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GOTTA STAY FAI posted:also where are all the goons whose first computer memories involve the use of punch cards
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0toShifty posted:My family's first ever computer was an Amiga A1000. It had a rather advanced color screen and speakers and full sound. It had a mouse, a fully multitasking operating system with icons. Played with Deluxe Paint, Skyfox. My school computer lab had these. Back in 1987-88 the computer teachers wanted amigas, but the government wouldn't buy them (gov wanted to wait a year or two and buy IBM 386clones), so they held a fundraiser to fill a lab with 12 amiga 1000s. It ruled. (2 years later they got the 386s, so we had both in the end) E:, my first electronic hand held game was this: http://rctoymemories.com/2012/11/16/tomy-digital-derby-auto-raceway-1978/ Followed by nintendo and clones "game and watch" LCD games. Fo3 has a new favorite as of 05:49 on Jul 6, 2015 |
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Jul 6, 2015 05:45
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It's not so much a failed technology as it is a complete scam, but I remember seeing a lot of commercials for reception booster stickers back when cell phones were becoming commonplace. Just put it on your phone and get a boosted signal! Who'd have thought that a $20 sticker doesn't actually do anything.
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Jul 6, 2015 06:06
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god now I want to play snake
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Jul 6, 2015 06:20
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  Gann Jerrod posted:It's not so much a failed technology as it is a complete scam, but I remember seeing a lot of commercials for reception booster stickers back when cell phones were becoming commonplace. I remember seeing commercials for a similar probably also didn't do anything, it was a teardrop shaped thing you clipped onto the top of your car antenna to boost FM reception.
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Jul 6, 2015 07:08
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When you're considering old school graphics, you can't go past Supergirl's - for possibly one of the more elaborate in-camera credits I'm aware of. https://vimeo.com/24676158 Those letters are 4" high chrome letters. So everything had to get milled and plated then shot inside a smoke tank. The final title crawl was a massive long row of all the credits placed in a long line on the studio floor then having the motion control camera pass over. You'll see it's hitting the limits of the day as the SUPERGIRL title pretty much flies into the camera and everything else flies under. The whole thing cost around one million. The company who did this and their whole range of titles with bits of trivia on what was done.
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Jul 6, 2015 07:51
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WebDog posted:When you're considering old school graphics, you can't go past Supergirl's - for possibly one of the more elaborate in-camera credits I'm aware of. That is ingenious and insane in the best way. Reminds me of how it was too expensive for the Escape From New York producers to render a wireframe model of NYC for one of the shots, so they built a scale model, painted it black, outlined everything with green tape and just did a flyover shot of that. Practical effects never fail to blow my mind.
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Jul 6, 2015 08:59
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Der Luftwaffle posted:That is ingenious and insane in the best way. Reminds me of how it was too expensive for the Escape From New York producers to render a wireframe model of NYC for one of the shots, so they built a scale model, painted it black, outlined everything with green tape and just did a flyover shot of that. Practical effects never fail to blow my mind. It's even more mind bending when you realize what some people managed to accomplish using practical effects. Go watch 2001. Literally none of that movie was CGI.
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Jul 6, 2015 09:32
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Eponine posted:My family took notes on my father's undergraduate thesis punch cards through the 1990s. I had many vocabulary flashcards with tons of random holes in them. My parents used to find boxes of this stuff while cleaning out offices, so I always ended up with a shitload of this paper to draw on. 
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Jul 6, 2015 09:33
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Der Luftwaffle posted:Reminds me of how it was too expensive for the Escape From New York producers to render a wireframe model of NYC for one of the shots, so they built a scale model, painted it black, outlined everything with green tape and just did a flyover shot of that. ToxicSlurpee posted:It's even more mind bending when you realize what some people managed to accomplish using practical effects. Well back in 1968 there was very little on hand for CG. It wasn't until the mid 80's that CG started being used effectively in films. 2001 was pioneering for using front projection - essentially a revamp of Pepper's ghost.  A projector is sending an image into a two way mirror that bounces the image onto a highly refractive white backdrop (think the stuff they use in hi-vis vest) which is then recorded by the camera looking straight on though the back of the two way. Front projection was seen as a cheap way to create backdrops as it didn't suffer from issues such as fuzzy chroma key outlines or obvious matte lines. It's main drawback is that it limits your ability to light a scene as anything lit has to expose correctly or the backdrop gets washed out as the projector can only push out so much light. To get brighter images of what was being projected Kubrick's team built a specialized water cooled arc lamp. For the space shots they used a primitive version of motion control where the camera was on a track that was linked into it's own motor and be able to match speeds to enable clean passes of the ship and the stars, which were composted later. BogDew has a new favorite as of 12:53 on Jul 6, 2015 |
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Jul 6, 2015 10:33
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MeatloafCat posted:My uncle has owned a small auto repair shop since the early 90s. He uses a database built on dbase III, it even has his first transaction from sometime in 1993. One problem is that the database only seems to want to print to an IBM proprinter. For a while we were using old HP deskjets that could emulate a proprinter, but the last one finally gave out. As a replacement he ended up buying a brand new (not even refurbished) OKI Data tractor feed dot matrix printer. I even bought him a 5000 sheet box of tractor feed paper to go with it. This was in 2013. You don't want to listen to it all day, but they are indestructible beasts that stand up to conditions that destroy lasers. They're incredibly easy to maintain, supplies are cheap, and they're just so hard to foul up. I had one at a previous job that was probably older than me and had been in service so long the little ridges in the paper feed area had been worn off.
