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Collateral Damage posted:Also, I don't know if it's true but I've read that one of the reasons they skipped Windows 9 was that many poorly coded older programs would check Windows version by looking for the string "Windows 9", which would then match both "Windows 95" and "Windows 98". Personally I think they just wanted to avoid the inevitable "Windows Nein" jokes. HaB posted:I saw code samples illustrating that, so I believe it's actually true. It's not. The Windows version string is "Windows NT x.xx", so checking for strings starting with "Windows 9" wouldn't match because there's no "NT" in the middle.
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Mar 16, 2016 15:10
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GOTTA STAY FAI posted:I love how New Yorkers think that everyone else on the entire planet automatically has intimate, exhaustive knowledge of NYC landmarks 
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May 3, 2016 11:35
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Blackchamber posted:Printers that use ink ribbons and continuous feed paper with the little holes on the sides? Check. People still use dot matrix printers because they can print directly onto duplicate/triplicate forms.
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Jul 14, 2016 12:01
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Humphreys posted:I'm intrigued on what the book is about now! A Spotter's Guide to Historic Radio Masts - Volume 237: West Africa 1964-69
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Feb 9, 2017 11:26
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RS232 is the de-facto standard for industrial equipment, and most networking gear above consumer level. It's basically everywhere once you look outside the desktop PC bubble.
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May 19, 2017 15:24
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Krispy Kareem posted:Which may be even worse. You try and hit space and delete what you already typed.  See the top right, next to the red function keys? That's not delete/backspace. That's the break key. Pressing it resets the computer, so you lose everything.
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Aug 23, 2017 15:44
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GRINDCORE MEGGIDO posted:Ah, I still remember the boot noise of those. doo DOOOOOT! They're really well built (designed to have school kids smash the poo poo out of them all day long). Even 35 years later the only thing that really goes wrong with them is bad caps in the power supply.
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Aug 23, 2017 18:16
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The BBC didn't have many good games. Lack of memory (32K was impressive in 1982, laughable by 1984. And the way the display worked meant you might only actually have 12K available for your game code) meant it was ignored by all the major publishers. So it didn't get any of the big releases of the time and instead BBC owners were mostly stuck playing slightly shoddy knock-offs of old arcade games, and loads of text adventures.
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Aug 26, 2017 10:40
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Danger - Octopus! posted:Given that as you get older, you become less able to hear high frequencies, and since most audiophiles seem to be older guys - do they pretend that this doesn't happen to them? I mean surely spending thousands on a sound system that plays frequencies you're too old to hear would mean admitting you're insane? they absolutely claim it doesn't happen to them. and/or claim to have way above average hearing to begin with - like saying they could hear 30khz, so a bit of loss is no big deal as they can still hear better than normal people
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Oct 28, 2017 23:38
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This podcast laughs at some of the funnier ideas (i.e. scams) audiophiles fall for: https://thefpl.us/episode/138
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Oct 29, 2017 11:13
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Even though inkjets got cheap (and then lasers too), dot matrix printers have stayed around for a few niche uses like being able to print into those carbon duplicate/triplicate forms a lot of places still use.
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Nov 4, 2017 12:36
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There were special VHS recorders made for CCTV. they'd have multiple camera inputs and cycle between them automatically, or arrange them into a single image (say 2x2 from four cameras, or 3x2 from six). They would also play the tape at a super slow speed and basically record single video frames once per second or two. The one I saw years ago would record 120, 240, 480, or 960 hours on a single 4hr tape - and yes the quality was absolute dogshit, and yes the owner used the same two tapes over and over and over for years making them even worse. Something like this: ftp://ftp.panasonic.com/pub/Panasonic/CCTV/SpecSheets/AG-TL950.pdf
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Nov 30, 2017 12:35
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JazzmasterCurious posted:It worked well, mostly used in Europe (UK and Scandinavia especially) where the FM radio signal usually was clear and strong. Small countries, you know. Plus, what the above posts said - it was very simple encoding of the data, just like a modem. Remember those? Software was also broadcast using teletext and could be extracted from a TV broadcast using special hardware. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telesoftware It was mostly used for small programming tutorials for the BBC Micro
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Dec 2, 2017 12:42
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DesperateDan posted:Amstrad did a proprietary 3 inch disc system and the discs came with cd style plastic cases which cracked really easy. They were rectangular and pretty hard to destroy, but I think they cost many times more than the standard 3 1/2" discs and quickly died out. That was a Japanese format (by Hitachi IIRC) that didn't last too long. The story I heard is that after the Japanese market had settled on the 3.5" format Amstrad was able to buy the remaining stock of 3" drives cheap and then used them in their own machines. There was a bit of a format war in the early-mid 80s for sub-5.25" disks. 3.5" won in the end, but there were various 2", 2.5", 3", and 3.25" disks as well. 
