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This is a mercury arc rectifier/valve. In 1902 and on for a shocking amount of time, this was the way you turned alternating current into direct current. The most common use of these would have been turning the AC from the power grid into the DC used by most subway or other transit systems as the DC motor was and still is, for the most part, king. Nowadays, we have tiny integrated circuits that can do this for normal household items. Every wallwart, power brick, and power supply in TVs and computers does this with much smaller, more efficient means. But even recently, as of 2004 (according to Wikipedia), the metal box version of these was used to turn high voltage AC into high voltage DC. Now with solid state electronics that can withstand kilovolt switching, these are effectively obsolete (as of 1975, again according to Wikipedia). Look at that wonderful light, listen to that wonderful 60Hz hum https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KGb-nUK41tc: that's . Ponder if the UV burned skin, cataracts, and possible mercury exposure is worth it. I desperately want one of these.
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# ? Jun 28, 2013 04:45 |
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# ? Mar 29, 2024 02:06 |
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DrBouvenstein posted:No one ever remembers Scour. I remember when Scour was good, when it had the cube logo. I remember using it at college and downloading a large file off via P2P, from somebody to whom I had a ping time of 11ms. It blew my mind to watch the progress bar fill up so quickly. I remember the disappointment of launching it one morning and seeing the message that it had been shut down.
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# ? Jun 28, 2013 04:50 |
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Geoj posted:By 2002 HDD-based players were well below the 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. gently caress yeah they were. I used this thing for probably 3-4 years until the hard drive finally got so hosed up that it wouldn't spin anymore and I resigned myself to an Ipod which at the time I thought was inferior because I think RockBox was out by then. I picked this is up in 2001 a bit after they came out. For some reason Circuit City was having a 50% off or so sale on them and I got my 17 year old rear end down to Circuit City as fast as I could that Sunday morning after I saw the ad in the paper. Plinkey has a new favorite as of 05:02 on Jun 28, 2013 |
# ? Jun 28, 2013 04:59 |
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DrBouvenstein posted:No one ever remembers Scour. I remember. Also, my first iPod. Nobody in high school had any idea what it was. I miss the touch/clickwheel.
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# ? Jun 28, 2013 06:17 |
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DesperateDan posted: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. Yesss! RA .ini file editing was the poo poo. My grenadiers shot lightning from their hands.
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# ? Jun 28, 2013 07:03 |
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Robot Uprising posted:I think you where supplying a serial killer. Well, seeing as we were 10 and 11, I doubt that. He just wanted to be a doctor (he never got that far though, since he got terrible grades all the time and is now working in construction), and he's now happily married and all that jazz. I didn't really care all that much, and hey. "Free" software and games. Yay! DrBouvenstein posted:No one ever remembers Scour. Heh, I knew I forgot one. I just prefered using DC++ though. Untill torrents that is. I remember we set up a DC++ server in the basement of one of my friends. We all chipped in with some hardware and got to share our warez and pr0n all over. It was great. Untill you dug deeper into what people shared and found CP and horsepr0n. That's when I quit talking to them. Datasmurf has a new favorite as of 11:15 on Jun 28, 2013 |
# ? Jun 28, 2013 11:10 |
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burtonos posted: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. Are you referring to Dataplay? They are re-writable (or pre-recorded) discs in 500mb capacity (250mb per side) using the same phase-change technology as CD-RWs. They hit the scene just before flash media was affordable in capacities useful for media. It was a tremendous flop, but it was a neat idea at the time, and the engineering was impressive. Here's a PDF with some nice images and technical information http://www.hotchips.org/wp-content/uploads/hc_archives/hc13/3_Tue/19dataplay.pdf
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# ? Jun 28, 2013 12:07 |
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Ron Burgundy posted:Audiogalaxy didn't make the list either. drat, another I forgot. Oh well, didn't use Audiogalaxy quite as much, but I definetly used it. And since I've been backing up my collection of pirated MP3s since I started with it in '98 (when we got our 128 kbps Cable modem), I still have about 99% of the MP3s I downloaded through shady software for the last 15 years or so. Oh, and going to friends to borrow CDs from them, rip them to wave by using MusicMatch Jukebox and then converting them to 128 kbps MP3s, because gently caress yeah! They take so little sapce! And I only had some crappy Sony knockoff headphones to listen to music anyway, so I didn't really notice the great dip in sound quality. Which again reminds me of MP3.com. That was the best site to discover new music that wasn't going to be played on the radio here in Norway. I found lots of great bands thanks to that site, even some weird band that came to our school to play. I remember using AllTheWeb (hey, a Norwegian got to use a Norwegian search motor that's awesome for finding MP3s, videos and pr0n, you know) to find out more about them, and lo and behold, I found MP3.com and everything was great. Untill CNet or Vivendi or whoever it was hosed up the site some years later. Oh well, still have some of the MP3s in 96 kbps lying around.