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Jul 6, 2015 12:44
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pienipple posted:You don't want to listen to it all day, but they are indestructible beasts that stand up to conditions that destroy lasers. They're incredibly easy to maintain, supplies are cheap, and they're just so hard to foul up. I had one at a previous job that was probably older than me and had been in service so long the little ridges in the paper feed area had been worn off. He figured it would last until he decided to retire, whenever that will be. When I was helping him research what to get, I kept seeing stories like yours. They seem pretty indestructible which is good considering the amount of ground metal dust, regular dust and who knows what else is floating around in a repair garage.
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Jul 6, 2015 14:02
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My first computer was this compact oddity: Even though my dad soldered a cable to plug our tape deck into it, I don't think I got any of the games I got to load properly. Fortunately, the instruction manual came with a few listings of BASIC games, so I typed them in whenever I wanted to play something. A C-64 with a tunable tape deck and a signal strength meter felt like a huge upgrade afterwards. An another huge milestone was an Amstrad PC1640. Because our local bank had a dial-in line, my parents bought a 2400 baud modem for it to do online banking. Getting anything downloaded from a BBS felt like a huge accomplishment, and more advanced protocols like SModem that allowed chatting while downloading were a godsend.
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Jul 6, 2015 14:32
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ToxicSlurpee posted:It's even more mind bending when you realize what some people managed to accomplish using practical effects. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QfRAfsK5cvU
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Jul 6, 2015 15:36
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MeatloafCat posted:My uncle has owned a small auto repair shop since the early 90s. He uses a database built on dbase III, it even has his first transaction from sometime in 1993. One problem is that the database only seems to want to print to an IBM proprinter. For a while we were using old HP deskjets that could emulate a proprinter, but the last one finally gave out. As a replacement he ended up buying a brand new (not even refurbished) OKI Data tractor feed dot matrix printer. I even bought him a 5000 sheet box of tractor feed paper to go with it. This was in 2013. We used Dbase way too long at my current job. It was useful because we have a bunch of different files it could pull from and manipulate.
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Jul 6, 2015 15:39
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Everything looks like my Radio Shack MC-10.
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Jul 6, 2015 16:17
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ToxicSlurpee posted:It's even more mind bending when you realize what some people managed to accomplish using practical effects. I saw a making of Team America and was blown away by the lack of CGI, it was really impressive
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Jul 6, 2015 16:33
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I'm apparently a heathen who never had the joy of a Commodore or loading games by tape. I grew up in the beginning of the time when computers became convent to use with barely any touching of a command line, except to "hack" into games (after finding the path name from XTREE) that were locked on the menu shell. My earliest home PC as kid was in 1990, likely some IBM 286 with a CGA setup that turned the grass purple in Mixed up Mother Goose. Somewhere that year we got upgraded to an EGA monitor that corrected it to green. I recall the monitor having faint lines of red pen drawn in from my father's attempt to win in Manhunter by drawing the map onto the screen to navigate the sewers. It booted to a simple menu select shell that contained ten items, including windows 3.1 Other items were Prince of Persia, Jack Nicklaus Golf, Manhunter, Math Crawler a pinball game that ran too fast and this, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ls57aM9qOs For ages we had various DOS shells, including one that was green with yellow borders on the windows, and the in-built screensaver was some exploding clock. We also seemed to get subsequent upgrades fairly often as we rented instead of brought, I found some old BIOS printouts that suggested in 1994 we had a 286 with an 80mb drive and 640KB of RAM, along with written instructions on how to compress everything and get Extended mem working. I seem to recall being told "we're getting an upgrade as we only have 4mb left!" And everything brought seemed to cost around $3000/$4000. Enter Windows 95 and a shiny 486 and CD Roms like the Grollier Encyclopedia - featuring time lapse videos of rotting bread! Plus programs like Fine Artist.
