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Lazlo Nibble posted: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. Lots of animations have been saved. Here is a demo of all of the graphics functions: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ZeDudfzAs0 The Twilight Zone: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ipikgmVCNW4 More Beer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5D_eg-NM5Pw
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Jul 24, 2013 11:45
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I remember back when I started 'using' the Internet, a lot of people had these mystical sequences at the end of their e-mails/posts and I didn't know what the gently caress. Turned out they were terminal animations but I never got them to show properly on my PC/terminal emulator 
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Jul 24, 2013 11:53
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Brother Jonathan posted:Lots of animations have been saved. You can still watch the first Star Wars movie in ascii animation via telnet at towel.blinkenlights.nl. I always thought that was one of the coolest pointless wastes of time on the internet.
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Jul 24, 2013 15:39
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Prenton posted:Ah, that reminds me. I always find early joysticks like this and like the Atari 5200 controller interesting because it seems like no one quite knew what they were doing yet and ergonomics were not even a consideration yet. Like no one actually sat down and thought about how you would hold these drat things. You see weird things like buttons above the joystick, buttons on the side of the controller, telephone-style keypads, etc.
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Jul 24, 2013 16:46
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Speaking of atari and horrible joysticks, my first atari console broke and I had to get a 2nd or 3rd(?) gen 2600 in about 1983. Completely different console, thin slimline and all plastic (no fake wood) with a silver cover. edit: This one:  It didn't come with standard old atari joystick like that picture shows. The joystick that came with that was horrible, looks the same as the joystick GIS says was called a "Pro-Line", designed for a 7800 (never heard of that model atari console).  Really uncomfortable atari controller that they shipped with last gen 2600s. It took serious punishment in games though and never broke. After the 2600 I bought a c64, and had the ubiquitous cheap cheetah 'jet-fighter style grip' two base button joystick for the c64 that ashens showed. Fo3 has a new favorite as of 17:56 on Jul 24, 2013 |
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Jul 24, 2013 17:48
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ZALGO! posted:You see weird things like buttons above the joystick, buttons on the side of the controller, telephone-style keypads, etc. Or all of those together. I had one of these:  Can't see them, but it had two buttons on each side of the controller. And I still don't know what the number pad was for. But there was a track-and-field game for the C64, one of the sort where you had to flail the joystick left and right in order to run, and if you held down two of the number pad buttons and one of the side buttons you'd turn into the goddamned Flash and just win every race.
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Jul 24, 2013 18:49
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Phanatic posted:Or all of those together. I had one of these: I seem to remember the number pad being used to select a play in a football game that they had for that system, but I could be wrong.
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Jul 24, 2013 19:14
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Prenton posted:Handheld joysticks Those are not real joysticks. This is:  Clamp that sucker to the table and you're all set.
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Jul 24, 2013 19:25
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All y'all are scrubs, this was the best: Look at that fuckin' thumb indent on the top trigger, most comfortable stick ever
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Jul 24, 2013 19:41
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Fun fact: Atari joysticks have the same shape and number of pins as a Sega Genesis controller. You can use a Sega controller for an Atari (just have to do some testing to see what button does what,) but I don't think you can use the Atari joystick for a Genesis, since there won't be enough buttons.
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Jul 24, 2013 20:13
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Fo3 posted:Speaking of atari and horrible joysticks, my first atari console broke and I had to get a 2nd or 3rd(?) gen 2600 in about 1983. The worst version of this stick was the 5200 version. It was NOT self centering. Whoever decided that was a good idea was out of his mind. It meant playing the l33t arcade ports like Pac Man a chore since the joystick didn't do anything when you let it go except for remaining doggedly in the direction you left it pointed in. Bad idea for twitch games (which basically every 5200 game was). The 7800 is a good system. Not up to the graphical capabilities of even a NES, but had some genuinely fun games (Ballblazer?) and was backwards compatible with the 2600 (which the 5200 was not.)
