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dissss posted:While the keyboard as a whole is obviously much bigger and heavier than something modern you'll find the key spacing of the main part of the keyboard (ie Q to P) is exactly the same as anything else. If the function keys, number pad, arrow keys, and the insert->page down block aren't in the same places, it's not really a full-size keyboard though and I've not seen that in a laptop.
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Jul 23, 2013 06:10
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Buckling spring supremacy, yo! I had one Model M pristine in the box from 1992 that I broke out of its packaging to celebrate my new job, and one from 1984 with the DIN-5 terminal connector that I kept around in case I needed to defend myself from a home invasion. I gave away the DIN-5 one when I moved house; probably should have kept it as model Ms are worth quite a bit to the right people. Edit: And I love my thumb-controlled trackball and am annoyed that Logitech don't make the corded Trackman Wheel any more so you see people selling them on Amazon for $200+ to addicts like me. The switches on the wireless M570 don't feel quite the same and there are complaints of early failure. ChickenOfTomorrow has a new favorite as of 07:27 on Jul 23, 2013 |
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Jul 23, 2013 06:41
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Jedit posted:As the box says they're called trackballs, and there's nothing obsolete about them - you can buy them in high street electronics and computer chains to this day. They're great for people with limited arm mobility and until recent developments in high-precision mice they were much beloved in the CAD fraternity. I'm still using the Logitech m570, all the kids in the library think i'm a computer wizard for using it. 
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Jul 23, 2013 06:45
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I used to loooove my old Trackball Explorer when I'd be on my laptop, since I hate trackpads with a passion. So handy! Such a great mouse. Also, ChickenOfTomorrow posted:I gave away the DIN-5 one when I moved house; probably should have kept it as model Ms are worth quite a bit to the right people. It's me, I'm the people. I want one of those tank-like noisy bastards so bad, just to troll the bejesus out of my employees with - I spend all day hammering on my now all-too-silent keyboard, my devs would kill me within the first hour of having that thing out.  I also miss the feel of them. Much better than the squishy mess my current keyboards [cheapo OEM Dell ones] feel like.
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Jul 23, 2013 07:20
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You can get imitation "clicky keyboards" with the right Google keywords. None are quite as good, so I stick with my 1995 Model M. Problem with the DIN-5 one was that it would have required a DIN-5->PS/2 adaptor and then a PS/2 ->USB adaptor and the keyboards are power-hungry enough that both would have to be active, not passive and I don't know if they make active DIN-5->PS/2 adaptors.
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Jul 23, 2013 07:26
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You can still buy mechanical keyboards, actual they're going through somewhat of a resurgence - there is a dedicated keyboard thread in SH/SC if you want some idea as to what's available
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Jul 23, 2013 07:28
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nocal posted:San Francisco more or less transitioned to RFID tech, and had relatively few bumps in the road. At least, considering the amount of money involved. Clipper is very successful now. I use it every day, and it's accepted in the largest 8 of the Bay's transit agencies, including CalTrain. This is an incredible achievement given the widely varying political structure of these agencies and the variety of passes, fares, transfers, etc. on offer. They also have a program called Clipper Direct where employers can deposit subsidized and/or pre-tax funds monthly into your Clipper card. It took a long time and a lot of money to get here, however. Per http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clipper_card : quote:In 1993, Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) and County Connection launched a pilot program named Translink (not to be confused with the later incarnation) that allowed the use of a single fare card between the two systems. The card, which used magnetic stripe technology, was envisioned to one day include all Bay Area transit agencies. However, due to technical problems, the program was abandoned two years later. Two orders of magnitudes, people, to get a working RFID-based transit card. P.S. SF Muni is light rail, and BART is heavy rail. BART has its exclusive grade-separated right of way. sincx has a new favorite as of 08:54 on Jul 23, 2013 |
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Jul 23, 2013 08:51
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Prenton posted:Ah, that reminds me. Bullshit. That's an Epyx 500xj, originally for the Atari 2600. 
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Jul 23, 2013 08:56
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einTier posted:Bullshit. That's an Epyx 500xj, originally for the Atari 2600. Almost every joystick design in the 80s and 90s was sold under at least three or four different brand names. Sometimes they were knock-offs but mostly just rebrands. (Notice the 'by Konix' in that ad?)
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Jul 23, 2013 09:46
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The 500XJ isn't the same as the Speedking. The Speedking gets its name because its technically the 500XJ Speedking, the designation was to note that it had an autofire function.
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Jul 23, 2013 10:12
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El Estrago Bonito posted:The 500XJ isn't the same as the Speedking. The Speedking gets its name because its technically the 500XJ Speedking, the designation was to note that it had an autofire function. Not all Speedkings had autofire though. 
