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Here's something I had in high school, although I have no idea exactly why I thought I needed one: the Sony Magic Link PIC-1000! Like a PDA only huge and heavy. Released in 1994, it ran the Magic Cap operating system by General Magic, a spin-off of early-90s Apple, and, like pretty much everything developed at Apple in the early 90s, it completely failed in the market. The company was run by Bill Atkinson (original Mac developer, creator of the Mac's QuickDraw API, MacPaint, and HyperCard) and Andy Hertzfeld (also one of the original Mac developers). The operating system started with the Desktop Metaphor and took it to its illogical conclusion:  Magic Cap user's manual posted:The geography of the Magic Cap software is modeled on that of the world, with rooms along a Hallway and buildings along a street Downtown. To perform different activities in the world you move from place to place. [...] There are three main scenes in Magic Cap: the Desk, the Hallway, and Downtown. Beyond that, there are scenes for other places in Magic Cap like the Telephone, Datebook, File cabinet, and so on. For example, let's say that we want to access the Internet. Well, the Internet is the world outside of our house, of course, so first we step out of our office into the hallway...  and then out of the hallway to the outdoors...  and then into your ISP's office building!  Then you could set up your Internet access and plug the built-in 2400 baud modem into a phone line and exchange e-mail and stuff. Fancy e-mail written on post cards with pictures and animations! Provided, that is, that your recipients also had a Magic Cap system. What was supposed to be a distinguishing feature was a built in GUI designer and scripting language, TeleScript, so that you could develop applications directly on the device. Sony, who licensed Magic Cap for their Magic Link devices, decided to leave in the GUI designer...  but disable the scripting language, on the grounds that customers wouldn't understand programming. So you could stick buttons all over the place, but had no way to actually make them do anything.
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Aug 1, 2012 02:12
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Absolutely harmless to humans! (No guarantees about your pets.)
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Aug 6, 2012 21:16
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Code Jockey posted:Not really internet filter related, but the discussion reminded me - I remember there was some system - I can't remember what it was called - that locked down the Macs at my middle school so we couldn't install stuff or have much fun with them at all.  My school district used At Ease for a while, but it wasn't very effective (you could use the built-in debugger to quit to the Finder). The school district's computer guy ended up writing his own program to keep us from screwing up the computers. He later quit his job at the district and started a company to sell the software, which was named FoolProof. It was reasonably effective, though you could still get files onto the hard disk if you could find a program that would save files there without using the standard file dialogs. Microsoft Works had a modem package where you could establish a connection between the computer and itself and then "send" a file to get it to save to the hard drive. cowtown has a new favorite as of 21:42 on Aug 12, 2013 |
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Aug 12, 2013 21:40
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Mr. Flunchy posted:Also in Tube news they accidentally poured 3 feet of quick setting concrete into a Victoria line signalling room today, bringing the whole line to a standstill: How do you accidentally fill a room with concrete?
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Jan 24, 2014 04:22
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Old James posted:The bold part reminded me of the old cable box remotes that had 12 radio buttons, a dial to adjust the frequency, and a lever to go above channel 13. Ours was one of these, with a single slider for all the channels. It was really easy to get to channel 2 quickly! 
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Mar 12, 2014 07:03
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cowtown has a new favorite as of 05:43 on Mar 18, 2014 |
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Mar 18, 2014 05:40
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Keiya posted:Gopher In case you're still using Gopher, and you need to use a proxy to access it, Mac OS X 10.9 has you covered: 
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May 20, 2014 04:38
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WebDog posted:Is there a Homeplug type device for phone lines? Given the thread that we're in, I'll assume you want to connect old Macs together and therefore I recommend Farallon PhoneNet:  Supporting a blistering theoretical maximum of 230 kbit/s, it can co-exist with your telephone wiring so long as you only have one line, since it uses the two wires that are unused with a single-line setup.
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May 24, 2014 08:22
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atomicthumbs posted:as long as you don't lose the loving terminators I'd make my own: just take a telephone plug and connect the pins corresponding to the yellow and black wires with a 120-ohm resistor.
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May 26, 2014 08:25
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Plinkey posted:Sega also did this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sega_Channel which was awesome. I had sega channel for about a year or two before it got replaced by an N64. It did sometimes take up to 5-6 minutes to download the 500ish kb games though. Worth the wait. I had Sega Channel; it was great except that it only had enough save RAM for one game, so loading a different game would erase your save for the previous game. It was basically a one-way cable modem. Since there was no uplink, it couldn't request a particular game; instead, it was just constantly broadcasting the various games. When you selected a game, it would have to wait for the game you selected to start being broadcast before it would actually download, which lead to highly variable download times. I would always get up early on the first day of the month to check out the new selections of games. cowtown has a new favorite as of 03:48 on Jul 14, 2014 |
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Jul 14, 2014 03:46
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Red_October_7000 posted:Dialoc Hide a microphone near the lock, record everyone's combination... fantastic lock! I wonder if there's even been a keypad lock that made touchtone sounds when the combination was entered... cowtown has a new favorite as of 02:35 on Sep 12, 2014 |
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Sep 12, 2014 02:31
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Dick Trauma posted:Hand scanners were horrible pieces of poo poo. My favorite old scanner: Thunderscan, the scanner in the form factor of an Apple ImageWriter ink ribbon cartridge. 
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Dec 6, 2014 11:03
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RC and Moon Pie posted:I had one of these as a kid. I think I had the Sesame Street one pictured and absolutely remember a book/tape for Inspector Gadget and Hello Kitty. I had one of these too. My favorite tape was "Please Don't Push The Red Button", where Grover gets increasingly frustrated at you as you leave the red button pressed the entire time. 
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Apr 24, 2015 06:43
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Lazlo Nibble posted:This is absolutely, totally, 100% untrue, at least in the US. Unless there's a specific exception in copyright law (which there are for things like sound recordings and computer software) the first sale doctrine allows you to do whatever the hell you want with legally-purchased media as long as you don't make additional copies of it. So video rental stores do not pay, and have never paid, for the right to rent out movies, nor do libraries pay for the right to lend books. Copyright gives the copyright holder the exclusive right to publicly exhibit a movie: The United States Government posted:17 USC 106 . Exclusive rights in copyrighted works
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Jun 13, 2015 19:05
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HAT FETISH posted:Apropos of nothing, are there any particularly good books about phone hacking/phreaking that anyone would recommend? I liked Exploding the Phone.
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May 8, 2017 08:09
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