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Jul 24, 2013 20:24
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DrBouvenstein posted:Fun fact: Atari joysticks have the same shape and number of pins as a Sega Genesis controller. There's enough buttons for Sonic. Although there's no pause button, but you gotta go fast anyways, who needs pausing? (I speak from experience, either my brother or I broke the only Sega controller and we had to play with dad's old Atari controller until my older brother brought his old six button controllers because he bought a Saturn. Does the Saturn count as failed technology?)
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Jul 24, 2013 20:34
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I'm going off a vague memory here but wasn't the Genesis control port RS-232 serial. e: d-sub 9 pin. Funny to think that at one point, what we commonly call a parallel port connector was considered subminiature. Ron Burgundy has a new favorite as of 20:51 on Jul 24, 2013 |
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Jul 24, 2013 20:43
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DrBouvenstein posted:Fun fact: Atari joysticks have the same shape and number of pins as a Sega Genesis controller.
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Jul 24, 2013 20:58
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DrBouvenstein posted:Fun fact: Atari joysticks have the same shape and number of pins as a Sega Genesis controller. Both will fit into a Commodore 64 port, too. The Genesis controller is pretty much non-functional, though. At least it was in Moon Patrol. Grumbletron 4000 posted:Forever and always my favorite keyboard... We have several Mac versions at work. I recently switched mine out for a thinner keyboard because some of the keys were beginning to stick. A coworker still uses his and the person who mentioned they were a bitch to clean is absolutely right. His keyboard was shining from grease from years of meals being eaten there. During his week of vacation, I scrubbed it down.
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Jul 24, 2013 21:11
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Curious about the transit/travel card chat earlier... were there any issues bringing in NYC's system? My boss has a subway token on his desk and it made me think of this thread.
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Jul 24, 2013 21:19
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Brother Jonathan posted:I'm surprised that no one has mentioned these yet: the VT100 terminal: While the VT100 was amazing let us not forget its space aged precursor the VT05.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ND6oLXocR0
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Jul 24, 2013 21:26
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Dr. Chainsaws PhD posted:There's enough buttons for Sonic. Although there's no pause button, but you gotta go fast anyways, who needs pausing? You need three buttons to use debug properly. Once you learn the debug mode code regular Sonic is just boring.
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Jul 24, 2013 22:35
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Ron Burgundy posted:
I remember when 320x240 graphics were considered "high resolution". Of course, that's true compared to a TRS-80 Model I, which had a graphic resolution of 48x128.
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Jul 24, 2013 22:35
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rockinricky posted:I remember when 320x240 graphics were considered "high resolution". Of course, that's true compared to a TRS-80 Model I, which had a graphic resolution of 48x128. I still remember the day I first saw a desktop running 640x480 in I want to say 8 bit grayscale? I was floored at how good that looked. I remember seeing someone using some art program like that, and the photo looked so good!
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Jul 24, 2013 22:39
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Code Jockey posted:All y'all are scrubs, this was the best: Y'all got this poo poo wrong. This one was the real deal:  Motherfucking TAC 2. Had 2 of these on my commodore 64, and lasting perfectly functional through the abuse me and my sister gave them over the years serves as a testament to their excellence.
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Jul 24, 2013 22:43
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A smug sociopath posted:Y'all got this poo poo wrong. Yeah, guess I can't argue there. Aren't those things made of cast iron and indestructabilium?
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Jul 24, 2013 22:45
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Code Jockey posted:Yeah, guess I can't argue there. Aren't those things made of cast iron and indestructabilium? The old Finnish game mag Pelit made a funny remark about TAC 2 in their Commodore 64 retrospective. Freely translated, "If you throw a TAC-2 into a wall, there won't be a scratch on it. There might be one on the wall, though."
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Jul 24, 2013 22:52
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Code Jockey posted:I still remember the day I first saw a desktop running 640x480 in I want to say 8 bit grayscale? I was floored at how good that looked. I remember seeing someone using some art program like that, and the photo looked so good! I remember when our family upgraded our system to 486-something and Pirates! Gold booted up with the 800x600 SVGA mode, that thing blew my mind.
