17, 2009

toEjaM iS oN
vaCatioN




Lipstick Apathy
I remember using Kazaa and Morpheus at the same time. Sometimes you would try to launch one, and the other would launch.

I still have some napster mp3s around.

Memento
Aug 25, 2009


Bleak Gremlin

Ron Burgundy posted:

All the Silent Steel discs inserted at the same time :getin:

But not all the Wing Commander III discs :smith:

Twitch
Apr 15, 2003

by Fluffdaddy
I used to make really obnoxious "techno remixes" then give them misleading names and share them on Napster. It was funny every time.

Phanatic
Mar 13, 2007

Please don't forget that I am an extremely racist idiot who also has terrible opinions about the Culture series.

Datasmurf posted:

Episodes? As far as I remember, Napster was only for music.


Ah, Napster.

My school had a wholly inadequate internet connection, it was a single T1 line for something like 2000 students, so that's 1.5Mbps. During the week it was bad enough, but this was a school where about 90% of the student body went home on weekends, and they'd leave their computers running, with their Napster apps running, with their entire music connections shared. So network performance on the weekends went to *poo poo* as the upstream bandwidth was saturated with all these music uploads.

My three roommates were all CS majors and they'd had enough of this poo poo. There was some app my friend would run on his Mac which would give you a nice display showing the campus network topography and you could see at a glance which dorms were grabbing all the bandwidth. The network admins were uniformly pretty dull, so all the Linksys routers and switches in all the dorms still had the manufacturer default passwords. So they'd just look at see, oh, Dorm A, you're screwing it up for everybody, we're rebooting your router and dropping all your Napster connections. Oh, campus radio station, you're actually trying to do high-quality streaming audio of your crappy DJ spinning Everlast and Nickelback and Puddle of Mudd? No, sorry, that's not going to work, your router's rebooting.

Eventually the school just blocked Napster's default ports (1122 and 2255, I think?) and everyone switched to Gnutella. Remember Gnutella?

Monkey Fracas
Sep 11, 2010

...but then you get to the end and a gorilla starts throwing barrels at you!
Grimey Drawer

Twitch posted:

I used to make really obnoxious "techno remixes" then give them misleading names and share them on Napster. It was funny every time.

You! :argh:

Elim Garak
Aug 5, 2010

Datasmurf posted:

Episodes? As far as I remember, Napster was only for music.
Lots of other stuff for series and cp - if that is your thing - though.

I was the king of our school for having a 2x CD burner and a 128 kbps cable modem, I downloaded and burned out so many songs for people at my school, and earned a fat load of money on it too. Ah, those were the days …

I'm pretty sure I had a pirated from the theater copy of the South Park Movie I got off napster, although it is possible I got it from the school's network. But I think it was napster.

Retrograde
Jan 22, 2007

Strange game-- the only winning move is not to play.
I found this former monster near the dumpster at work yesterday, gotta fire it up and see if it still works. I think there's a version of linux that runs on SPARC i could potentially put on it?

Code Jockey
Jan 24, 2006

69420 basic bytes free

Retrograde posted:

I found this former monster near the dumpster at work yesterday, gotta fire it up and see if it still works. I think there's a version of linux that runs on SPARC i could potentially put on it?



That's so cool. :allears: I love old Sun boxes. Solaris would work right? I've got a pair of Sun 1U rackmounts [I forget what model] that I keep meaning to throw Solaris on.

My dream is to acquire some SGI gear. I used to play around on that, a friend of mine's dad was head of the CS department at the local big private college [read: money out the yin yang] and they had some awesome stuff. Playing Doom on an SGI screaming fast, when my home PC could barely do it, was cool.

Pham Nuwen
Oct 30, 2010



Retrograde posted:

I found this former monster near the dumpster at work yesterday, gotta fire it up and see if it still works. I think there's a version of linux that runs on SPARC i could potentially put on it?



Use NetBSD. Linux and Solaris will be dog slow. I speak from experience.

