Register a SA Forums Account here!
JOINING THE SA FORUMS WILL REMOVE THIS BIG AD, THE ANNOYING UNDERLINED ADS, AND STUPID INTERSTITIAL ADS!!!

You can: log in, read the tech support FAQ, or request your lost password. This dumb message (and those ads) will appear on every screen until you register! Get rid of this crap by registering your own SA Forums Account and joining roughly 150,000 Goons, for the one-time price of $9.95! We charge money because it costs us money per month for bills, and since we don't believe in showing ads to our users, we try to make the money back through forum registrations.
 
  • Post
  • Reply
Computer viking
May 30, 2011
Now with less breakage.

Dr. Quarex posted:

Truly the last gasp of the old Internet was whenever it was I last typed something other than [url]HTTP://[/url] in the address bar.

Actually it was whenever I last ordered something from my Telnet connection to CDConnection.com or last typed in my e-mail address as my password on an FTP site

The webmail at work gives a 503 over http, so you need to type out the https.

Adbot
ADBOT LOVES YOU

KozmoNaut
Apr 23, 2008

Happiness is a warm
Turbo Plasma Rifle


Pretty good posted:

vvv there's a bit in Devin Townsend's podcast series where he talks about getting to hang out with FF around when they were beginning to blow up and telling them "you guys are doing this music that's all black and blue, and I want to do the same kinda thing except it's black and red," and imo he delivered on that ambition 100%.

That's probably the most succinct description of SYL I have heard.

Dip Viscous
Sep 17, 2019


LifeSunDeath posted:

spreadsheets rule

i still sometimes fire up visicalc for personal use because i'm so used to running it ultra fast keyboard only

LifeSunDeath
Jan 4, 2007

still gay rights and smoke weed every day
My buddy sent me this:

quote:

I was looking on the bookshelf at work for something about an older GPS unit we have, when I found this "guide to the internet" book from 1995

Beve Stuscemi
Jun 6, 2001




Also a tech relic? Printing a screenshot of the website in addition to the link

Fantastic Foreskin
Jan 6, 2013

A golden helix streaked skyward from the Helvault. A thunderous explosion shattered the silver monolith and Avacyn emerged, free from her prison at last.

Oh man, just seeing WWW in text like that takes me back.

Data Graham
Dec 28, 2009

📈📊🍪😋



It's like the JG Wentworth logo

CaptainSarcastic
Jul 6, 2013



Fantastic Foreskin posted:

Oh man, just seeing WWW in text like that takes me back.

I'm surprised the copyright on this is 2007, but maybe it was just uploaded then or something.



Something something a series of tubes.

Code Jockey
Jan 24, 2006

69420 basic bytes free

Computer viking posted:

The webmail at work gives a 503 over http, so you need to type out the https.

I admit with much shame that one of the internal tools I wrote for my current job requires you to type [url]https://[/url] because I forgot to set up automatic forwarding to https if you try accessing it in a non secure way. It's me.

F4rt5
May 20, 2006

Ah, those halcyon days of the mid to late '90s when every 14-20 year old of a hackeresque persuasion advocated for an open and free internet with wide eyes, convinced that it would enable peoples of the world's access to information, education and enlightenment

The future never becomes what one imagines, though. How could we imagine that some people would just be ignorant and stupid and form amplifying echo chambers that just made it all completely poo poo

Humphreys
Jan 26, 2013

We conceived a way to use my mother as a porn mule


F4rt5 posted:

Ah, those halcyon days of the mid to late '90s when every 14-20 year old of a hackeresque persuasion advocated for an open and free internet with wide eyes, convinced that it would enable peoples of the world's access to information, education and enlightenment

My mates dad owned a reef diving shop on an island with a radio internet link back to the mainland that was terribly slow. Even so, we infected his machine with the Sub7 trojan and would constantly gently caress with him. Remote printing donkey dicks to his printer that was used for printing diving certifications was our favourite thing.

EL BROMANCE
Jun 10, 2006

COWABUNGA DUDES!
🥷🐢😬



4 million websites
14 million queries

So on average each site getting about 3-4 clicks. Ouch.

WITCHCRAFT
Aug 28, 2007

Berries That Burn

Code Jockey posted:

Man I absolutely love the color distortion at the edges of letters and other graphics that those Apple color monitors have. :allears:

Chromatic abberation is a thing that happens in photography, and I feel like that's the same thing in old CRTs. Something is just a little bit off-center so you get colors leaking out the edges of something that is supposed to be white.