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Jul 24, 2013 23:02
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Pham Nuwen posted:I occasionally pull out one of these at home: I was using this same exact setup (monitor and keyboard) at a previous job around 2007. At the end of my day, I'd put my data into that glorious monochrome green screen and go pick up several pages of a dot-matrix printout on green striped paper. At the time, I thought those terminals were hilariously 20 years out of date, but thinking back on it, they still did what they were meant to do. Why get something more modern when all it is is data entry and hard copies of the printouts?
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Jul 24, 2013 23:06
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nocal posted:Coincidentally, reporters are obsolete technology. We are? Dang! And noone ever bothered to tell me.
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Jul 25, 2013 00:23
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A smug sociopath posted:Y'all got this poo poo wrong. Saved me making the same post. I just bought a USB joystick dongle thingy so I could use my old TAC-2 on the PC. It saw plenty of service on my Amiga and now sits on my PC when I feel the need for some one-button gaming.
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Jul 25, 2013 02:43
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I know the joysticks we had on our Amiga 500 (which is certainly the very best in failed technology!), and they worked on the master system (partially at least).
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Jul 25, 2013 06:07
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Jul 25, 2013 06:51
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That owns! My first home PC was a Televideo 8086 with the monitor built into the tower, on the side of it, and it tilted up and down. Green monochrome, but not nearly as stylish as that. It had... two 5.25" floppy drives? Maybe just one? It died when the 10 meg hard drive caught fire inside the case. The scorch marks inside the case were awesome. I remember playing hilariously low res Space Invaders on that. e. I also remember staring at that green screen for long enough periods to give me a sort of weird color-blindness, or color-weirdness for a while after. The green numbers on my VCR were white-ish, and other stuff looked weird.
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Jul 25, 2013 07:25
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I work at IBM, and up until a few years ago, we had a few actual 3270 consoles down in the lab: Because IBM mainframes are pretty much infinitely backwards compatible, we do get requests every now and then to make sure that a specific piece of hardware will work on a new system. Even today, despite a host of new systems management APIs and solutions, if you want to talk directly to a virtual system, firing up the 3270 emulation software is the first step. You have to keep in mind that these were introduced as replacements for punchcards. The dimensions of the screen are 24x80 characters, which allowed for the same amount of input as the 80-character punched card format. In olde tyme computer days, you had a set number of programs residing on a system, and you would generally call that program and tell it where to gets its input and where to direct its output. So if you were running Payroll, you would punch out a card that ran the Payroll program, which resided in memory, followed by all of the input it needed. This could be on a subsequent stack of cards, a reel of tape, or if you were really fancy, disk of some sort. If everything went well, you would get a Return Code of 0, and a bunch of paychecks printed out on some monster printer, which was directly connected to the system. Pretty much anybody working on mainframe systems back in the day has some memory about the rubber band snapping or knocking a stack of cards off their desk and having to spend the rest of the day re-ordering them. So now you've got terminals, which can enter commands and present output from systems without the need for physical media. However, each mainframe system had a set number of terminal connections, so only important people had direct connections to the systems. If you go through a building that had a mainframe in the 60s and 70s, you'll often find miles and miles of big thick black cables running in the walls and floors that connected systems to the desks of programmers and sysops. This was made less cumbersome by the invention of SNA, an IBM networked systems infrastructure that aimed to connect devices over a network rather than directly point-to-point. If you worked on multiple systems, you either had a fancy terminal with a knob on it, which let you select the host system, or you had one of these in your office, which basically did the same thing. I took this picture just a few minutes ago.  Eventually, this all got rolled into VTAM and today, connecting to 3270-based terminals over IP connections ain't no thing. 3270 consoles are still very visible today, just go into Lowes, or any retail store that doesn't have a GUI-wrapper for their POS terminals. You'll see a black screen with green, white, red and yellow text where pressing F3 takes you to the previous screen. That's 50 years of human/computer interaction evolution still at work right there.
