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RC and Moon Pie posted:YouTube does not seem to have a video properly demonstrating Magic Fingers, but for the curious, pop in Vacation. The Griswolds encounter one. Or the X-Files episode "Bad Blood".
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Jul 26, 2013 23:25
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Snark posted: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. I kind of miss how good the token booth guys were. They would just have a big pile of change and tokens in front of them, and you could slide any amount of cash through the little slot under the bulletproof glass and say (or hold up fingers to show) how many tokens you wanted and they would, in one swift motion of one hand, slide back the exact right amount of tokens and change to you without even looking up from the Knicks game on their tiny portable TV
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Jul 27, 2013 00:33
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Optimus Prime Rib posted:Is it common for businesses and universities to still be running these old mainframes?
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Jul 27, 2013 00:43
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It also allows for quicker recovery in case of a terminal crapping itself. I work with a standard laptop but all the files in a strange state of being both on my laptop and the server. I've no clue how it works but it's marvelous.
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Jul 27, 2013 00:55
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Snark posted: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. You look at this timetable and while it is insane, you have to realize that the token dispensing machines were done away with rather quickly. They phased out the token accepting turnstiles much more slowly. Boston, on the other hand, phased in the CharlieTicket* vending machines exceedingly slowly and phased out the token accepting seemingly overnight. Which meant that for weeks you got to deal with incredibly surly MBTA employees manning these plexiglass boxes in stations without card reading terminals. Because they just ripped all of the turnstiles out of the ground at once with nothing to replace them. You could throw a token, the fare in cash or your card into the box. That's right, if you had a card you had to just throw it in, even if you had $50 worth of fares on it. It was loving absurd, and at least one station went from tokens to the box back to tokens back to the box and then to cards. The MBTA (I would probably argue Boston as a whole) is obsolete and antiquated. (I will say I actually much prefer RFID systems like the CharlieCard and the countless others to the MTA swipe system, I hate having to fish around for my MetroCard instead of just plonking my wallet onto a pad like I could do in Boston.) *CharlieTickets are paper tickets with a magnetic stripe that you have to feed into a slot on the turnstiles, while CharlieCards are plastic cards with RFID chips in them that you just bang on a reader. of course, being in Boston, you can't get a Card vended to you with money on it, you have to find the station agent booth, get a card, go back to the vending machines and put money on it. Lazlo Nibble posted:Can't speak for universities but yes, mainframes are still common in large businesses, because they're still the most cost-effective way to do the kind of work they do. At least one rather large financial services company uses what must be a mainframe terminal emulator for account management. Seeing it pulled up on multi-monitor trading stations alongside all the slick graphing and analytic programs is a little jarring. Inspector_666 has a new favorite as of 04:17 on Jul 27, 2013 |
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Jul 27, 2013 04:09
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In any financial services company big enough to have a retail storefront all those transactions are going to end up on the mainframe for end-of-day processing anyway, so they may as well cut out the middleman and have the branch reps enter 'em there directly. 
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Jul 27, 2013 04:39
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Lazlo Nibble posted:In any financial services company big enough to have a retail storefront all those transactions are going to end up on the mainframe for end-of-day processing anyway, so they may as well cut out the middleman and have the branch reps enter 'em there directly. It's not that sort of company, they handle backend stuff for other brokerages. But yeah, it's probably the same thing at the end of the day. It's just funny seeing them push out new software that's like "Here's the best and flashiest thing to analyze market trends now if you want to see how many shares customer X has you just fire up this terminal emulator window and..."
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Jul 27, 2013 05:17
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Lazlo Nibble posted:In any financial services company big enough to have a retail storefront all those transactions are going to end up on the mainframe for end-of-day processing anyway, so they may as well cut out the middleman and have the branch reps enter 'em there directly. I worked for a major hardware store and the backend systems were all tied into some kind of mainframe system, I never examined the details but it sounds like it may have been a 3270 series system. Used F keys for navigation, and to select various functions we typed different three digit codes. We used G-Link as a terminal emulator at least. I think there was a Linux server or two handling the bridge between the mainframe inventory system and the much more modern POS systems. Checking inventory from the POS still involved "dialing" in and submitting a request (it was all IP over VPN but it was amazingly slow most of the time).