Rambling Robot
Sep 13, 2011
Duggar Fan Club Superstar #1 LOL

Elim Garak posted:

I'm pretty sure I had a pirated from the theater copy of the South Park Movie I got off napster, although it is possible I got it from the school's network. But I think it was napster.

Perhaps you got it on Napster, and the used Wrapster?

Really old school "news":

http://news.cnet.com/2100-1023-238290.html

Rambling Robot
Sep 13, 2011
Duggar Fan Club Superstar #1 LOL

Perry Normal posted:

Was going to mention this one. Audiogalaxy, for whatever reason, had so much more obscure stuff on it than other ones. I remember getting so much indie rock and rare live versions of songs from there.

Audiogalaxy was amazing. Found some CDRs from 2002 filled with mp3s the other day. So much stuff that is probably lost or very hard to find now.

Elim Garak
Aug 5, 2010

Rambling Robot posted:

Perhaps you got it on Napster, and the used Wrapster?

Really old school "news":

http://news.cnet.com/2100-1023-238290.html

No, I don't remember ever installing wrapster, and March of 2000 seems a little late, I think I had the movie by the end of the fall '99 semester. It must have been the school's network after all. This is only so memorable because it was the first full movie I pirated and I was pretty stoked by it all.

DrBouvenstein
Feb 28, 2007

I think I'm a doctor, but that doesn't make me a doctor. This fancy avatar does.
Oh yeah, we had a DC service at my school...at least, I think that's what it was. Some guy coded a indexing/search engine accessed from a website, and it would give you results for all the computers on the network that had the files you were looking for.

Of course, since, like, 90% of the computers were laptops, there was a decent chance whoever was sharing the file you wanted might either not be online since the last time indexing occurred, or could go offline at any moment (it was early 2000's, and only 1 dorm and a few other buildings on campus had wireless, and most laptops didn't actually have built-in wireless cards.)

DrBouvenstein has a new favorite as of 17:59 on Jun 27, 2013

Geoj
May 28, 2008

BITTER POOR PERSON

Phanatic posted:

My school had a wholly inadequate internet connection, it was a single T1 line for something like 2000 students, so that's 1.5Mbps. During the week it was bad enough, but this was a school where about 90% of the student body went home on weekends, and they'd leave their computers running, with their Napster apps running, with their entire music connections shared. So network performance on the weekends went to *poo poo* as the upstream bandwidth was saturated with all these music uploads.

That's loving terrible. Was this some technophobic private christian school or something? My highschool around that same time had an OC-3...although granted they also shared the connection with all of the other schools in the district via fiber.

mystes
May 31, 2006

Perry Normal posted:

Was going to mention this one. Audiogalaxy, for whatever reason, had so much more obscure stuff on it than other ones. I remember getting so much indie rock and rare live versions of songs from there.
Yeah, Audiogalaxy was great. I would have totally paid for a service that was as good for discovering new music as it was. The situation has gotten better with legal streaming services and things like Pandora but none of the current options have same breadth of weird obscure stuff.

eddiewalker
Apr 28, 2004

Arrrr ye landlubber
I rode to ride my bike to my aunt and uncles house (where there was a cable modem) with a box of zip100s, one of which contained mIRC to download files from xdcc bots, and a copy of Winzip to split those downloads into 100mb chunks.

I'm just now realizing how long that probably took to wait for a download slot, download, split, and write to zip disks. They definitely thought I was a weird kid.

ol qwerty bastard
Dec 13, 2005

If you want something done, do it yourself!
It's weird seeing stuff about DC++ in the "obsolete technology" thread since I used it a lot (and was even an admin on my school's DC network) up until pretty recently. But everyone just torrents or streams their shows and movies now anyway.

To contribute to the thread: I took a trip to London recently and I'm a museum buff so I got to see plenty of old outdated (but freakin' sweet) technology.

Here's John Harrison's first longitude clock, H1. He had to design and build three more of these before they were accurate enough to use for navigation per the conditions of the prize he was competing for, and even then the prize board had to basically be bitched out by the king himself in order to grudgingly award him the money. He was so old by the time he finally got it that he died just a few years later.