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Jul 6, 2015 16:40
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WebDog posted:
I think the single hardest thing I ever had to do with a PC was get Ultima VII running in DOS. Gamers back then were already used to editing autoexec.bat and config.sys to manipulate what drivers got loaded into which memory segments, loving around with expanded memory managers, and so forth, but Ultima 7 used its own proprietary memory manager that didn't work with that poo poo. Just getting the damned thing to load, let alone with working mouse and sound drivers, was tricky. You needed 561,144 bytes of free RAM for the game to work, which was ridiculous. One thing from back in the day that blew me away was GEOS, pretty sure it's been mentioned here before but I don't know to what level of detail. Graphical operating system for the Commodore 64, at one point it was the second-most popular GUI, behind the Mac's, and the third most-popular OS, behind MacOS and MS-DOS. Basically gave you the capabilities of the original Macintosh on a 1Mhz processor with 64KB of RAM, it was really amazing for the day and required some pretty specific adaptations of the C64's various hardware idiosyncracies to write: http://www.osnews.com/story/15223/GEOS_The_Graphical_Environment_Operating_System/page6/ quote:The icons in GEOS are all 24x21 pixels in size. This is because the Commodore 64's sprites are always 24x21 in size which equates to 3 characters (8 pixels wide) across and almost 3 characters high. Whilst GEOS's icons are not sprites themselves (they could be of any particular size because they are drawn dot for dot on the bit-mapped screen), 24x21 is used so that the mouse pointer (a sprite) can become a ghosted icon in drag and drop operations. This was amazing at the time: 
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Jul 6, 2015 17:08
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Phanatic posted:This was amazing at the time: Poor mans MacWrite which came out a few years earlier.
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Jul 6, 2015 17:13
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I never even touched autoexe until DosBox  High school was Macs for the most part of it - so I'm a bloody softie.All the horror stories of IRQ assignments and messing with expanded memory I just missed. At worst it was sitting through ten disk installs of Martian Memorandum and waiting for the defrag to finish. The last thing the family brought was a Celeron 400 that had an indented reset button. "You never need to restart this computer" the salesman told us. They had no idea I was to be around on it. The monthly install of PC demos and random apps (there was a copy of BEOS floating around that I had no idea how to boot) didn't mix well with the fact many things flat out overwrote crucial DDL's at the time. This eventually broke the drivers for the graphics card (Riva TNT2) and when trying to fix that I managed to break the mouse drivers - making the cursor move only in massive leaps across the screen. So I attempted to fix that by re-installing windows 98 over itself...which surprisingly didn't break it, but didn't help. $900 later for a backup and re-install. So after that I finally taught myself how to fix things, kind of handy as the internet had come along with new things to click on. "Hey why did someone send me a shortcut?" 
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Jul 6, 2015 17:34
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blugu64 posted:Poor mans MacWrite which came out a few years earlier. On much more expensive hardware with double the RAM. The original Mac was priced at $2500, the 64 retail price at that point had dropped to roughly $250. So yeah, "poor mans" is probably both accurate and nothing to sneer at.
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Jul 6, 2015 17:42
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Phanatic posted:
When I was at college we had some colour Macs, a big deal at the time. Another guy in my class was designing a print font and he used pixellated art like in the image above, he was 'reacting against Macs and standing up for print' or some such bullshit. His whole point was that Macs couldn't render text well on screen and this was the basis for his 2 month long project. I had a Mac at home and one day I noticed him working away, I leaned over and upped the resolution on his monitor and accidentally made his whole point moot 
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Jul 6, 2015 17:48
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Mike-o posted:I remember constantly getting kicked off my connection because my aunt was trying to call my mom, she eventually had figured out that if she kept calling it would kill my connection so she could get through. I still get poo poo for this from my mom and aunt to this day. Apparently we had really good phone lines because I was consistently getting 56k versus my friends getting 28.8. Jokes on me though, they both got cable/dsl while I was stuck with dialup until 2005. I miss the dialup tones, don't miss the slow as molasses download speeds. Many years ago, there was a multiline BBS in the town I lived in. It had, I think, 4 lines? I used to have a special dialing list in my terminal program that had the number for BBS user in town I knew that had call waiting. It would ring them then immediately dial the BBS. (Back in the day, a call waiting beep could kill a modem connection.)
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Jul 6, 2015 21:44
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Couldn't you dial *67 or something like that to disable call waiting for that one call? I remember every dial-up program asking for your call waiting disable code. (Not that my parents ever had call waiting, or caller id for that matter) Then again, people had 12:00 blinking on their VCRs for all eternity, so that might still be too difficult to set up.
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Jul 6, 2015 21:56
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WebDog posted:When you're considering old school graphics, you can't go past Supergirl's - for possibly one of the more elaborate in-camera credits I'm aware of. This reminds me of: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=agS6ZXBrcng Bet you didn't think at the time that the entire sequence was all practical effects. Talk about an insane amount of creative work for an intro screen, that could probably be accomplished in like an hour with a computer today.