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# ? Jun 28, 2013 12:20 |
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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. I've been there too, and the H4 is absolutely amazing. Here's a crummy picture of it: After three large, unwieldy clocks, the fourth is beautiful, portable and elegant.
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# ? Jun 28, 2013 12:58 |
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Dalrain posted:Did someone say American steam turbine locomotive? I don't think this bad boy was posted: The french "aérotrain", gas turbine hovertrain. Somebody made a cool showcase montage https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5VvsxaaFNAs This thing was supposed to link a major airport to Paris, then went to poo poo due to lack of funding, gas prices and the death of the leading inventor. The whole story is a little sad, it's like the future suddenly started to suck. unpacked robinhood has a new favorite as of 13:33 on Jun 28, 2013 |
# ? Jun 28, 2013 13:29 |
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unpacked robinhood posted:I don't think this bad boy was posted: It looks like something straight out of a Thunderbirds episode...
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# ? Jun 28, 2013 13:38 |
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DrBouvenstein posted:No one ever remembers Scour. (Edit: Looking at Wikipedia I guess I maybe used "Scour Media Agent" before Napster came out, which sucked, and then there was "Scour Exchange" which was more like a normal file sharing network?) mystes has a new favorite as of 14:14 on Jun 28, 2013 |
# ? Jun 28, 2013 14:11 |
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Ofaloaf posted:
This locomotive, 1 of 3 built by Chesapeake and Ohio, is actually a turbo-electric locomotive. The steam turbine was connected to a generator, which powered the traction motors located on the bogies. One of the biggest problems with this type of locomotive is its fuel source- it was coal-fired. This made sense in the coal-rich region it operated (railways operating in the west typically used oil-fired steam locomotives from the late 1930s onward), but it simply did not work in the complicated turbine designs. From front to back, a typical steam locomotive is typically arranged like this: smokebox-boiler-firebox-cab-tender. The C&O turbine was arranged: coal bunker-cab-firebox-boiler-smokebox-generator-water canteen tender, with traction motors under everything except the tender. This arrangement meant that coal dust fell into the traction motors and fouled them, rendering the locomotives useless. They were supposed to operate an express service between DC and Cincinnati, but neither of the 3 made it the whole way without breaking down. They were also too long and heavy for most of the C&O system. Pennsylvania Railroad's S2, on the other hand, showed some promise. This design stated during the war, and was grandfathered in under a prohibition on new designs (the government wanted production focused on types that were known to work), but the builders were forced to use heavier materials, resulting in the front and trailing trucks having 6 wheels instead of the planned 4. This design, unlike the C&O turbine, was a direct-drive turbine. It had one big turbine for forward operation, and a second smaller one for reversing. It actually had some advantages over conventional steam locomotives: because there were no pistons, there was no hammerblow on the tracks, so it was at once a smoother ride and easier on the tracks, and it was very efficient at speeds over 30 mph/ 50 km/h. It was more capable of sustaining high speeds than a traditional reciprocating locomotive. It was also extremely powerful, putting out 6900hp. A Union Pacific Big Boy, with twice the number of driving wheels and much longer length, only put out 6000. However, in addition to melting its own firebox and blowing out rivets and bolts, it had extremely high fuel consumption at low speeds, making it unsuitable for freight trains, which doomed it as diesels took over passenger operations. Perhaps an oil-fired turbo-electric steam locomotive would have worked, but by the early 1950s, it was clear that American railways were going over to diesel. There was, however, one railroad that did things differently: Union Pacific. Union Pacific always did things big. They had some of the toughest hills and longest trains in the US. They had the most mileage to cover, and the biggest locomotives to match. When locomotives with a single set of driving wheels weren't enough, they introduced articulated locomotives; the Challenger, with 2 sets of 6 driving wheels: When the Challenger wasn't enough, they introduced the Big Boy; the largest steam locomotive ever built (there was one heavier, but the Big Boy was larger by dimensions): Even this wasn't enough. To cope with the train lengths and weights of the late 1950s, 2 Challengers or Big Boys were often needed. The early diesels weren't particularly powerful, generating