I have pictures of H2, H3, and H4 as well, but IMO this one looks the coolest:

mystes
May 31, 2006

ol qwerty bastard posted:

It's weird seeing stuff about DC++ in the "obsolete technology" thread since I used it a lot (and was even an admin on my school's DC network) up until pretty recently. But everyone just torrents or streams their shows and movies now anyway.
People really still use direct connect? I guess it would be simpler to administrate than other things and the fact that most people have forgotten about it means that your school would be less likely to look for it, but personally I haven't used it since the short-lived i2hub was shut down in 2005 and I want to say that direct connect already seemed pretty obsolete then.

Honestly, those early file sharing services were so bad I suspect that many people wouldn't have bothered with them if it was actually possible to purchase digital copies of music and movies at that time.

mystes has a new favorite as of 18:18 on Jun 27, 2013

ol qwerty bastard
Dec 13, 2005

If you want something done, do it yourself!
U of T was always pretty strict about torrents and DDL sites and employed a lot of traffic shaping and outright blocked some stuff IIRC. Whereas they kind of tacitly approved of the hub so long as we weren't too obvious about it, because it kept internet traffic down.

But you're not wrong; it probably hit its peak number of users in 2005/2006 and peak sharesize in 2007/2008 and has been downhill ever since.

Desert Bus
May 9, 2004

Take 1 tablet by mouth daily.

Twitch posted:

I used to make really obnoxious "techno remixes" then give them misleading names and share them on Napster. It was funny every time.

I really enjoyed renaming "Bastard of Christ" by Deicide to the names of really popular pop songs. I always kind of wished I was around when some kid thought they were going to listen to Britney Spears or whatever and encountered Satanic death metal instead.

Johnny Aztec
Jan 30, 2005

by Hand Knit

Phanatic posted:

Ah, Napster.

My school had a wholly inadequate internet connection, it was a single T1 line for something like 2000 students, so that's 1.5Mbps

Pfft, I'm on a 1.5Mbps line right now IYOL 2013. I live in a city of about 80K,and I get 1.5Mbps. My friend lives in a town about an hour away of about 300 people, and brings down TERABYTES of data across netflix every month. Life is cruel. However, he does have latency issues in MMOs, and mine is usually rock solid, so eh toss up.

mystes
May 31, 2006

Johnny Aztec posted:

Pfft, I'm on a 1.5Mbps line right now IYOL 2013. I live in a city of about 80K,and I get 1.5Mbps. My friend lives in a town about an hour away of about 300 people, and brings down TERABYTES of data across netflix every month. Life is cruel. However, he does have latency issues in MMOs, and mine is usually rock solid, so eh toss up.
1.5Mbps for the entire school of 2000 people.

Dick Trauma
Nov 30, 2007

God damn it, you've got to be kind.

ol qwerty bastard posted:

Here's John Harrison's first longitude clock, H1.

Anyone interested in this device or this sort of early technology needs to watch Longitude, a quiet but excellent movie about Harrison's work. It's got Jeremy Irons and Michael Gambon and lots of lovely views of Harrison's chronometers. Harrison's persistence and the pig-headedness of the scientific community of the day is remarkable. It also added the phrase "powder of sympathy" to my vocabulary. You need look no farther for an example of 17th century scientific weirdness.

Dalrain
Nov 13, 2008

Experience joy,
Experience waffle,
Today.
Did someone say American steam turbine locomotive? :D The S2 would melt it's own firebox while attempting to build pressure for a start.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRR_S2

Phanatic
Mar 13, 2007

Please don't forget that I am an extremely racist idiot who also has terrible opinions about the Culture series.

Geoj posted:

That's loving terrible. Was this some technophobic private christian school or something?

No, it was in Wilkes-Barre PA. So culturally just as much of a backwater but with a lot more drinking and pre-marital sex.

Dr. Dos
Aug 5, 2005

YAAAAAAAY!

Phanatic posted:

No, it was in Wilkes-Barre PA. So culturally just as much of a backwater but with a lot more drinking and pre-marital sex.

Hahaha I lived in Wilkes-Barre until last month. I swear it is impossible to get decent internet there.