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Jul 27, 2013 23:29
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Lazlo Nibble posted:Can't speak for universities but yes, mainframes are still common in large businesses, because they're still the most cost-effective way to do the kind of work they do. Also the costs of migrating off a working mainframe system can be daunting. The tax department here has budgeted $1.5 billion over ten years for replacing their current system, and this is a country with only around 4.5 million people
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Jul 27, 2013 23:47
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dissss posted:Also the costs of migrating off a working mainframe system can be daunting. Yep. I've worked for two retail places in my life, major chains, where if you dig deep enough, you end up at a mainframe system. My current job too, on the brick and mortar side of it. I'd be terrified at the scale/complexity of replacing that - we've got probably 30 years of stuff built on top of it, and to replace the core with something more modern, then have to rewrite and test all of that business functionality, for the scale of business we are... yeesh. And besides - if it works, why replace it? The cost to do so will be staggering, both in labor and money, so we'd need a pretty significant reason to rip it out. It really isn't giving us any problems now worth replacing it for. Though this does make me think of one of the new hires at work for our IT [infrastructure] department. He was like 19, this was his first job, and probably the second day he was here he walked up to my desk and said "I'd like to replace your SVN [source control] system with Git, it's way better, because..." and I shut him down pretty much instantly. SVN works great for us, we have zero problems with it, we have a ton of tools/systems built around it, and even if I wanted to move to Git - which I might someday, who knows - I don't have the resources to put on that project [documentation, converting existing tools, moving the source over, etc] anyway. He gave me a look I will never forget - he looked like I just ran over his dog.
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Jul 28, 2013 00:00
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Code Jockey posted:Though this does make me think of one of the new hires at work for our IT [infrastructure] department. He was like 19, this was his first job, and probably the second day he was here he walked up to my desk and said "I'd like to replace your SVN [source control] system with Git, it's way better, because..." and I shut him down pretty much instantly. SVN works great for us, we have zero problems with it, we have a ton of tools/systems built around it, and even if I wanted to move to Git - which I might someday, who knows - I don't have the resources to put on that project [documentation, converting existing tools, moving the source over, etc] anyway. He gave me a look I will never forget - he looked like I just ran over his dog. He is surely writing a DailyWTF submission as we speak. The biggest problem with moving to git is that all the fucks will whine because it's not SVN. It's a pretty good source control system and is easier to set up (both client and server side) than SVN, but people really seem to be attached to SVN.
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Jul 28, 2013 02:21
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Pham Nuwen posted:He is surely writing a DailyWTF submission as we speak. That's a pretty harsh thing to say about a person. (Actually I guess it's just the 'editors' who are terrible.)
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Jul 28, 2013 10:28
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You guys might find this interesting: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-23330157 Inverkip power station was an oil-fired power station that was completed in the late 70's, just in time for the oil crisis and subsequently very rarely generated any power - all the original systems are still in place from the 1970s. It's being demolished today.  Any ID on that computer? (Nice monitor burn btw)
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Jul 28, 2013 14:07
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Axeman Jim posted:You guys might find this interesting: Used to go by Inverkip power station every day on the way to work.
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Jul 28, 2013 16:28
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Axeman Jim posted:You guys might find this interesting: That's a Computek 300 smart terminal, one of the terminals that could produce what passed for pretty good graphics in the early 1970s.
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Jul 28, 2013 17:45
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Also a DECwriter II in the background. 
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Jul 28, 2013 18:28
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More nice Inverkip Power Station photos: http://www.flickr.com/photos/flickrphotos/sets/72157600130113050/with/475417422/ PDP-11 with tape drives  Paper-tape punch  Telex machine  and much more at the link
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Jul 28, 2013 18:39
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dissss posted:Also the costs of migrating off a working mainframe system can be daunting. It is nearly impossible to get rid of a tailor-made legacy system. My job involves maintaining such a system. Replacing it with something more modern has been discussed every so often, but it cost somewhere north of 100 programmer-years to build the system we have, so guess what it would take to build a new one? The option of paying some guy (me) to keep the old thing shambling along wins out every time.
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Jul 28, 2013 22:18
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When I visited relatives once in the UK I came across Ceefax: It was basically a teletext system that let you look at news, weather, sports, etc while accompanied by some nice loungy music that some people have actually gone to the effort of recording (much like how some people record music used on The Weather Channel). It got shut off last year because of the digital switchover and because no one cared about staring at teletext when the Internet existed. There was also videotex which instead of sending data in one direction did it both ways and resulted in poo poo like Viewtron in the US which didn't last very long:  Not gonna lie, though, Ceefax seemed like a cool rear end thing to have on in the background.
