Post the very best in obsolete and failed technology

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hirvox: Sep 8, 2009

Our high school had a bunch of Windows 95s with an NT 4.0 acting as a domain controller and a file server. The teachers didn't really have any interest in policing the network, so one of the fileshares kept accumulating a lot of random crap. It was so big that one could hide entire games like Subspace, MUD clients or Quake(world) in it. Even multiple copies, just in case some idiot got caught playing one during a class and the teacher deleted it.

Because we were seniors, we could choose what classes we wanted to take and thus ended up with an occasional hour or two of free time in the middle of the day. After a bit of convincing, the teachers let us stay in the computer class and do whatever we wanted, as long as it didn't interfere with actual school work. They even gave us the password for the domain administrator and let us set up a permament Quakeworld server on the domain controller. The price of such freedom was the responsibility to keep the network functioning and to chase out any juniors who tried to skip class.

Good times.

# ¿ Jun 14, 2014 05:25

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# ¿ Apr 29, 2024 06:56

hirvox: Sep 8, 2009

minato posted:

And wasn't there some game like Ultima where it came with a map printed onto actual cloth that you needed to complete the game?

Ultima V's cloth map was at most a soft form of copy protection; You could figure out where the moon gates were (and how they worked) and find all settlements and other points of interest on your own, but the map sure made it much easier. The manual's runic alphabet and the list of spells (and their ingredients) were much more substantial barriers to getting anything done in the game.

# ¿ Jul 2, 2014 06:44

hirvox: Sep 8, 2009

WebDog posted:

G-Code was so hit and miss as sports or the schedule in general would change unexpectedly, (In Aust, Channel 9 was infamous with this), so you end up recording something else entirely. It was more efficient to just press record when the program was in.

PDC/VPS was supposed to fix that issue but transmitting codes when the programme was actually about to start or end. Not that anyone used it..

# ¿ Aug 4, 2014 15:18

hirvox: Sep 8, 2009

JediTalentAgent posted:

The malicious 'dialer' viruses, programs, etc. that went around where it would cause your PC to dial something like a per-minute or per-call number without your knowledge. With everyone making the move to much faster services like DSL, Sat. and cable, not even having a traditional modem at all in newer computers, etc., I haven't seen anyone really make a big deal about this in years. However, 10 years ago, it seemed like one of the bigger PC security concerns.

They're alive and well on the mobile side.

# ¿ Jan 3, 2015 19:21

hirvox: Sep 8, 2009

mng posted:

I loved that. It's like a mini game!

And sometimes you just couldn't get more than two or three bars in the signal strength display, even after half an hour of trying. Sometimes you even got the multicolored loading borders.. but not the game itself. :smith:

# ¿ Feb 24, 2015 14:16

hirvox: Sep 8, 2009

Our Netposti in Finland offers an additional feature where it scans the electronic mail for barcodes used in bills and if it detects one, it decodes it lets you copy the barcode's value and paste it to your bank's website to pay it.

Or you could have the bill delivered straight to the bank where they automatically submit the payment and all you have to do is to authorize it. Or if that's too much work, you can have the bank auto-approve it. If you want to check out the details, the bill itself is available as a PDF. Netposti was obsolete the day it was launched.

# ¿ Jun 29, 2015 12:11

hirvox: Sep 8, 2009

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.

# ¿ Jul 6, 2015 14:32

hirvox: Sep 8, 2009

eminkey2003 posted:

Back in the 90s, my cousin had a humongous stereo like these. