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Reminds me of Daft Punk on floppy drives. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2lq34Ob7Gsg
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Mar 20, 2014 21:42
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Jasper Tin Neck posted:Unless they outlast books by a wide margin. Which is doubtful, for the time being. I wouldn't call drawing boards obsolete. There are a few disciplines that still use them. A lot of the smaller groups producing shop drawings work on the board here. Also when CAD software took over the average design time for a project increased by about three weeks. This is because you could now revise multiple times without having to start from scratch. This meant designers and engineers started working a bit more loosely.
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Mar 20, 2014 22:27
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Man or Astro-Man?'s "A Simple Text File" was specifically written for a dot-matrix printer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o0QHY7S-OtU
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Mar 20, 2014 22:30
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Collateral Damage posted:I'm on 10.9 and I still have it. Although maybe that's because I had it installed under previous versions and it doesn't get removed when upgrading. That's exactly it. If you buy any Mac with OS X 10.9 Mavericks pre-installed, there is an X11 stub application in Utilities. Its only function is to open an article in Safari on Apple's support site which then directs you to download an open-source version of X11 called Xquartz. It does indeed state that X11 has been removed from standard OS X installs. 
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Mar 20, 2014 22:35
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Binary Badger posted:That's exactly it. Ahaha this going to cause SUCH shitfit in Penn State's Astronomy and Astrophysics department the next time someone has to upgrade their computer. Every single professor uses X11 as the default terminal window and the system is crappy and barely tolerates Macs already and someone's gonna have to set them all up to have Xquartz 
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Mar 21, 2014 00:13
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Pilsner posted:Oh Lord, CDE. My university's UNIX-based data labs used that at least up until 2006; maybe it's still there. It worked, but it was quite laggy since all the processing took place on a central server; we just worked on a thin client. I'm pretty sure that's what I used to do CAD on in about 2005 at university and once did something like open the wrong terminal and instead of starting up the cad app crashed every other client in the room. At least none of my work was lost 
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Mar 21, 2014 01:15
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Plotterboy posted:I wouldn't call drawing boards obsolete. There are a few disciplines that still use them. A lot of the smaller groups producing shop drawings work on the board here. Architects also seem to use them, at least the older generation. The landscape architecture professors at my school also have a huge boner for paper and pen (Seriously, screw doing A1-sized posters with a pen. In three copies. That's just busywork.) I will dispute your point about working looser though. At least in my trade (railway construction) there seems to be an effect akin to Jevon's paradox with respect to planning. A few decades ago, plans were rather minimal and most stuff was left to be figured out on-site. Nowadays plans are much more detailed, which saves a lot of head-scratching of the construction sites. As a bonus, the drainage on newer stretches actually works. Drawings have also become much more legible since you can do separate drawings for different disciplines, rather than trying to cram all information into the same blueprint.
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Mar 21, 2014 21:57
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No doing things in pen isn't just busy work. Especially when it comes to new trainees. Working on the boards teaches scale and also encourages people to think before they start a drawing. Its really difficult to grasp the concept of scales in an infinite 3 axis array that you can view from any point in the array. Surprisingly I also work in railway. And ive found the opposite. Our older drawings are easier to read and better detailed, where the new cads are crammed and difficult to read, and the details are much looser. This however may be due to the guys we use to build. Last major project I finished up with I had to make the contractor rewalk a 200km stretch and redraw the drawings 3 times until the cads where up to code.
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Mar 21, 2014 23:58
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How have neither of you posted in this thread yet?
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Mar 22, 2014 06:14
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Wilford Cutlery posted:How have neither of you posted in this thread yet? Train people choo choo choose to post here
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Mar 22, 2014 13:19
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wTP2RUD_cL0&feature=kp The 1985 video for Dire Straits' Money for Nothing is apparently the first ever CGI music video. I've got to admit, they never seemed like the kind of band that'd take such a bold leap. It's hilarious how blocky and janky the animation is though. As Charlie Brooker said: 'Look at it! They must have been stupid!'
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Mar 22, 2014 16:23
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Daktar posted:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wTP2RUD_cL0&feature=kp Fun fact, the animators behind that music video went on to start Mainframe Entertainment and the tv show ReBoot. The CGI characters from the music video have a cameo in the ReBoot Episode "Talent Night"
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Mar 22, 2014 16:32
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Lowen SoDium posted:Fun fact, the animators behind that music video went on to start Mainframe Entertainment and the tv show ReBoot. Holy poo poo - Reboot! I still have cards from those days in a folder somewhere!
