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And voltage stability for light meter circuitry not available from alkaline batteries.
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Apr 26, 2015 23:54
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Der Luftwaffle posted:Is there a reason why cameras use/used so many different varieties of battery? Years ago a friend without a credit card asked me to use ebay to find some camera battery he needed and it seemed like there was a staggering quantity of obscure varieties that weren't used for anything else. Was it before AA and AAAs became popular or do they hold better charge or something? The battery in question (4LR44) is 6V (each LR44 is 1.5V). Most of your common coin cells such as 1616, 1620, 2025, 2032, 2450.... are standardized by their dimensions. You CAN use a 2025 instead of a 2032 but it is smaller in capacity and a little shorter (first 2 integers are diameter in xx millimeters, last two are height in x.x millimeters). Handy hint for those in desperate need. Also your standard alkaline 9V that every kid touches their tongue on has 6x AAAA batteries inside it. Some little torches use this uncommon battery - and will get you out of a day driving around for a pesky battery. Batteries are an interesting part of all our obsolete tech from over the past 100 years, and very rarely given much attention (and as such will now be spending all night learning the history of how we got standards like AA/AAA/C/D etc). A personal battery I had experience with that was well and truly obsolete by the time I started having to use it was the battery for the AN/PRC 77 Radio Set when I was in basic training for the Australian Army.  Now I joined in 2002. This radio entered service in 1968! These used a horrible horrible Lithium Sulfur Dioxide battery called the BA-386/U. It was changed to a Nickel Cadmium by the time I came around. These batteries leaked and caused all sorts of havoc (and the Ni-CD versions were no better.
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Apr 27, 2015 09:47
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Humphreys posted:The battery in question (4LR44) is 6V (each LR44 is 1.5V). Most of your common coin cells such as 1616, 1620, 2025, 2032, 2450.... are standardized by their dimensions. You CAN use a 2025 instead of a 2032 but it is smaller in capacity and a little shorter (first 2 integers are diameter in xx millimeters, last two are height in x.x millimeters). Handy hint for those in desperate need. Also your standard alkaline 9V that every kid touches their tongue on has 6x AAAA batteries inside it. Some little torches use this uncommon battery - and will get you out of a day driving around for a pesky battery. Holy crap, I recognized the "prick" right away. I hated toting that thing around .. it was still fairly modern in 1981, comparatively.
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Apr 29, 2015 02:09
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I used that fucker all through the late 80s. I wasn't the radioman per se but we all swapped out carrying that bastard.
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Apr 29, 2015 02:58
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Was that the one where one of the troubleshooting procedures was dropping it to 'Reset the Diodes'? (Dude who told me that might have been pulling my leg)
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Apr 29, 2015 06:10
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Jaguars! posted:Was that the one where one of the troubleshooting procedures was dropping it to 'Reset the Diodes'? (Dude who told me that might have been pulling my leg) It's not out of the question. quote:The fix Apple suggested in a technical bulletin was to lift the Apple III off the desk until it was three inches in the air and then drop it, repeating the procedure until the symptoms disappeared
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Apr 29, 2015 08:38
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Bobby Digital posted:It's not out of the question. That was an overheating problem that made the chips come unseated; dropping it was supposed to knock them back into place.
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Apr 29, 2015 09:33
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razorrozar posted:That was an overheating problem that made the chips come unseated; dropping it was supposed to knock them back into place. Yep, just pointing out that "drop it to fix it" is plausible.
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Apr 29, 2015 09:46
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Humbug Scoolbus posted:I used that fucker all through the late 80s. I wasn't the radioman per se but we all swapped out carrying that bastard. We were carrying around and using the modernized version of that bastard in the early 2000, although they were phasing them out to the local volunteering units.
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Apr 29, 2015 09:51
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Der Kyhe posted:We were carrying around and using the modernized version of that bastard in the early 2000, although they were phasing them out to the local volunteering units. Yeah mine was upgraded a bit - cypher modules etc. But STILL had a bullet hole from who knows which conflict before being handed to us dumb recruits.