only 1200-1800 hp, meaning that you would have needed about 10 of them to pull a train through the Wasatch mountains. UP had a solution: the gas turbine locomotive. It was essentially a jet engine on rails. Three generations were developed between 1954 and 1959. The third generation was the most powerful locomotive ever built in North America. It was factory-rated by General Electric for 8500 hp, and Union Pacific often uprated them to 10 000 hp. Look at this monster: The front unit contains the cab, a diesel engine for reversing and maneuvering in the yard, the associated generator and the electronics. The middle section is the gas turbine and generator, and the rear section is the fuel tender, a former steam locomotive water canteen tender filled with heavy fuel oil. They generated a lot of heat and noise, and were banned from Los Angeles after UP left one idling under a bridge- and melted a hole in it with its exhaust! There was also an experiment with running two of the earlier turbines back-to-back, which caused the rear one to flame out. In the rare instances extra power was needed, regular diesels were added to the train. They operated until 1970, by which time diesel locomotives became more powerful and efficient, and the high maintenance costs and fuel consumption of the turbines outweighed the benefits they offered. They also tried a coal fired turbine, but this exacerbated the problems with wear on the turbine blades the fuel-oil powered turbines had, and was less efficient and powerful than any of them Sunshine89 has a new favorite as of 18:44 on Jun 28, 2013 |
# ? Jun 28, 2013 17:41 |
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Sunshine89 posted:
That's pretty fascinating. Have you got any links for how one of these engines actually worked? As far as I understand the way turbine engines work, they rely on shooting air out the back of them at high speed, which wouldn't really work on a train. So obviously it's something else and I'm pretty curious.
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# ? Jun 28, 2013 18:03 |
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Here's a diagram of a prototype: There are some videos of the turbines in operation, but I've only seen dubbed-over previews for mail-order VHS tapes.
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# ? Jun 28, 2013 18:15 |
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Awesome post, thanks for that. The sheer amount of power is crazy to me, and the fact that the gas turbine melted a hole in a bridge is amazing.
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# ? Jun 28, 2013 18:18 |
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DNova posted:Are you referring to Dataplay? That thing looks a hell of a lot like a PSP UMD. drat.
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# ? Jun 28, 2013 18:29 |
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DNova posted:Are you referring to Dataplay? Man, this is way cooler than USB drives. Not as practical, certainly, but much cooler. It looks like something out of a 80s/90s scifi movie/TV show
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# ? Jun 28, 2013 19:11 |
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Plinkey posted:gently caress yeah they were. This MP3 player has kept me with Archos ever since, even though nothing has quite lived up to how much I loved this one. Once you had Rockbox installed it was incredible.
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# ? Jun 28, 2013 19:14 |
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twosideddice posted:That's pretty fascinating. Have you got any links for how one of these engines actually worked? As far as I understand the way turbine engines work, they rely on shooting air out the back of them at high speed, which wouldn't really work on a train. So obviously it's something else and I'm pretty curious. Turbine referrers to the fact that the steam rotates a turbine ( sort of like a propeller) instead of pushing a cylinder in a traditional steam engine. Almost forgot that content: A rotating current train. It needs three overhead lines. Although some models got around with two lines, by putting a voltage directly on the actual tracks. VictualSquid has a new favorite as of 19:45 on Jun 28, 2013 |
# ? Jun 28, 2013 19:24 |
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tonberrytoby posted:It is an electric locomotive. It just has its own power plant on board. To further clarify, when the exhaust produces thrust it's a jet or rocket engine, not a turbine. Now, jets do usually have turbines that generate thrust (as well as to drive the air intake), but the turbine is used to capture exhaust energy and use it to move more air using a fan or propeller: most jet engines in modern aircraft don't primarily get their thrust from exhaust. Gas turbines that don't provide jet propulsion are also used in assorted vehicles (tanks for example) and steam turbines are the usual way of turning thermal power (fossil fuels, nuclear, thermal solar) into electricity.