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Jul 6, 2015 22:19
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My first computer memory is playing Sopwith (which is still fun to this day) on my first computer, a Tandy 1000HX in the mid '80s. That, or this easter egg in King's Quest 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVXiHjRY3ZE
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Jul 6, 2015 22:45
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Samizdata posted:Many years ago, there was a multiline BBS in the town I lived in. It had, I think, 4 lines? I used to have a special dialing list in my terminal program that had the number for BBS user in town I knew that had call waiting. It would ring them then immediately dial the BBS. (Back in the day, a call waiting beep could kill a modem connection.) I ran a 2 line BBS in KC, that was the underground feed for the latest Terminate program, an innocuos terminal on the surface, but if you got into the secret area and answered "Do you want to play a game" correctly (global thermonuclear war) - it became the best war dialer ever.
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Jul 7, 2015 03:56
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Imagined posted:My first computer memory is playing Sopwith (which is still fun to this day) on my first computer, a Tandy 1000HX in the mid '80s Holy poo poo I forgot this existed and I used to play it a lot, I want to say on my first 8086.
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Jul 7, 2015 05:17
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Eponine posted:My family took notes on my father's undergraduate thesis punch cards through the 1990s. I had many vocabulary flashcards with tons of random holes in them. The greatest use of this paper ever was someone mailing Kevin Murphy a huge sign that said I HATE TOM SERVO'S NEW VOICE!!!!! You just don't get that kind of impact by sending someone goatse or pig poop balls on Twitter.
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Jul 7, 2015 06:28
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Gann Jerrod posted:It's not so much a failed technology as it is a complete scam, but I remember seeing a lot of commercials for reception booster stickers back when cell phones were becoming commonplace. I worked at a mall phone kiosk in high school and these things cost us like $0.30 each. My boss said if I could sell them on a cash transaction I could pocket half. I used one and it worked great, you have to stick it on the battery though, not just the outside of the phone, if you want to test it out I'll pull it off my old Razr and send it to you for $20.
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Jul 7, 2015 07:21
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These things are still for sale. Amazon has a... confusing... message their use.
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Jul 7, 2015 11:59
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Does it cancel out those anti radiation shield stickers? http://www.amazon.com/Cell-Phone-Radiation-Shield-Anti-Radiation/dp/B004YXC1WO/?tag=myinteshop-20&linkCode=w10&linkId=
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Jul 7, 2015 14:30
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mng posted:Does it cancel out those anti radiation shield stickers? The reviews for that just make me sad about the human race.
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Jul 7, 2015 15:31
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Samizdata posted:Many years ago, there was a multiline BBS in the town I lived in. It had, I think, 4 lines? I used to have a special dialing list in my terminal program that had the number for BBS user in town I knew that had call waiting. It would ring them then immediately dial the BBS. (Back in the day, a call waiting beep could kill a modem connection.) You're a monster  I went ahead and bought a second line when our small town finally got a local ISP (an aside: "bumblebee, Christmas tree" is an obsolete mnemonic now, at least for residential use) and told the phone company it was for my modem. I wired up a jack, they turned it on, and things were great. Until I started getting kicked off. Frustrated, I called the ISP and explained that I kept getting disconnected and they swore nothing was wrong on their end. Then, I called the phone company and they swore everything was fine, and even sent a guy out to double-check the connection from the pole to my house. Had I maybe wired the jack wrong? Surely not--it's two wires--but I checked it anyway. I hooked a phone directly to it to listen for static on the line as a way of troubleshooting and was surprised when it rang a few minutes later. The phone company had apparently given me free call waiting without telling me (that's what was kicking me off), which isn't a huge deal, but the second half of the story is if that phone was hooked up it rang all goddamn day. The phone company assigned me a telephone number that used to belong to a chimney sweeping company, and I guess it was one of the few remaining businesses of its type left in the region when it finally shut down, so I had people calling from all over the place wanting their goddamn chimneys cleaned.
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Jul 7, 2015 15:46
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Antifreeze Head posted:These things are still for sale. Amazon has a... confusing... message their use.
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Jul 7, 2015 18:13
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Zereth posted:It sounds like they've put the warning for an actual device which boosts cell reception on it. Sounds like some sort of stationary mini cell phone tower. You have to have an antenna 8" away from you at all times?
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Jul 7, 2015 19:22
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Admittedly I don't know what the gently caress that's about.
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Jul 7, 2015 19:33
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Zereth posted:Admittedly I don't know what the gently caress that's about. Radiation scary. 
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Jul 7, 2015 19:46
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Zereth posted:Admittedly I don't know what the gently caress that's about. It's the text on the official FCC warning label for signal boosters. http://wireless.fcc.gov/signal-boosters/index.html These start at around 200 USD and actually work.
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Jul 7, 2015 19:52
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