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May 2, 2015 09:34
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Dick Trauma posted:I haven't seen a residential or commercial fusebox in a long time. I'm wondering how common they still are. Everything I've worked with since the 1990s has been circuit breakers. From way back in the thread while perusing the nostalgia machine - but at my old job I had a client in the middle of BFE in an old building that still had these things installed. They were literally in a town of a couple thousand people and it was a pharmacy/home care store that was converted from a really, really old dilapidated building. Basement ceilings were maybe 7' high tops and everything was so rickety I was afraid I'd fall through the stairs if I stepped down too hard.
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May 8, 2015 22:36
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Hyperland, starring Douglas Adams and Tom Baker as a search engine butler. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1iAJPoc23-M Very wrapped up in the early 1990's multimedia boom and focuses on interfaces such as Hypercard as well as Xanadu and in a way (though not really as flashy or dripping in VR) gets it right regarding the concepts of of world wide web that was just on the horizon. The whole thing is presented as a sort of interface that's explored by Adams, and it is an interesting look at how to not design fancy and distracting elements. It also has the cute term M-icons, which means icons that animate and talk over you.
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May 9, 2015 02:24
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Ozz81 posted:From way back in the thread while perusing the nostalgia machine - but at my old job I had a client in the middle of BFE in an old building that still had these things installed. They were literally in a town of a couple thousand people and it was a pharmacy/home care store that was converted from a really, really old dilapidated building. Basement ceilings were maybe 7' high tops and everything was so rickety I was afraid I'd fall through the stairs if I stepped down too hard. Half of my parent's house runs on these. Anything new or replaced is run to modern circuit breakers, but all of the old original outlets and lights use knob and tube wiring and are still on a fuse box.
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May 9, 2015 03:15
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WebDog posted:Hyperland, starring Douglas Adams and Tom Baker as a search engine butler. I love the emphasis on virtual spaces the early 90s was obsessed with. Nobody could predict that 20 years in the future... we still don't want to walk through virtual museums and look at virtual exhibits. We just want to look poo poo up on Wikipedia, which is visually less impressive than a CD-ROM ~interactive multimedia~ encyclopedia. That pale death mask they had to change the lighting on because it was "too realistic" was a hoot, too. Who'da thunk in 20 years we'd have every gross pore in Kiefer Sutherland's face mapped and modeled as part of a video game?
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May 9, 2015 03:32
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Going back a couple pages to educational toy chat, I had one of these when I was nine or ten: https://youtu.be/gctVrZzCa-s We had the dinosaur and space cartridges. The voice recognition was primitive and finicky, the hardware more fragile than it looked, and the recorded voice was nowhere near that clear and comprehensible. I still loved the hell out of it.
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May 9, 2015 07:12
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Code Jockey posted:I am in charge of our EDI system at my job [midsize e-commerce place], and it's still widely used by a lot of modern companies, big [like Walmart big] and small. I wouldn't consider it obsolete, it still does what it needs to do pretty well, and a lot of companies hate change and have 20 year old systems that pump out EDI data, so yay for job security. I used to be a logistics manager some years ago. I once worked with a customer that used Foxpro as their translator, made up their own 850 format and took their invoicing off an 856. No AK from either side, no 810, no 812. Since Gentran refused to do what they asked (no delimiters, just CRLF, no term, no X12 wrapper) I had to make my own pre and post translator using scripts and then give it to Gentran. EDI is only fun if you do it for a living. If not, it's the most boring thing in the world. ANSI X12 4010 ISO wrapper blah blah... Click on the phone to connect to the VAN. Lose your mind using the mapper.
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May 9, 2015 14:40
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My coworker is balls deep in a project to convert our EDI system on the AS400 from dialup to sftp. He's been working with OpenText like every god drat day. It's terrible.
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May 10, 2015 01:48
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GreenNight posted:My coworker is balls deep in a project to convert our EDI system on the AS400 from dialup to sftp. He's been working with OpenText like every god drat day. It's terrible. I hate everything in this sentence, except SFTP.
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May 10, 2015 07:09
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mostlygray posted:I used to be a logistics manager some years ago. I once worked with a customer that used Foxpro as their translator, made up their own 850 format and took their invoicing off an 856. No AK from either side, no 810, no 812. Jesus christ why Also gently caress crlf or god help me, other nonprintable characters as delimiters, just use a god drat ~ like god intended  and no ISA/GS wrapper? I just don't...  Yeah you win. My worst problem is vendors who send, for one example, price change requests in message segments instead of 855s with proper codes, and carriers... Well, just carriers. Oh my god freight carriers are bad at standards.