Johnny Aztec
Jan 30, 2005

by Hand Knit

mystes posted:

1.5Mbps for the entire school of 2000 people.

Oh, whoops. I read that as more of "1.5Mbps for each person". Still, 1.5Mbps in this day and age is pretty obsolete. ...or it should be.

Ogg the clever
Mar 26, 2010

Johnny Aztec posted:

Oh, whoops. I read that as more of "1.5Mbps for each person". Still, 1.5Mbps in this day and age is pretty obsolete. ...or it should be.

Tell me about it. Round here where I live in the UK, we didn't get 'broadband' until 2004, and then we could only get around 1.2Mbps on a good day. 2008 came around and we finally got upgraded to 3Mbps.

2 weeks ago I had 76Mbps down/20Mbps up fibre installed, so it's nice for once to actually have an above average connection.

DesperateDan
Dec 10, 2005

Where's my cow?

Is that my cow?

No it isn't, but it still tramples my bloody lavender.
This thread makes me really sad, because my damned parents threw out or donated all my old tech.


I first cut my teeth in basic with a



motherfucking sinclair spectrum 16K. This bad boy had a 48K RAM PACK that, at the age of 5 I had no idea what it did, but I did know that if I knocked it ever so slightly out of place, "Horace goes skiing" or "predator" would bugger up, and I would have to spend another 15 minutes waiting for the loving things to load again. Through a tape drive, with some pirated memorex tapes in it.

after that, the mighty, mighty



Amstrad 8256. My dad upgraded this pimp rear end mother to have two, count them, two 3 inch disc drives. The amstrad used some weird proprietary 3 inch wide discs that messed up if you even thought about them funny. It came with a dot matrix printer, the sound of which gave children nightmares and gave chills to adults. I spent a lot of time playing a weird adventure game, or using an incredibly basic paint program to create masterpieces the printer would do no merit to.

We then got some shiny HP laser printer, which prompted my dad to buy



a Research Machines 486. This boasted 4mb of RAM and windows 3.11 for workgroups. I hosed it up about 3 times prompting a reinstall, including attempts at getting the onboard modem to respond to me whistling really hard at it and editing command files in DOS. I got a pirated version of DOOM which had a virus and caused the final reinstall which ended up with me getting a master system and use of a lovely 14" TV (had to plug that fucker in every time I used it) which shut me up for a bit, and stopped me wrecking my dad's word processor on a monthly basis. It eventually got a 28.8Kbps modem that was used only for faxes.

Around the time Independence Day hit the cinemas, the building society that held my childhood savings sold its stocks or something happened that meant I was suddenly in possession of a sizeable wedge of cash.

I wanted a machine that would make my friends jealous. A machine with the chip from intel with the advert with people singing to "play that funky music white boy".

A "Tiny" PLC Pentium 166MMX with 16MB of RAM and a 2.5GB hard drive. At the time, this was the fastest poo poo available. I can't get a pic because Tiny PC always brings up small form factor PC's. It was a beige box that came with a massive pack of CD-Rom's with things like encarta and microsoft works. It also came with mechwarrior 2 and POD racing. I picked up a Sidewinder 3D Pro, and got into gaming.

A year or so later, I dropped in a 56K modem, a 3DFX passthrough card and another 16MB of RAM. While reading the motherboard manual, I came across a jumper switch that was labelled something like clock speed modifier. I switched that fucker around and suddenly my P166MMX with 16MB was a P233MMX with 32mb and a 3DFX card. Tomb Raider II was suddenly very pretty, and C&C Red Alert ran like hot poo poo, even with a buddy connected with a LAN cable and an edited .ini file allowing nuclear attack dogs. It was 1999 and the internet was a very, very different place. I ran up massive bills spending ages getting short porno clips, and then got suspended from school for selling 3.5 inch disks with zips packed with them (I made some loving bank doing so, and moved onto a cigarette business afterwards)

That lasted a few years before I saved up for an AMD chip that ran at an amazing 1GHZ, which required a new case and PSU e.t.c picked up from a computer fair where I bought CD-ROMs full of 80's style porn pictures and since then computers have all been much the same to me.