I usually go for filters that mimic that when I'm running an old videogame system emulator on my desktop. Looks better than the other options that upscale to modern resolutions but round out the edges of pixels so they look like someone hastily converted everything in MSPAINT.

Who the gently caress uses those filters that make all the pixels have a round edge, and it's all jaggy and incongruous between colors? Do those look good output onto a CRT? Because they look like steamy piles of poo poo when you're using your regular LCD monitor.

Mandoric
Mar 15, 2003

WITCHCRAFT posted:

Chromatic abberation is a thing that happens in photography, and I feel like that's the same thing in old CRTs. Something is just a little bit off-center so you get colors leaking out the edges of something that is supposed to be white.

I usually go for filters that mimic that when I'm running an old videogame system emulator on my desktop. Looks better than the other options that upscale to modern resolutions but round out the edges of pixels so they look like someone hastily converted everything in MSPAINT.

Who the gently caress uses those filters that make all the pixels have a round edge, and it's all jaggy and incongruous between colors? Do those look good output onto a CRT? Because they look like steamy piles of poo poo when you're using your regular LCD monitor.

It can happen in old CRTs if the guns are out of alignment, but the deliberate use in demos and some of the more experimental early '80s software is from video signals saving bandwidth by sending a full-resolution B&W image but a lower-resolution color image. https://int10h.org/blog/2015/04/cga-in-1024-colors-new-mode-illustrated/#artifact_colors gives an overview of how it works on early computers, where you can do truly gnarly things by adjusting the phase of the color signal using patterns in the B&W signal, but even in modern video it's typical for i.e. a full HD image to be 1920x1080 B&W overlaid with 960x540 color.

The most famous use of this effect is probably the waterfalls in JP and US copies of Sonic the Hedgehog having their precise pattern because composite couldn't keep up with the rate of horizontal pixel change and spewed rainbow artifacts everywhere.

E: An example shot from that post, bottom is digital signal/what's living in VRAM (itself massive hackery to overlay conveniently-patterened new lines of text(!) every one or two pixel rows), top is what an American or Japanese composite display would make of it after the colors left the RAMDAC as phase changes in a signal with limited change speed:

Mandoric has a new favorite as of 09:02 on May 1, 2021

barbecue at the folks
Jul 20, 2007


Apple II color is notorious/legendary for the amount of hacking and general fuckery that goes into producing it. Steve Wozniak designed the system around the smallest amount of chips possible at the time to cut costs, resulting in a lot of "peculiar" features in the hardware. The color fringes around things are a normal part of operation because most of Apple II color is actually produced by similar hacking and coding tricks as the CGA graphics described above.

8-bit Guy explains it a bit here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_rsycfDliZU

Buttcoin purse
Apr 24, 2014


Don't just leave the box for your new computer at the bottom of your staircase, that's a tripping hazard!

longview posted:

So I may have bought a bunch of token ring NICs... (so cheap!)

Should be fun to play around with at least.

I think the only piece of token ring equipment I've seen in my entire life is an adapter for one of my routers which is wasting space somewhere in my house. I assume it was something only organizations with lots of money bought?

Mister Kingdom
Dec 14, 2005

And the tears that fall
On the city wall
Will fade away
With the rays of morning light
More 70s weirdness from Techmoan.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rObG3GddYGk

r u ready to WALK
Sep 29, 2001

I saw that ski slope philips in another video and desperately wanted one until I realized it's from the 70s so the sound quality is going to be dreadful.

It is a brilliant design though, even more so after seeing the rube goldberg machine inside with literal strings and pulleys making it work.

Pierre Chaton
Sep 1, 2006

Humphreys posted:

I used to LOVE Fear Factory and somehow missed the train to Strapping Young Lad

It's weird how sometimes a band just doesn't click for you. They can be very similar to another band you love, but somehow just not grab you.

I'm even more likely to bounce off new stuff these days, partly because I'm a codger, but also because it's so easy to hear a different new thing.

When I was a teenager if I got a new album it was a big deal. I was going to listen to it in full, reading the lyric sheet, and when it was done probably flip it over again and take a second listen.

Now if you've heard of a band you want to check out you go to youtube. It's cost you nothing, and there are other things on the page vying for your attention.

Same with video games. Dropping the cash for a new release PS1 game was a big deal for me as a young guy working low wage jobs, and it was for sure getting a good chunk of playtime, even if in the end I didn't like it and traded it in.