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May 10, 2015 07:18
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 I have one in my garage.
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May 10, 2015 07:35
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ToyotaThong posted:
I like the tiny black telephone handset.
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May 10, 2015 10:33
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Jerry Cotton posted:I like the tiny black telephone handset. I'm sure you are joking but those are port covers.
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May 10, 2015 11:38
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How to organize your video library (Betamax version). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FZxtIsoc0wE At one point I had over 1200 VHS tapes of stuff usually recorded in the crappy EP mode. My numbering system consisted of two letters and two numbers (like AC01 for American comedies). However, I ran into an issue with that series as I neared 100 tapes. Rather than renumber the tapes with three numbers, I used letters, like ACA0 through ACA9 and then ACAA through ACAZ followed by ACB0 and so forth. I'd gotten to ACCR before I started buying DVD box sets. I've ripped all of my DVD/BR to external hard drives and they take up less space than a dozen or so VHS tapes.
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May 10, 2015 14:41
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I wonder if he ever actually watched any of those tapes, or if he just liked being a  and collecting as many pointless TV shows and movies as possible?
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May 10, 2015 14:48
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All of those tapes are sitting in a landfill somewhere right now.
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May 10, 2015 15:28
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EDI makes me want to puke, how perfect. It's literally like the worst you can do before someone says "we need to start over asap". What's that, the customer accidentally changed the format of the files and don't know how to change it back in their software from 1987? And their big sale is TOMORROW?! Can they just hand type all 40k new prices instead because it will be faster than trying to decipher the new 400MB of garbage shitfiles they are trying to send us? I had an old coworker who specialized in Clipper and still thought EDI was bad. SLOSifl has a new favorite as of 15:59 on May 10, 2015 |
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May 10, 2015 15:54
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cobalt impurity posted:All of those tapes are sitting in a landfill somewhere right now. There's another video from 2009 and his collection was up to over 2000 tapes. Any tape I had that I was able to replace completely went in the trash (sorry, mother nature). For the rest, I broke down the tape and just kept the supply reel. I'd gotten the idea from the microfilm reels at the library. I keep a complete empty shell with take-up reel in case I need to look at it again.
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May 10, 2015 16:00
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Jonathan Yeah! posted:Couldn't you just use the ISA/ serial ports over USB? I imagine that would be way cheaper than baking 20 year old tech into a swish new motherboard. A lot of the tech in your own motherboard dates back at least 20 years. VGA came out in 1987 for example, and you probably still have a VGA port. PCI slot? PCI came out in 1993. CR-2032 coin cell keeping the BIOS settings and clock running? Same thing in a 20 year old motherboard. ATX standard? Came out in 1995. If you still have PS/2 ports, those came out the same time VGA did. And there are probably still parts of ISA in your motherboard, even if the physical slots disappeared long ago.
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May 10, 2015 18:07
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Bobby Digital posted:It's not out of the question. True story, when I worked on jet fighter avionics we would do this to the radar receiver modules and it would sometimes fix them. Slamming one specific side into the deck would re-seat the cards into the backplane, causing us to get at least another flight or two out of the system before we'd have to send it back for real maintenance. Gotta keep that sortie rate up somehow.
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May 10, 2015 18:36
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Cracked_Gear posted:A lot of the tech in your own motherboard dates back at least 20 years. VGA came out in 1987 for example, and you probably still have a VGA port. "20 year old tech" was a guess. RS232 came out in '69 and ISA in '81. And, people still use PCI, CR-2302, ATX and PS2 ports. Only people trapped in an endless hell still use ISA and RS232, and I don't think it's worth making their lives any better 
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May 10, 2015 18:39
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VGA is really just D-Subminiature, which came out in 1952. The extra six pins that DE15 has over nine-pin D-Sub don't even carry display signal. You can convert DE15 to 9 pin D-sub and back and still get a perfect picture out of the other end in most cases.