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Jul 25, 2013 15:58
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nocal posted:EZ Pass is a plastic block that you stick to your car windshield, in order to drive over the Golden Gate bridge without stopping to pay the toll in cash. Slowing down is considerably faster and more efficient than stopping, so many toll taker jobs were eliminated (unfortunate, maybe). Similarly, there is a card called the Clipper that is basically a thick credit-card-size plastic card with RFID inside that allows you to ride the ferry, the bus, and possibly BART (light rail). Dunno about the train inside the city (caltrain), because I think I have never even met a person that has used it. The card and EZ Pass can be set up to automatically reload from a bank account or charge card or online; the card can also be refilled at stations in the ferry and bus terminals. The Dallas area has a similar system for its TollTags. A new turnpike has gone in in segments over the last decade or so; the mid-segment toll checkpoints have 3 lanes for RFID and about 10 gated coin kiosks, half of which would have cashier booths. Now within the last two or three years, this system switched over to purely electronic toll collection. If you don't have an RFID tag, cameras will snap your license plates, and you will eventually get a bill in the mail for however much you owe. But where this used to be a ticket for a toll violation, it's now just a slightly marked-up regular toll; you don't get charged penalties unless you ignore the first bill. Demolition for these relatively new toll kiosks has been a low priority. They just sit in the middle of the highway, a massive eyesore and an example of specific obsolescence.
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Jul 25, 2013 16:32
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Code Jockey posted:e. I also remember staring at that green screen for long enough periods to give me a sort of weird color-blindness, or color-weirdness for a while after. The green numbers on my VCR were white-ish, and other stuff looked weird. I've done the same. The white wall looked purple, etc.
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Jul 25, 2013 16:38
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cubicle gangster posted:Curious about the transit/travel card chat earlier... were there any issues bringing in NYC's system? Sort of. The metrocard is amazingly easy to hack for a free one time ride: you bend it. This was discovered about thirty seconds after the system was introduced and is still possible to this day. Slightly easier than vacuuming tokens out of turnstiles, which was one of the more inventive common thefts from the old turnstiles.
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Jul 25, 2013 18:18
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There was also a huge overlap between tokens and MetroCards. The first MetroCards came out in 1993, the last token was accepted in 2003. So there was some flexibility while the kinks were worked out.
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Jul 25, 2013 23:48
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For some reason at work today, I started remembering Magic Fingers. Stick a quarter (or 50 cents) in in a hotel bed and it would vibrate for a few minutes. If it worked. They were a dying breed in my youth, but I clearly remember some of them stealing money. I don't think I've seen one in person since the mid-1990s. Amazingly, there's still an active company, but there's apparently only one hotel actively promoting it now. Can't say that I'll be in Coeur d'Alene anytime soon. Indeed, the business is trying to promote an in-home unit now. YouTube does not seem to have a video properly demonstrating Magic Fingers, but for the curious, pop in Vacation. The Griswolds encounter one.
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Jul 26, 2013 02:43
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RC and Moon Pie posted:For some reason at work today, I started remembering Magic Fingers. Stick a quarter (or 50 cents) in in a hotel bed and it would vibrate for a few minutes. If it worked. They were a dying breed in my youth, but I clearly remember some of them stealing money. I don't think I've seen one in person since the mid-1990s. Someone find the Tumblr with a bunch of pictures of hipsters lying on their second-hand Magic Fingers beds.
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Jul 26, 2013 06:26
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bisticles posted:I work at IBM, and up until a few years ago, we had a few actual 3270 consoles down in the lab: drat that is handsome, right there.
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Jul 26, 2013 08:40
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bisticles posted:I work at IBM, and up until a few years ago, we had a few actual 3270 consoles down in the lab: This is really fascinating stuff. I work in administration at a very large university, and the vast majority of my work is done in a 3270 terminal emulator (and a few web systems built on it). I always thought it strange that we were still using a 50 year old system to do this sort of work. Is it common for businesses and universities to still be running these old mainframes?
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Jul 26, 2013 22:57
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A huge amount of businesses still use terminal emulators. There's a whole market for software to build GUIs around terminal emulators, which I hate because you end up with the worst of both worlds. I think businesses feel that new hires won't understand a green screen which is crap.
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Jul 26, 2013 23:02
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