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Jul 28, 2013 22:45
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Zeether posted:When I visited relatives once in the UK I came across Ceefax: Austria still has this too. It's mostly filled with sex-line advertisements complete with ANSI drawings of naked girls. Here are some examples:  NWS: http://i.imgur.com/LR34bHL.jpg NWS: http://i.imgur.com/0CsGrp0.jpg
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Jul 28, 2013 22:51
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I just found out via Wikipedia that the BBC still does a teletext thing called Red Button but it's digital. So I guess teletext still exists in a way, but Ceefax is long gone.
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Jul 28, 2013 22:59
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Technically they are called videotex services. The most successful was France's Minitel: It started in 1982 and finally went offline last year.
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Jul 28, 2013 23:03
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Brother Jonathan posted:Technically they are called videotex services. The most successful was France's Minitel: Minitel was basically a BBS that the terminal dialed into. I'm talking about a service that is broadcast over the air in DVB-T signals. Prior to DVB, it was done with analog broadcasts and whatever kind of decoder was necessary in the set-top-box or television.
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Jul 28, 2013 23:10
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That keyboard! Are they all like that in France?
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Jul 28, 2013 23:10
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Zeether posted:I just found out via Wikipedia that the BBC still does a teletext thing called Red Button but it's digital. So I guess teletext still exists in a way, but Ceefax is long gone. Also checking in to say teletext is still being used to its fullest potential in Belgium and it would still be my go-to place to find out when a specific plane will land on Brussels airport.
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Jul 28, 2013 23:15
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Zeether posted:Ceefax Yeah it was useful before the internet took off. You could read the latest news, get the weather, sports updates etc. A lot of people used it to buy last-minute holidays to get a great bargain.
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Jul 28, 2013 23:18
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Lincoln posted:That keyboard! Are they all like that in France? Yes.
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Jul 28, 2013 23:18
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So 888 still works?
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Jul 28, 2013 23:28
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ChickenOfTomorrow posted:So 888 still works? No, but you can still get subtitles on the digital signal
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Jul 28, 2013 23:34
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ChickenOfTomorrow posted:So 888 still works?
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Jul 28, 2013 23:53
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DNova posted:Austria still has this too. It's mostly filled with sex-line advertisements complete with ANSI drawings of naked girls. This is rad as hell. Neon text titties.
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Jul 28, 2013 23:57
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Flipperwaldt posted:Also checking in to say teletext is still being used to its fullest potential in Belgium and it would still be my go-to place to find out when a specific plane will land on Brussels airport. Rumor has it that it might be gone in 2014 or 2015 though, and at least one of the big Belgian TV providers doesn't really put any effort in getting it to work properly on their STBs(Including giving any reported bugs with it the lowest priority ever and having incomplete documentation for certain functions)
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Jul 29, 2013 00:44
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DNova posted:Minitel was basically a BBS that the terminal dialed into. I'm talking about a service that is broadcast over the air in DVB-T signals. Prior to DVB, it was done with analog broadcasts and whatever kind of decoder was necessary in the set-top-box or television. Gotcha. I didn't notice the mention of television. Minitel was part of the phone service from France Télécom.
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Jul 29, 2013 00:53
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I kind of want an ŪGJRMV keyboard now.
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Jul 29, 2013 01:08
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Ceefax wasn't an actual thing, it was just what the BBC called their teletext service. ITV called their teletext service Oracle.
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Jul 29, 2013 07:15
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Flipperwaldt posted:The information pages may be gone, but the technology is still in use for subtitles for the hard of hearing. At least on satellite, don't know about the rest. Still in extensive use in Norway, too. Program listings, news in brief, etc.
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Jul 29, 2013 07:23
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It was called teletext in Australia. I guess they just couldn't be bothered mucking around.
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Jul 29, 2013 07:26
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a dutch broadcaster, NOS, even has an TeleTekst (as it's called here) app on the appstore. You can also look it up on their website: http://nos.nl/teletekst/#100_01
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Jul 29, 2013 07:34
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Call Now posted:I kind of want an ŪGJRMV keyboard now. I was in Latvia earlier this year, they were using Qwerty so I don't know what's up with that.
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Jul 29, 2013 12:29
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To me, Ceefax was always an indicator of "you've been drinking for too long and it's time to go to bed". If you were still drinking by the time the sign language programs came on then it was DEFINITELY time to stop.
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Jul 29, 2013 13:15
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