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# ? Jun 28, 2013 19:51 |
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Monkey Fracas posted:Man, this is way cooler than USB drives. Not as practical, certainly, but much cooler. It looks like something out of a 80s/90s scifi movie/TV show That's why I always liked SmartMedia cards: I remember my dad's first digital camera used SmartMedia, and to get the pictures on the computer, he had to put the SmartMedia card into a floppy-disk adapter:
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# ? Jun 28, 2013 19:56 |
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DNova posted:Are you referring to Dataplay? God drat, talk about being a day late and a dollar short. "Solid state....what's solid state? gently caress!"
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# ? Jun 28, 2013 20:29 |
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While we're still on track (har har) with locomotives, there's one more turbo-electric experiment in the US: the ominously-named Jawn Henry (thank you Bob, whoever you are, for getting the one decent close-up I could find of the real thing) This was Norfolk and Western's turbine attempt and one of the last new steam locomotive designs in the USA. It was built in 1954, by which time dieselization was well underway. Norfolk and Western did much of its business in coal-rich Virginia, and was one of the last holdouts operating steam locomotives. Jawn Henry (offcially N&W 2300) was a one-of-a-kind design, similar to the 1947 C&O turbines, but had some improvements, such as semi-automated boiler controls and a water tube boiler (more efficient than a fire tube boiler, such as the C&O turbines had). However, Jawn Henry suffered from similar problems to the C&O turbines, albeit to a lesser degree -it actually completed runs. Again, the locomotive was coal fired, and coal dust fouled the traction motors and boiler controls. The locomotive was withdrawn in 1957 and scrapped the next year. Also, a big thanks to Douglas Self's Loco Locomotives, a Web 1.0 treasure trove of information on obscure steam locomotives. The broader site focuses on audio equipment and other obsolete tech, as well as being an example of mid-late 90's web design itself.
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# ? Jun 28, 2013 20:54 |
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burtonos posted:God drat, talk about being a day late and a dollar short. "Solid state....what's solid state? gently caress!" See also: Iomega Clik. It was a system with 40mb magnetic-recording discs that were more related to hard drives than floppies. Very thin and small, but the devices were absurdly expensive when they would have been relevant. They became competitively priced at the same time 32-64gb flash memory cards were becoming reasonably priced.
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# ? Jun 28, 2013 22:00 |
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Split-flap displays. Did you ever watch Groundhog Day and wonder what was with that weird clock? Well, before LEDs came down in price, digital clocks rotated cards against a ratchet: each time a minute passed, the card slipped in front of the ratchet and a new card was displayed. Since minutes move in an ascending sequence, this worked just fine. However, sometimes you need a bigass display that's alphabetic -- say, for instance, you're a train station and you need to show the next ten trains leaving and where they're leaving for. Every single letter there is one flap on a 26-flap wheel. (Note that there are also specialized flaps for things like train lines.) Now imagine that the train at the top of the list departs. That means that the list needs to move up and a new train has to be displayed at the bottom. That, in turn, means that every single one of those wheels has to rotate from its current position to the new letter. When you're sitting next to one of these boards, it sounds like a thousand pigeons took off next to a chain-link fence with playing cards clipped to their wings. Mechanical stuff is awesome.
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# ? Jun 28, 2013 22:20 |
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I love when humongous split-flap displays go apeshit.
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# ? Jun 28, 2013 22:23 |
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We had something like a split flap displays for years around our town. They were large and instead of letters or numbers, they were just 'pixels' that would flip to green or black little paddles to form out a single long line of letters, numbers, and very simple symbols. Standing beneath the sign was like hearing a thousand little claps going on ever 3-5 seconds at each change. Chlap! Chlap! Chlap!
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# ? Jun 28, 2013 23:03 |
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Split flap alarm clocks are the best. What better place for an appliance that makes a sound every minute than your night stand. They do look really cool though.