Memories :(

Farecoal
Oct 15, 2011

There he go
Here's a horribly outdated visually but still very cool website that has a bunch of outdated/weird technologies:

http://www.douglas-self.com/MUSEUM/museum.htm

http://www.douglas-self.com/MUSEUM/LOCOLOCO/locoloco.htm

Farecoal has a new favorite as of 00:40 on Jun 28, 2013

7734
Feb 8, 2008
Saw this in my local Craiglist:
http://olympic.craigslist.org/sys/3875337903.html
IBM Personal Computer from 1983, with a dot matrix printer. Might be fun to hit up eBay and get Zork on 5.25".
I was all of 2 years old when this machine was released, so I cut my teeth on later versions of DOS. At the very least it would make a cool functioning antique to impress people with. Or if I could find ink for the printer, turn it into a pro manifesto writing computer.

Mr. Beefhead
May 8, 2003

I can make beans into peas.

Geoj posted:

I'm honestly surprised they lasted as long as they did, given that they were basically smaller CDs that stored data on the disc by a slightly different method.

I sometimes wonder if it was technological advancement and price reduction in solid state digital media players that did them in, or recordable CD media prices dropping below $1/disc in the late 90s.

I was a big supporter of the minidisc back when. I think it had a bit to do with a combination of the drop in price of recordable media, the increasing reliability of burners, and the increasing ability of car cd players to play burned cds, at least in the US. By the time solid state digital media players became cost effective you really didn't see minidisc hardware or media in stores anymore.

I've noticed that a few people in this thread seemed a little mystified as to the appeal of minidiscs at the time. The thing was, at that time car cd decks tended to skip like crazy at every little bump and couldn't play burned cds (not that it really mattered, seeing as how at the time blank cds cost upwards of $10 a pop and you had about a 33% chance of making a coaster when you burned one). A good tape deck was seen by many to be a superior option for in the car. You kind of have to think of Minidiscs as more of an upgrade to cassette tapes than as an alternative to CDs.

At the time, Minidiscs were amazing - they were way cheaper than cd-rs (about $2.50 each when purchased in a 10 pack, IIRC), you could record to them over and over again, you could delete just the tracks you didn't want and add new ones, the sound quality was vastly superior to cassette tapes, you could just toss them on your dash or in your glovebox and never have to worry about scratching them, they never really skipped, the deck would display title information for each track, the portable player was way smaller and got much better battery life than anything else at the time, man, the list goes on and on.

burtonos
Aug 17, 2004

...and the angel did say, "go forth, and lay waste to all who oppose you"

Mr. Beefhead posted:

I was a big supporter of the minidisc back when.

Three was a guy trying to develop a super minidisk that was about the size of a postage stamp. Imagine sifting through a glove box full of those.

kastein
Aug 31, 2011

Moderator at http://www.ridgelineownersclub.com/forums/and soon to be mod of AI. MAKE AI GREAT AGAIN. Motronic for VP.
I think they're called microSD cards.

I have lost more of those drat things than I care to think about.

Dewclaw
Apr 22, 2010
Wait, the discs were unscratchable? Really?

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Geoj
May 28, 2008

BITTER POOR PERSON

Mr. Beefhead posted:

By the time solid state digital media players became cost effective you really didn't see minidisc hardware or media in stores anymore.

Solid state was probably a bad example.

By 2002 HDD-based players were well below the :suicide: price point and factors of magnitude more convenient to load (legal) music onto - drop CD into computer, rip to digital format and transfer to player in under 10 minutes vs. 1:1 dub from original format to MD, not to mention being able to carry an entire library of music on a single device without having to change out media.

Dewclaw posted:

Wait, the discs were unscratchable? Really?

The actual disc was enclosed in a cartridge similar to a floppy disk. Unless you broke the cartridge (rendering the disc useless anyways) or deliberately opened the shutter and touched the disc it was protected.

Geoj has a new favorite as of 04:44 on Jun 28, 2013

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