Now I've got an Epic Games Store account with over 30 titles I paid exactly zero for, of which I've played one for maybe half an hour. I think I've probably spent more time claiming the free games than actually playing any of them.

TotalLossBrain
Oct 20, 2010

Hier graben!

BLOBby Newmark posted:


Now I've got an Epic Games Store account with over 30 titles I paid exactly zero for, of which I've played one for maybe half an hour. I think I've probably spent more time claiming the free games than actually playing any of them.

Extremely :same:
I now buy games on sale a few years after they come out and if I might even play them!

I've only ever played one of free EGS games for any length and now I can't even remember the title. Though I will say that the Microsoft Gamepass PC is pretty nice to have. I don't use it a whole lot, but enough to justify the cost.

TotalLossBrain has a new favorite as of 15:41 on May 1, 2021

Computer viking
May 30, 2011
Now with less breakage.

We live in a time of huge AAA games with incredible production values and competent voice actors, and I do play a fair bit of games - and those two things have very little overlap.

There is also an overabundance of small game producers making interesting things in a way that reminds me of the 16-bit era, so I'm not trying to be old and grumpy - I just tend to get stuck on a few games, and they rarely have much narrative. :)

Computer viking has a new favorite as of 16:18 on May 1, 2021

Flash Gordon Ramsay
Sep 28, 2004

Grimey Drawer
Hooray it boots!



Oh poo poo I don’t even remember this interface and apparently my voice has changed



Fake edit: that’s as far as I got. I don’t have anything else to boot this from and I don’t remember a password form 20+ years ago. Also there’s an ongoing hiss from the left speaker. The mold cleaned off pretty well though. And holy poo poo this thing has a lot of ports. I forgot what that was like.

r u ready to WALK
Sep 29, 2001

https://macintoshgarden.org is your friend, burn a copy of the original restore CDs

It will be much happier running a version like 7.6 or 8.6 anyway

W424
Oct 21, 2010

BLOBby Newmark posted:

It's weird how sometimes a band just doesn't click for you. They can be very similar to another band you love, but somehow just not grab you.

I loving loved SYL’s city back in the day, allways thought fear factory was cheesy garbage with the worst vocalist and even worse riffs. I quess the biggest thing was that syl had emotional content vs fear factorys scifi robot wars.

longview
Dec 25, 2006

heh.

Flash Gordon Ramsay posted:

Fake edit: that’s as far as I got. I don’t have anything else to boot this from and I don’t remember a password form 20+ years ago. Also there’s an ongoing hiss from the left speaker. The mold cleaned off pretty well though. And holy poo poo this thing has a lot of ports. I forgot what that was like.
Awesome, that's such a weird machine.
I assume OS 9 doesn't do anything close to actual security, could you just hold the "disable extensions" key combo on startup and not load the voice password thing perhaps?

Just remembered that XP Home edition had a "hidden" Administrator account with no password (or maybe a never-changed default?) you could log on to in Safe Mode, making it ridiculously trivial to get access to it.
At least the OEM installs I ran into back then were all like that.

Buttcoin purse posted:

I think the only piece of token ring equipment I've seen in my entire life is an adapter for one of my routers which is wasting space somewhere in my house. I assume it was something only organizations with lots of money bought?

I would guess companies with IBM mainframes doing Very Important Business + workstation/terminals in the mid-late 80s would be the most likely customers. Or perhaps companies that really wanted pretend they were big and important.
Back then Ethernet wasn't the de facto winner of the LAN standards yet (10Base-T was only standardized right around 1990, before that it was either thick or thin coax).

I might do a big effortpost on it at some point but I need to gather more information and some experience.
Fake e: I guess I did it now

Basically the issue with Ethernet back then (and for a while going forward) was the use of CSMA/CD.
Everyone was either on an actual bus (i.e. same physical coax) or connected using hubs (which basically emulate a bus network even though it's wired as a star network).
There was no way to avoid collisions where two or more computers wanted to transmit at the same time.
So each computer was required to try to detect if it had tried to transmit on top of another computer, if this was detected then the computers involved would delay a random amount and try again.
If the network isn't super busy this works (the random delay is to prevent them from immediately colliding again).

Pictured above is an actual packet colliding on a 10Base-2 network with only two computers on it, from earlier this year. The normal signal amplitude is 4 divisions, when the collision occurs the voltage doubles.