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Jan 14, 2018 21:22
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Spy_Guy posted:Also some content: I love the way it shakes the desk when it gets going.
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Feb 26, 2018 22:30
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LORD OF BOOTY posted:meanwhile, Quake 1 has no map or objective markers, and I can navigate that game just fine because it's made by loving level design wizards who knew to put landmarks in places and have a reasonably obvious "flow" to their levels and executed that basically perfectly throughout the entire game This is the only time I've ever heard anyone describe Quake as having good level design. It's typical lovely mid-90s FPS design - endlessly turning each corner just have have a bunch of enemies appear out of hidden cupboards.
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Apr 23, 2018 23:29
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Chillbro Baggins posted:555s and cockroaches will be the only survivors of WW3. and HP Laserjet 4s
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Apr 28, 2018 23:34
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Price labels that don't show the price are moronic, and proof that Americans will make excuses for anything. Sweevo has a new favorite as of 11:02 on Jun 15, 2018 |
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Jun 15, 2018 10:59
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Tunicate posted:Are you in one of those countries with no VAT, or do you just cheat on customs a lot when ordering online? What?
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Jun 15, 2018 16:50
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Johnny Aztec posted:Can you imagine what "vintage" cars are going to be like in 30 or 40 years? Rotting in a scrapheap because the LCD touchscreen that controls the entire car stopped working when the car was <10 years old.
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Oct 7, 2018 22:58
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Trabant posted:A little more attention to the presentation wouldn't be bad though. I get the lo-fi charm and simplicity of his MS Paint illustrations, but see how often he begins a sentence with "so" and tell me it isn't a little much. I know a lot of people do that in everyday speech, but this stuff is still scripted. It's like Doug DeMuro's use of "now." These ticks are 100x less annoying than people who start every other sentence with "Go ahead..." Pilsner posted:What I really like about him is that he's one of the few Youtubers that seem to act natural, instead of that overgeared, hyper voice, unnatural tone and spastic body language many do. If I click a video and there's a few seconds of silence and then some hyperactive dorklord starts bellowing "HEYWHATSUPYOUTUBETHISISMORONMCSHOUTY..." then I'm going to click close before they've even paused for breath. Sweevo has a new favorite as of 11:12 on Oct 24, 2018 |
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Oct 24, 2018 10:12
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Computer viking posted:That's kind of Sony's thing, isn't it? It's weird and fiddly and intensely proprietary, but when it does work it works well. And in typical Sony fashion they'd also planned to make multiple subtly-incompatible variants before the original had even launched.
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Nov 9, 2018 13:15
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KozmoNaut posted:Every time MiniDisc comes up in this thread or the Retro tech thread, it pains me a little how Sony mismanaged the format. They could have ruled the removable storage/media player segment so hard for 10-15 years, but they fumbled and I'm sure the record label arm of the company didn't help matters, with their fear of MP3. Betamax, Minidisc, UMD, the forty different versions of MemoryStick... Sony doesn't have a good record when it comes to media formats. When Bluray vs HD-DVD was happening I would have put my money on HD-DVD solely because Sony were backing Bluray.
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Nov 14, 2018 11:00
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Audiophiles cared about PS1s for about six months, then moved on to the next piece of snake oil crap.
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Nov 19, 2018 15:07
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Still better than the EEVBlog guy, who would ramble for 30 minutes at the start, then diagnose the transistor, then re-diagnose the transistor five more times using different multimeters.
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Mar 1, 2019 19:37
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The teardowns are occasionally interesting, when they're not just opening up a ten grand piece of lab equipment and pointing at black rectangular ASICs for twenty minutes. Sweevo has a new favorite as of 17:29 on Mar 6, 2019 |
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Mar 6, 2019 14:50
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SubNat posted:I always found it kind of strange how europe stuck with VHS until DVD eventually took over. Because VCD looked like dogshit and you had to swap discs in the middle of the film?
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Apr 23, 2019 19:42
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They might have changed to a different URL scheme too, and just left the old "domain.com/~username" pages as-is.
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Jun 2, 2019 21:21
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T-man posted:Besides, there are old 1960's programs in FORTRAN and poo poo to print out sexy lady ASCII art, so I assure you all people have been masturbating to computers for over half a century. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LtlrITxB5qg Skip to 3:20 and 7:20 if you're impatient. Sweevo has a new favorite as of 00:02 on Jun 5, 2019 |
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Jun 4, 2019 23:54
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Mister Kingdom posted:That has Techmoan written all over it. 
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Jun 23, 2019 17:07
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aardwolf posted:Did any of your school desks have holes designed to take inkwells? Mine did in a small / rural (read: broke as gently caress) NZ school in the '90s and I remember thinking that was really odd / retro but I have just realised I have absolutely no idea what time scales were actually involved in something as simple as writing technology. My UK middle school still had old style desks with lift-up tops and inkwells (long disused and stuffed full of pencil shavings and 10 year old gum). This would have been 1988-92. The "fun" class project on the first day of the school year was to give the kids sandpaper and tell them to remove last year's graffiti.   The high-school I started in 1992 still had a typing classroom full of typewriters, although they were just putting the last group of girls (no boys allowed) through and turned it into another history classroom the next year. The headmaster was also very old fashioned and used to walk around in his mortarboard and gown swishing the cane he wasn't allowed to use any more.