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May 10, 2015 18:46
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Jonathan Yeah! posted:Couldn't you just use the ISA/ serial ports over USB? I imagine that would be way cheaper than baking 20 year old tech into a swish new motherboard. A lot of the ISA/Parallel via USB stuff doesn't actually work for most of what places want. You have to get the company to recompile their original 1985 drivers to actually read properly through USB, and that's hard when the company that made your ISA card has been dead since 1994. Most places that uses those are factories and stuff where it would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to actually upgrade to something modern, so when the computer breaks they get a new motherboard and throw a patched version of DOS or Windows 3.1 on and keep using their ancient stuff.
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May 10, 2015 18:51
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The Casualty posted:
This is called "percussive maintenance".
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May 10, 2015 18:59
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Jonathan Yeah! posted:"20 year old tech" was a guess. RS232 came out in '69 and ISA in '81. And, people still use PCI, CR-2302, ATX and PS2 ports. Only people trapped in an endless hell still use ISA and RS232, and I don't think it's worth making their lives any better Way too much industrial and scientific equipment uses RS232 for it to be depreciated in any anything less than ten years from now.
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May 10, 2015 19:59
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Mister Kingdom posted:How to organize your video library (Betamax version).  I got irrationally upset at this part. Also I wouldn't have bothered with the color-coded titles. Running numbers on the tapes, amended with info about the tape type (so 143, 144, 145-2, 146-2, 147-S...). Keep a ledger where you enter the content of each tape in order - even better, index cards. That way you could have kept one index for movies, one for shows - one for each show, even - ordered by title. Look through your index for a movie, get the number, go to the shelf, pull it. Like actual libraries did! Although to be fair, not a bad setup as it is. Then again when I was a kid I taped a lot of stuff from the air and just labelled each one. First by typewriter, later in colorful WordArt. Still got all those tapes in my parents' basement and can't think of a single thing I'd want to pull off them.
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May 10, 2015 20:12
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Oddly enough, in retrospect the sort of stuff people recorded off TV back in the 80s and 90s onto VHS that is probably worth keeping is the stuff that they worked hard to keep from saving in the first place: Old commercials. Most TV shows and movies have probably ended up on streaming or DVD in the years since for probably less than the cost of the blank VHS tape, but stuff like old ads (regional and national) are probably sort of lost to the ages. In hindsight, I sort of wish in the 90s I spent less time hitting pause during commecial breaks. They're a nice, strange little time capsule to the various years when you want to remember not just the entertainment that was popular, but the products and services, too. Sort of like a few years ago I was watching an old VHS tape and saw ads for things like Sam Goody and Suncoast and with a select pop titles, or old SURGE(!) commercials.
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May 10, 2015 20:46
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And stuff like ads for music available on CD, LP and cassette!
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May 10, 2015 20:51
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Another example: Mid-90s. Commercials for Lucent Technologies. There was this whole huge buzz for them for a few years, then it sort of felt like they vanished. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EljC8YGS0eA
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May 10, 2015 20:54
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JediTalentAgent posted:Oddly enough, in retrospect the sort of stuff people recorded off TV back in the 80s and 90s onto VHS that is probably worth keeping is the stuff that they worked hard to keep from saving in the first place: Old commercials. http://www.fastcompany.com/3022022/the-incredible-story-of-marion-stokes-who-single-handedly-taped-35-years-of-tv-news
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May 10, 2015 21:03
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I got almost all my stuff off public service TV, which can't have ad breaks over here. But if I still have the wrestling shows I had a buddy tape for me, I could probably supply the world with a very comprehensive list of phone sex ads! Actually back then there was one local station that had regular late night double or even triple movie features, hosted by a guy in zombie makeup. Real weird stuff - they started, obviously, with horror movie classics, but later there was stuff like a Ralph Bakshi triple feature, a Monty Python night (that turned out to be 2/3 Terry Gilliam movies) or just four hours of Looney Tunes cartoons. That is stuff I should maybe make sure my parents don't chuck out. That station also showed Monty Python's Flying Circus, in English with German subtitles, back when I was maybe six years old. That probably accounts for a lot of things. And I dimly remember they'd show entries for some animation contest - properly weird stuff that is probably completely lost to the ages. All long before we had a VCR though. Man. TV has really gone to poo poo. My Lovely Horse has a new favorite as of 21:11 on May 10, 2015 |
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May 10, 2015 21:06
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