The issue with this is when the network gets super busy, the chance of colliding becomes much higher, and the effective throughput will probably fall of a cliff once you put too many computers on the same network.
It also becomes a bit of a survival of the rear end in a top hat situation I guess since waiting for a shorter time probably means you can get a higher throughput compared to waiting for a long time after each delay. I think most OSes did respect the specified wait-time algorithm though.

When I went to school we learned about Ethernet and without fail collision detection was brought up as a key part of it, but it's irrelevant for modern networks except for specialty uses like 10Base-T1S/L.
Of course this was in the 2000s, and none of us had even seen an actual Ethernet hub, and every network I've ever touched has been a switch-based network. In this case collisions are impossible since the link is full duplex and there's only ever two devices per physical link, the switch stores packets that would collide on a bus/hub network and sends them to the right port, one at a time.
This was a big benefit of 10Base-T and later 100Base-T, you built a network with hubs, then later you could swap the hubs out for switches when they became cheap or you had put too many computers on the network.
This is also where the infamous 2-port switch came in as an intermediate measure, it was a switch that would interconnect two hub-networks, effectively isolating the two bus-networks, reducing the effective size of the network as far as collisions were concerned.

-- Oh yeah token ring
Token Ring was designed to avoid these collisions, and also to ensure that all nodes in the network ring would get their fair share. The idea is to wire all the devices in a big ring, the data flows through the ring though each device in the ring.
From what I can tell this is literal - a token ring NIC has TX and RX signal pairs, the RX is connected to the previous device in the ring and the TX to the next device in the ring. A token ring "Hub" (called a MAU) is a passive device full of relays that mostly just makes the wiring easier.

This is a picture from Wikipedia showing the basic signal flow, each of the lines is an actual set of wires.

The token is a special message that is sent from one device to the next, going around. When a node gets the token it is allowed to transmit some amount of data, and it (presumably) sends the token along after the data.
The benefit is that no matter how many devices are in the ring, each device can rely on having stable latency, and in principle fairly stable throughput.
It seems the initial version ran at 4 Mbit, while the common version was 16 Mbit, and 100 Mbit was a thing for a few years before the entire standard died, several cards have 4/16 in the name which presumably means they support both rates.
From what I've gathered so far there's no special "master" device, so not entirely sure how the initial token is generated when the network is cold-started.

The downside is it was apparently pretty complicated to implement, so the NICs were expensive, the first ones used very high end IBM ASICs. More details here: https://www.righto.com/2021/02/strange-chip-teardown-of-vintage-ibm.html and here https://www.righto.com/2021/03/reverse-engineering-standard-cell-logic.html
The original wiring was also pretty expensive and apparently fairly fragile, though later variants used normal phone line/ethernet wiring and RJ-45s.
If the ring is broken, for example when you turn off a computer (I think), or when someone just unplugs their computer, the network goes down immediately.
The MAU (hub) has relays that detect this and bypass the disconnected port, letting traffic flow again within a relatively short time.

DreadUnknown
Nov 4, 2020

Bird is the word.
Holy poo poo Lycos is still around... wait Tripod is still around?

Computer viking
May 30, 2011
Now with less breakage.

The process for generating the initial frame and for recovering from a lost frame are the same, if I'm reading this correctly: any client that thinks there is a problem, for instance because it has not seen a token for 7 seconds, can try to recover. It does that by sending a "claim token" message, and if it makes it all the way around and comes back, it sends a new token. If multiple clients are interested, the one with the highest MAC wins.

Dr. Quarex
Apr 18, 2003

I'M A BIG DORK WHO POSTS TOO MUCH ABOUT CONVENTIONS LOOK AT THIS

TOVA TOVA TOVA

W424 posted:

I loving loved SYL’s city back in the day, allways thought fear factory was cheesy garbage with the worst vocalist and even worse riffs. I quess the biggest thing was that syl had emotional content vs fear factorys scifi robot wars.
Say what you will about Fear Factory, but I cannot think of any other band with such a clear vision that you can start improvising a riff in their style as a joke and immediately any other fan of theirs who hears it will know what band you are imitating

(lest this lead to a further derail pointing out other such bands I am overlooking, I acknowledge there may indeed be others)

You Am I
May 20, 2001

Me @ your poasting

Why am I looking at Amiga 500 Pluses in eBay? Come on

Powered Descent
Jul 13, 2008

We haven't had that spirit here since 1969.

longview posted:

Of course this was in the 2000s, and none of us had even seen an actual Ethernet hub, and every network I've ever touched has been a switch-based network. In this case collisions are impossible since the link is full duplex and there's only ever two devices per physical link, the switch stores packets that would collide on a bus/hub network and sends them to the right port, one at a time.
This was a big benefit of 10Base-T and later 100Base-T, you built a network with hubs, then later you could swap the hubs out for switches when they became cheap or you had put too many computers on the network.
This is also where the infamous 2-port switch came in as an intermediate measure, it was a switch that would interconnect two hub-networks, effectively isolating the two bus-networks, reducing the effective size of the network as far as collisions were concerned.