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# ? Jun 28, 2013 23:05 |
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Please don't tell me there are people on these forums who have never encountered a split-flap alarm clock before. My mom used to have one on her nightstand. I'm only 28, I'm not that old! To contribute: Floptical disks. These came out in the late 90's just around the time the first CD-R drives were turning disks into coasters at 1x speeds. They used electromagnetic fluctuations like a floppy, but at such a tight density that they needed a laser to align the heads, like a CD-ROM (but not really). They were capable of holding a whole 21 megabytes! I remember reading about these in PC World and marveling at the fact that just one of these could hold the entire hard drive from my first computer plus a couple extra floppies. It was the first time I knew what my parents felt like when they looked at a Nintendo.
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# ? Jun 28, 2013 23:14 |
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A Pinball Wizard posted:Flopticals If I remember correctly the drives could also read and write regular 9 cm floppies which always struck me as oddly sensible for a storage medium.
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# ? Jun 28, 2013 23:22 |
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Jerry Cotton posted:Split flap alarm clocks are the best. What better place for an appliance that makes a sound every minute than your night stand. I saw a link (probably from this thread) to a project a guy was doing that involved a split-flap alarm clock, where the flaps would stop advancing during the night until the alarm time came around, when it would go through the entire set of flaps and then display the correct time, which would act as the alarm.
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# ? Jun 28, 2013 23:37 |
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Inspector_71 posted:I saw a link (probably from this thread) to a project a guy was doing that involved a split-flap alarm clock, where the flaps would stop advancing during the night until the alarm time came around, when it would go through the entire set of flaps and then display the correct time, which would act as the alarm. That's cool until that one time you wake up in the middle of the night, see the time hasn't changed, and freak out because you're still half-asleep and think time has stopped.
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# ? Jun 28, 2013 23:39 |
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DrBouvenstein posted:That's cool until that one time you wake up in the middle of the night, see the time hasn't changed, and freak out because you're still half-asleep and think time has stopped. Unless the numbers are glow-in-the-dark you won't see the time anyway.
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# ? Jun 28, 2013 23:42 |
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Jerry Cotton posted:Unless the numbers are glow-in-the-dark you won't see the time anyway. Split-flap clocks had small incandescent lamps inside to illuminate the digits.
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# ? Jun 28, 2013 23:44 |
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DNova posted:Split-flap clocks had small incandescent lamps inside to illuminate the digits. Oh drat of course. Actually, now that I think about it, probably all alarm clocks of a certain period used to have those - unless they were glow-in-the-dark.
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# ? Jun 28, 2013 23:48 |
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DocCynical posted:
As far as power semiconductors go (diodes, SCRs, IGBTs), depending on the semiconductor not only kilovolts, but kiloamps of current. (I worked with SCR pucks that could handle around 1500 amps at several hundred volts.) In fact the new big thing for power transmission is ultra-high voltage DC transmission, only possible with advances in power semiconductors. So you have one power line at +500kV and another at -500kV, and the difference between them is one million volts! Three-Phase has a new favorite as of 23:59 on Jun 28, 2013 |
# ? Jun 28, 2013 23:56 |
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All the kazaa talk reminded me of some short lived ftp search engine. I don't recall what it's name was, but you could submit your ftp for indexing, turn on ratios, and let the filez come to you! It was amazing how honest and creepily friendly people were. I could leave for a couple of days and come home to an upload folder full of goodies. Nowadays you kids have to go out and look for what you want to steal, back then your anonymous e-friends would introduce you to fetishes you didn't even know you had. Truly those were better times.
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# ? Jun 29, 2013 00:30 |
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Mr. Beefhead posted: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. Unfortunately the main thing I ever remember about Minidisc is the houndstooth jacket on the dude in all the magazine ads for them back in the mid-1990s
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# ? Jun 29, 2013 00:39 |
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# ? Mar 29, 2024 02:06 |
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When we're slightly on the topic of moving files illegaly. Do people still use IRC and DCC for their ? I remember in 2004 - 2005 when that was really popular here, and all my friends would get permabanned from DALnet, EFnet and Undernet for spamming for the channels. Good times.
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# ? Jun 29, 2013 00:42 |