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Mar 22, 2014 16:38
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Lowen SoDium posted:Fun fact, the animators behind that music video went on to start Mainframe Entertainment and the tv show ReBoot. Where they get booed off stage if memory serves. Hell that entire show is a cavalcade of obsolete computer technology, from the various references down to the hardware they used to make it. It apparently took them years to animate enough episodes to have a single season at first while they developed the software tools. Today you could probably animate an entire season of a show like it in a month.
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Mar 22, 2014 21:27
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Wilford Cutlery posted:How have neither of you posted in this thread yet? Because I couldn't give two shits about locos.
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Mar 23, 2014 02:13
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Daktar posted:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wTP2RUD_cL0&feature=kp
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Mar 23, 2014 11:15
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Kwyndig posted:Where they get booed off stage if memory serves. Hell that entire show is a cavalcade of obsolete computer technology, from the various references down to the hardware they used to make it. It apparently took them years to animate enough episodes to have a single season at first while they developed the software tools. Today you could probably animate an entire season of a show like it in a month. It always amuses me that with the sole exception of the first episode, South Park has been made using the same animation software that was used for Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within.
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Mar 23, 2014 11:28
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Jedit posted:It always amuses me that with the sole exception of the first episode, South Park has been made using the same animation software that was used for Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within. WOW that is a knowledge bomb on me (I an ex 3D animator). I remember having to delve through my win95 temp files for the quicktime file for trailer of that movie. That trailer with 'Ich Will' by Rammstein playing on winamp takes me back.
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Mar 23, 2014 16:48
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The south park guys made the analogy that it's like using a bulldozer to build a sandcastle.
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Mar 23, 2014 18:47
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This thread is great, I loved the mixture of old computer tech that I remember, and the stuff that just never caught on or just badly designed. I am surprised no one mentioned cd caddys http://i.imgur.com/kGgysyg.jpg In the early days of CD roms, many drives needed the disk to be placed inside a caddy before inserting it into the drive. It was an annoying extra step, and honestly, i was always confused on why they needed them in the first place because by the time CD roms were becoming common on computers, CD players were everywhere, and I have never seen one of those need a caddy. Why they stuck with me is a good friend of mine during the late 90s was obsessed with making his entire computer scsi, because it was slightly faster. Thing is, scsi stuff was way more expensive, and you got a lot less for your money than you'd get with IDE stuff. I remember my friend bragging about how his 40mb scsi hd had a .2 MS faster access time than the 340mb IDE hd I just bought, even thought it was literally 1/3 the price. Anyways, the only SCSI CD Rom drive he could find used caddies, but this being 96 or 97, they were long out of date, so he was limited to one caddy that came with the drive, and you could not buy them in stores separately anymore. Obviously this is before Amazon and NCIX and other online stores, but even now you can still buy them but they are expensive. A tech that I used be to fascinated with when I'd go to the electronics store with my dad as a kid was auto flipping cassette decks. Anyone as old as I am will remember when a cassette finished its side, you can to take it out and flip it around. Eventually they made it so at the end of the side, the tape would just start playing in reverse with the head reading the second side of the tape. Either before that feature was standard, or because just having it go click and the rest of tape that was recorded off the radio would start up again wasn't baller enough, they had decks that actually flipped the tape around https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lf4eR3ZkvoY I would watch it while my dad looked at something else, because it was freaky seeing these robots play music. Though I think the fact that you'd be playing the Moody Blues to get your lady in the mood and right after Nights in White Satin there's a big CHACHUNK as it flips around would pretty much spoil it.
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Mar 25, 2014 01:22
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Caddies were all about protecting the disc, which was an issue back before scratch-resistant technology and in environments where you might be inserting the disc a lot (e.g. doing a bunch of OS installs). I'd also heard that they allowed you to spin the disc faster, but that sounds like bullshit. But they'd make cleanup easier if a disc shattered. The flipping cassette head seems bizarre, and I expect it's an eye-candy Unique Selling Point. It's can't be that hard to have a bi-directional read head, although Wikipedia suggests that it's tricky to get right - some systems had mechanically flipping heads instead of the whole tape. You did remind me of some obsolete tech; the rising scale of tones at one end of a side of tape. It's hard to find info on it, but I think they were part of a Super Dynamic Range feature. The rising tones may have allowed the player to adjust its EQs based on how the standard tones played through it.