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Jun 25, 2019 11:21
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The Dendy is a weirdly fascinating story because it's an entire infrastructure including cartoons, tv shows, even an official mascot all built up completely independently from Nintendo. Russians got bootlegged games from Asia to such an extent that when the real ones came in later they were dismissed as knockoffs.
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Jul 8, 2019 18:29
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Groke posted:Kind of like how Commodore brilliantly followed up the success of the C64 with the amazing C16 and the C+4. It's hilarious how incompetent Commodore were. They were a bunch of sleazy conmen who got lucky with the C64 and then thought they were geniuses despite pissing away millions on designing machines whose only competitors were their own products. They only ever released two good machines - the C64 and the Amiga, one of which was a fluke and the other designed by an outside team. Meanwhile their list of failures: the C16, C128, Plus/4, Commodore 900, C64GS, C64 LCD, C65, Commodore PC, and probably a dozen others that never got off the drawing board.
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Jul 23, 2019 10:46
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Yes the shaft goes right through. One end goes into the drive and the other end that would normally be flush with the rear of the motor is extended slightly and has the wheel on it. Talking of chunky drives, I just scrapped a bunch of 5.25" double-height scsi drives that came out of some early 90s video editing hardware. They must have weighted 6-7kg each, and had 14 platters inside. I assume they were kept in a rack in a different room from the user because they sounded like a washing machine on full speed, and there were six of them. Each drive took ~20 seconds to spin up to running speed, and the power-ups were staggered so that they wouldn't all try to spin up at once and overload the power supply. Sweevo has a new favorite as of 11:17 on Jul 29, 2019 |
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Jul 29, 2019 11:08
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Memory Stick EX Plus Alpha 2 vs Capcom
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Jul 31, 2019 22:56
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The early 80s was weirder for that. Half the magazine would be 1/6th page black and white ads with a hand-drawn image and the titles of a few clearly home-made games you've never heard of. No screenshots or even descriptions, just titles and prices: <badly photocopied pencil drawing of a dragon> Gorilla Attack (ZX81/VIC20) Cave (ZX81/VIC20/Spectrum) Martian Saucer (VIC20 only) Stalag XIII (Zx81/Spectrum) Space Cruiser 2 (ZX81 only) Typing Teacher (ZX81/VIC20) Send £4.99 each to: <some 15 year old's home address> The actual content wasn't much better. You'd get eight games reviewed in the space of one page, then a four-page feature on some lovely spreadsheet that was only available for an obscure platform, then a nine-page Basic listing (full of typos) for a game that was no fun to play. Sweevo has a new favorite as of 16:31 on Aug 15, 2019 |
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Aug 15, 2019 16:27
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Tall Tale Teller posted:And the best piece of copy protection ever. THE DIAL-A-PIRATE. And the worst: Lenslok - squint through a folding plastic lens held against your TV to turn some distorted gibberish into a code you have to enter. Does not work if your TV is substantially bigger or smaller that the developer's. Or if you don't follow the incredibly vague instructions exactly. Or if the publisher put the lens for the wrong game in the box. Also to have to do it against a time limit so the code may well have changed in the few seconds it takes to decipher the code and then type it in.
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Aug 18, 2019 17:59
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Unperson_47 posted:I would watch a whole documentary on feelies/physical copy protection. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zFd60nCBygg Skip to 29 min if you like. The first part is mostly about silly UK anti-piracy ads from the 80s.
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Aug 18, 2019 20:35
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Krispy Wafer posted:EDIT: looking up info on CGA it looks like it actually had a decent number of colors and could look reasonably good, but for some reason every game I owned looked like this shard of glass on the eyes. It had sixteen colours for text mode, but the graphics modes only allowed four and they couldn't be whichever four you wanted, you had to use one of three preset palettes. It doesn't help that VGA isn't fully backwards compatible, and if you run CGA software on VGA then one of the incompatibilities is that VGA always uses the cyan/magenta/white palette even if the software is trying to use one of the others. E: The PC wasn't really a significant gaming platform in the CGA days anyway. CGA was primitive even for the time, and a 4.7mhz 8088 wasn't fast enough to do any kind of fancy effects in software. Sweevo has a new favorite as of 14:10 on Aug 21, 2019 |
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Aug 21, 2019 14:03
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You drat kids with your CADs and your CAMs and those accursed computer things. Behold the Mergenthaler Diagrammer: https://vimeo.com/75532300
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Oct 9, 2019 12:32
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