Hubs were already on their way out in the late 90s, but the office network at my first "real" job still ran on them.

Since a hub network is all one big segment, every machine on it got all of the traffic. Which meant that anyone who was interested could snoop on everything everyone else did. And of course there were tools for this. I once played around with a free trial version of Little Brother, for just long enough to confirm that all yes, of my co-workers were incredibly boring. I bet someone out there got much juicier info from, say, a college dorm's network.

Trabant
Nov 26, 2011

All systems nominal.

Dr. Quarex posted:

(lest this lead to a further derail pointing out other such bands I am overlooking, I acknowledge there may indeed be others)

We should absolutely not have that derail.

But Type O Negative is definitely one of those bands.

W424
Oct 21, 2010

Dr. Quarex posted:

Say what you will about Fear Factory, but I cannot think of any other band with such a clear vision that you can start improvising a riff in their style as a joke and immediately any other fan of theirs who hears it will know what band you are imitating

(lest this lead to a further derail pointing out other such bands I am overlooking, I acknowledge there may indeed be others)

I really didn’t appreciate their innovation of ”play the lowest string in unisono with the bass drum, just one note if feeling lazy” as a guitarist.

Humphreys
Jan 26, 2013

We conceived a way to use my mother as a porn mule


But thats how you get to be the Carmageddon score!

KozmoNaut
Apr 23, 2008

Happiness is a warm
Turbo Plasma Rifle


Powered Descent posted:

Since a hub network is all one big segment, every machine on it got all of the traffic. Which meant that anyone who was interested could snoop on everything everyone else did. And of course there were tools for this. I once played around with a free trial version of Little Brother, for just long enough to confirm that all yes, of my co-workers were incredibly boring. I bet someone out there got much juicier info from, say, a college dorm's network.

And you can force a switch into hub mode by poisoning its ARP table, so it falls back to sending all traffic everywhere, until it can rebuild the table.

Good modern switches have some mitigations/detections against this, but it still works generally.

Sweevo
Nov 8, 2007

i sometimes throw cables away

i mean straight into the bin without spending 10+ years in the box of might-come-in-handy-someday first

im a fucking monster

You Am I posted:

Why am I looking at Amiga 500 Pluses in eBay? Come on

There's literally no reason to buy a 500 Plus. They never work due to battery damage, and the few that do work sell for more than the minor upgrade over the 500 is worth. Get a 500 or 600, or if you're feeling rich a 1200.

Flash Gordon Ramsay
Sep 28, 2004

Grimey Drawer
When I was unpacking the TAM, I discovered my OG Connectix QuickCam. Low res, black and white. And immediately dropped it, where it exploded on the tile. Tried to piece it together for a picture.

LifeSunDeath
Jan 4, 2007

still gay rights and smoke weed every day
flared base

TheDarkOfKnight
May 14, 2003

All the world's a stage. Look at the lighting!

I hadn't seen that he posted this. I actually have one of these at home in my office right now complete with the ski hill attachment. My uncle found it in his house and gave it to me a while back. I should see if it works I guess.

EL BROMANCE
Jun 10, 2006

COWABUNGA DUDES!
🥷🐢😬



TheDarkOfKnight posted:

I hadn't seen that he posted this. I actually have one of these at home in my office right now complete with the ski hill attachment. My uncle found it in his house and gave it to me a while back. I should see if it works I guess.

Awesome! That was my favorite video Mat has posted in ages, and I think those desktop cassette decks ooze style even without the wacky attachments.

Adbot
ADBOT LOVES YOU

LifeSunDeath
Jan 4, 2007

still gay rights and smoke weed every day
https://i.imgur.com/a8ZUH4B.mp4
giant schematics

  • 1
  • 2
  • 3
  • 4
  • 5
  • Post
  • Reply