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Mar 25, 2014 01:48
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Ugh, don't get me started on SCSI. Apple used it in all of their Macs up until about 2000. The whole technology was notoriously temperamental. There were several different types of SCSI cables that may or may not interoperate, some devices are "self-terminating" and some may or may not need a terminator, some devices are preset to a particular device ID or don't work when set to a particular ID or when they are in a particular place in a SCSI chain. A common joke was that you needed to sacrifice a live chicken in order to get your SCSI device to actually work.
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Mar 25, 2014 02:01
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I still have a SCSI ZIP drive. Double-obsolete.
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Mar 25, 2014 02:05
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minato posted:The flipping cassette head seems bizarre, and I expect it's an eye-candy Unique Selling Point. It's can't be that hard to have a bi-directional read head, although Wikipedia suggests that it's tricky to get right - some systems had mechanically flipping heads instead of the whole tape. My dad's late 80's Oldsmobile Eighty Eight had the no-flip tape deck. It blew my loving mind.
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Mar 25, 2014 02:14
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empty baggie posted:I still have a SCSI ZIP drive. Double-obsolete. At the last place I worked, I was cleaning out a storage closet and found one of these. I have no idea if it works. A quick check on eBay shows that people still buy these things. I should probably put it on there. Mister Kingdom has a new favorite as of 02:20 on Mar 25, 2014 |
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Mar 25, 2014 02:18
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Hell, at the CURRENT place I work, our servers and workstations are all SCSI. Doubly obsolete, they are also DEC Alphas.
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Mar 25, 2014 02:24
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Konstantin posted:Ugh, don't get me started on SCSI. Apple used it in all of their Macs up until about 2000. The whole technology was notoriously temperamental. There were several different types of SCSI cables that may or may not interoperate, some devices are "self-terminating" and some may or may not need a terminator, some devices are preset to a particular device ID or don't work when set to a particular ID or when they are in a particular place in a SCSI chain. A common joke was that you needed to sacrifice a live chicken in order to get your SCSI device to actually work. Yea, he probably spent like 2 grand at the time getting this system together, and there was always some problem with it. He loves Os2, and guess what, os2 warp had some huge problem with an all scsi computer. He eventually broke down and got a IDE windows machine that was significantly better in every way, and half the cost. He's big into SSD now, but I have to admit, even though they are more expensive and smaller, seeing windows boot up in literally a second is amazing, and huge games that require lots of access time run super smooth on it because the SSD is so fast.
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Mar 25, 2014 04:25
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twistedmentat posted:Yea, he probably spent like 2 grand at the time getting this system together, and there was always some problem with it. He loves Os2, and guess what, os2 warp had some huge problem with an all scsi computer. He eventually broke down and got a IDE windows machine that was significantly better in every way, and half the cost. Yeah, because an SSD is worth the cost in most every day situations, where SCSI wasn't back then pretty much at all. empty baggie has a new favorite as of 04:51 on Mar 25, 2014 |
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Mar 25, 2014 04:48
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I'm still using a SCSI scanner, but only because it's easier than paying $2k to replace it with the modern USB equivalent (it's an old large-format Epson Expression). That was fun to get running on Win7x64...
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Mar 25, 2014 06:51
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poo poo, all my rack mount servers I use at home now use SCSI, albeit the hot swap ultra wide kind with fancy backplanes / management software that's actually pretty easy to work with. I do remember the nightmare that was 90s desktop SCSI, though. I had a Compaq... Deskpro? It was a big wide flat desktop PC, and it had a 10 gig SCSI disk in it. I thought it was just the coolest thing, and it was honestly a quite stable file server [had a few other disks in it, the 10g SCSI was the OS drive] until the SCSI disk just kind of said "lol gently caress you" one day, and decided to stop working.
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Mar 25, 2014 06:52
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These days, workstation SCSI would typically be SAS, which is a perfectly nice technology that uses the same power and data connectors as SATA (and you can put SATA disks on SAS controllers, though not the reverse). It helps that it - like SATA - uses one cable per drive instead of daisychaining. Oh, and the alpha and related OSes deserves an effortpost at some point. I could do it, but I'll have to replace the BIOS battery in my PWS first. Computer viking has a new favorite as of 08:09 on Mar 25, 2014 |
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Mar 25, 2014 08:07
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I think the tl;dr is that parallell bus interfaces always suck.