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Jul 23, 2013 10:21
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atomicthumbs posted:This is better than any other possible portable pointing device, including apple's multitouch trackpads and any touch screen. If you say otherwise you have obviously never used one and I will fight you. Bring it on. If you've been using a clitmouse for any length of time your fingers will be hosed and you'll be a pushover.
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Jul 23, 2013 10:52
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Blue_monday posted:What gets me though? That keyboard clits are still a thing. Once you get used to it there's no going back, I find myself trying to rub the GHB triangle of keys whenever I borrow a laptop that doesn't have it. It's the main reason I don't have a MacBook Air (that and no on-site service warranty). If you hold the center button with your thumb it's a brilliant way to scroll too, not as precise as a wheel but more natural than multi-touch gestures.
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Jul 23, 2013 11:09
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Code Jockey posted:Holy poo poo there's a model M with a clitoris mouse and mouse buttons. I must own this. Here's what I use (yes, I know it's filthy) 
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Jul 23, 2013 15:10
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I never much cared for clit mice. I blame it on my first laptop that I was forced to buy from my college. Early IBM (yes, it was still IBM back then) Thinkpad. i want to say it was a T20? Mid-2000 era. The drat things sucked. Always had weird hardware problems. Mine had to had the power adapter replaced three times (a small fall, like, desk height to the carpeted floor was enough to break them. It was a known issue, but the computer depot kept giving me replacements from the same bad batch!) The screens all had wonky pixels (I had one that was always green, one that was always white, and a "patch" that was always a bit darker...this was fresh out of the box, yet the screen was NEVER covered in the warranty) and the best was the clit mouse. They didn't have nub+touchpad, JUST the nub. I knew lots of people (myself included,) who's nubs just stopped working right. On mine, the thing kept falling off. Like...just the small pressure from me pushing it up/down/whatever caused the red tip to come off the base. And on top of that, it would keep "drifting" in that last direction I pushed it in. What I want to know is, whatever happened to laptops with tiny trackballs in them? I liked those.
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Jul 23, 2013 15:20
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DreamingApe posted:I'm still using the Logitech m570, all the kids in the library think i'm a computer wizard for using it. A trackball wizard? Is your name Tommy?
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Jul 23, 2013 15:21
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DrBouvenstein posted:And on top of that, it would keep "drifting" in that last direction I pushed it in. This still happens from time to time, but it auto calibrates if you let go of the nub for a few seconds.
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Jul 23, 2013 15:26
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blugu64 posted:This is incorrect. There can only be one But can you use it as a life raft in the event of flooding?  
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Jul 23, 2013 16:17
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Geoj posted:But can you use it as a life raft in the event of flooding? F24!!!
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Jul 23, 2013 16:45
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spog posted:F24!!! And look at that arrow key layout, good gracious
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Jul 23, 2013 16:51
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Geoj posted:But can you use it as a life raft in the event of flooding? Bought one of these for 25¢. It works great.
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Jul 23, 2013 17:15
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 Killed a lot of bugs with this thing.
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Jul 23, 2013 17:47
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Geoj posted:But can you use it as a life raft in the event of flooding?
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Jul 23, 2013 20:05
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Program Attention keys .
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Jul 23, 2013 20:59
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Geoj posted:But can you use it as a life raft in the event of flooding? Hey I'd be on board with 122 key terminal keyboards, but I've just been too lazy to figure out which model I'd need to order from unicomp. Apparently there are three different methods of sending scancodes to the pc. I'd love the extra function keys though.
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Jul 23, 2013 22:13
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I'm surprised that no one has mentioned these yet: the VT100 terminal: It was released in 1978 and was so successful that computers still have VT100 terminal emulation programs on them. I fondly remember banks of them at the university library for accessing the book database. Hardware terminals aren't used anymore, though. Computing power is so cheap that it's wasteful to dedicate a machine to just providing a text terminal.
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Jul 24, 2013 06:22
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Brother Jonathan posted:I'm surprised that no one has mentioned these yet: the VT100 terminal: Have one for work. It connects via a complex and thoroughly retarded series of adapters to an actual linux box, from which I do computer-janitor poo poo. Why? Because I found it in the basement. That's why. When I get back to the office, I'll see about pictures. 
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Jul 24, 2013 06:25
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Brother Jonathan posted:I'm surprised that no one has mentioned these yet: the VT100 terminal: Oh hey we have one of those at work. I occasionally pull out one of these at home: .jpg)
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Jul 24, 2013 06:33
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My high school  had a PDP-11/34 running eight or nine VT100s (at a blazing 2400 baud!) and a mess of print terminals. A friend and I wrote a messaging/"email" system that could capture and display VT100 escape sequences, which you could use to move the cursor around the screen and set a lot of hardware-specific display options. After a while people started using it to create these little character-based animations that used pretty much every feature on the terminals -- graphics characters, double-height/double/width text, locked scrolling regions, flipping between smooth and line scrolling, making the screen shake around by switching in and out of interlaced-display mode really fast, you name it. People also wrote a couple of decent games for them, like a version of the old Canyon Bomber Atari cartridge. I've been hauling around 8" disks full of that stuff for decades, I'd love to find a way to read them and a working terminal to display them on (no emulator could do them justice).We also wardialed the escape sequences and found some undocumented ones, like a mode where character autorepeat is super-fast (100+ characters per second) and kicks in instantly. If you turn on keyclick in that mode, the repeat is actually fast enough that the clicks sound like really bad musical notes, and because different characters take slightly different amounts of time to display for some reason, different keys would "play" different "notes". It was super loving annoying. VT100s are awesome. Edit: Nothing in that picture looks obviously doctored to me, it's just a photo of a plain old VT100. The "bold" mode is actually a little brighter in real life, I remember it as being pretty striking, like the bullets in Asteroids vs. the darker lines on everything else in the game. Lazlo Nibble has a new favorite as of 07:19 on Jul 24, 2013 |
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Jul 24, 2013 07:09
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Brother Jonathan posted:I'm surprised that no one has mentioned these yet: the VT100 terminal: Oooo, pretty. I imagine this is probably just doctoring the photo for marketing purposes, but were the monitors really that nice? Because that looks like a very nice monitor. I'd hook one of these up to a serial switch to manage my Cisco/HP switches if I had one. 
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Jul 24, 2013 07:14
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Forever and always my favorite keyboard... They are getting rare and pricey, especially for a new one.
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Jul 24, 2013 07:43
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Brother Jonathan posted:I'm surprised that no one has mentioned these yet: the VT100 terminal: Some people I know managed to find one of these. They put a Raspberry Pi running Debian inside it and hooked it up, it was great.
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Jul 24, 2013 07:48
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Brother Jonathan posted:Hardware terminals aren't used anymore, though. Computing power is so cheap that it's wasteful to dedicate a machine to just providing a text terminal. Even as a tech-illiterate teen in the mid-90s I knew that Larry Ellison was completely full of poo poo when he tried to promote dumb internet terminals like this as a Microsoft-killing app. I mean seriously the first thing I thought when I heard his spiel on those things was "but how do I save my own work/files/porn?" Ahahahaha of course there's a Wikipedia entry about those worthless shitboxes.
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Jul 24, 2013 08:31
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Vincent Van Goatse posted:Even as a tech-illiterate teen in the mid-90s I knew that Larry Ellison was completely full of poo poo when he tried to promote dumb internet terminals like this as a Microsoft-killing app. I mean seriously the first thing I thought when I heard his spiel on those things was "but how do I save my own work/files/porn?" Think about it this way: a lot of people these days use their personal computers only for WWW stuff and even save their poo poo in the cloud.  (I'm not advocating terminals but smart graphical terminals are really not a bad idea. It's just that nobody wants them. Dumb terminals are another thing.)
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Jul 24, 2013 08:37
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Yeah but I distinctly remember him saying that his Network Computer terminal things would end the PC as we knew it. Which pretty comprehensibly didn't happen. We're doing cloud poo poo on the same PCs that Ellison predicted would be doomed.
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Jul 24, 2013 08:42
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Vincent Van Goatse posted:Yeah but I distinctly remember him saying that his Network Computer terminal things would end the PC as we knew it. Which pretty comprehensibly didn't happen. We're doing cloud poo poo on the same PCs that Ellison predicted would be doomed. The technology with the better boozing parties always wins. I can only imagine what the booze budget for SAP vendors must be like.
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Jul 24, 2013 08:44
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Grumbletron 4000 posted:Forever and always my favorite keyboard... I loved these too, but taking one apart every six months to clean out all the dead skin and crumbs and schmutz so lovingly showcased by that clear chassis was not a lot of fun.
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Jul 24, 2013 08:52
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Vincent Van Goatse posted:Even as a tech-illiterate teen in the mid-90s I knew that Larry Ellison was completely full of poo poo when he tried to promote dumb internet terminals like this as a Microsoft-killing app. I mean seriously the first thing I thought when I heard his spiel on those things was "but how do I save my own work/files/porn?" Generally speaking, anyone who's ever claimed that some new and upcoming product is going to instantly replace an already ubiquitous technology forever has either invested a lot of money in the new product being a success (Larry Ellison), assumed everyone has the same tech needs they do, or is hopelessly optimistic about how quickly people will dump their old thing that "works just fine" in favor of the new hotness.
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Jul 24, 2013 11:23
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Thin clients are the new terminals though, really.
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Jul 24, 2013 11:30
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Jimbo Jaggins posted:Thin clients are the new terminals though, really. You could also say that Google's Chromebook is extremely similar to the concept as well.
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Jul 24, 2013 11:42
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