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Mar 25, 2014 10:31
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SCSI, huh? When it came time to replace the old Apple IIe in the early 90s, my parents went out and bought an absolutely terrible Packard Bell. If memory serves, it was a 386SX-16. It managed to spectacularly fry its video chips within a month of purchase. Wherever we bought it from grudgingly took it back, and we ended up with another Packard Bell, this time a 386-20; I forget what killed it, but it lasted less than a week. At this point my father went to the beige-box builder that supplied his business, and we ended up with a no-name tower with a non-Intel 386DX-40, eight 256k RAM sticks and a double 5 1/4" ESDI hard drive. That thing lasted a good two years before the mobo burned up. I ended up putting a SCSI card in it at some point for a CD burner, because as crap as SCSI was, it was pretty much the only means of successfully burning a disc before buffer underrun protection was a thing. That's another thing that's obsolete / failed - the computer assembly industry before Best Buy, before Gateway 2000 and Dell, certainly before Newegg and Amazon, where you were either mail-ordering parts out the back of PC Magazine and Byte with best guesses as to compatibility, or dealing with one of the two or three beige-box assemblers within driving distance. Or spending bucketfuls of money at the Apple store for whatever configuration they felt like selling you; the more things change, the more they stay the same.
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Mar 25, 2014 11:22
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Back in the early 90s my brother had a show on KLSU, they used cd caddies with the cd player because it was less prone to failure than the motor drive cd trays. By the time I was in college and got on WTUL it seemed like most of that stuff had disappeared, although we constantly had problems with at least one of the cd players at my station with read errors/door not opening.
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Mar 25, 2014 15:46
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Snowdens Secret posted:
The LOCAL not actually affiliated with the company Apple Store that is. I remember after Apple started opening locations all over the place the last Mac specific computer store in town had to start doing Penske truck rentals to keep afloat, I went in to get AppleCare service on my PowerBook and laughed when I saw a full priced copy of OS X Server 1.0 on the software shelves. I think this was in 2004 so that software was already a few years outdated, and couldn't run on any of the modern hardware.
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Mar 25, 2014 15:50
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 I inherited one of these from my grandmother years ago, it is a tiny black and white projection TV, the image quality was not great but definitely watchable. When I used to do security I'd bring it with me every night with a set of rechargeable batteries. I used it right up until all the channels went digital and rendered it completely obsolete. 
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Mar 25, 2014 17:56
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I used to do some freelance PC service work for a doctor in town who had a gaming PC network set up in his basement. There were 8 high spec machines down there. He was huge about spending money on the most expensive parts, no mater if they helped game performance or not. All of his hard-drives and optical drives were SCSI and they were a massive pain in the rear end to get working in Windows 98 for all of the reasons listed in post above. Some other oddities in his computer room were that he had widescreen CRT monitors. Sony FW900 24" monitors. Those sons-of-bitches were heavy. They looked great, but back then very few games supported widescreen aspect ratios so most of the players in games just looked short and fat. He used Gigabit network adapters on standard PCI slots. For those of you who don't know, Standard PCI slots have a shared bandwidth of 133MB/s. A Gigabit network adapter uses up to 125 MB/S. That doesn't leave much bandwidth to go around for any other PCI device on the system like the sound cards and 3DFX Voodoo cards that he also had in the systems. Not that it mattered much, the only time when files of any size were being moved around was when game mods or patches needed to be distributed from machine to machine. And back in those days, it was a few hundred MB at max. He also had some duel socket motherboard. I can't remember what CPUs he had in it but I do remember trying in vain to stop him from buying them because: A: No game at the time would run Multi-threaded B: Windows 98 didn't recognize more than one processor any ways, and good luck runs games on Windows NT4 I forgot how much RAM he had in that system, but I know it was more than Windows 98 supported. There was also a very high end video card that he spend a thousand dollars on because it had more memory than anything else on the market. Judging from pictures, I think it was a 3Dlabs Oxygen series card. What does he use it for? Playing Age of Empires and Tribes using 3DFX Voodoo (2?) pass through cards. I have no doubt that every machine in there had at least $7000 in it new. And none of them performed more than 15% better in any meaningful category than $1000 PC I had at the time.
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Mar 25, 2014 20:02
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vxskud posted:
My dad had one of those he used at work. Picture wasn't bad, but I remember it being a battery hog.
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Mar 25, 2014 21:43
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Dirk Squarejaw posted:My dad had one of those he used at work. Picture wasn't bad, but I remember it being a battery hog. I'd usually go through 2 sets of 4 AA batteries in a shift. So I had a bunch of rechargeable NIMH batteries I'd use. Or one set of those really drat expensive Duracell lithium AAs.
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Mar 25, 2014 21:59
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vxskud posted:
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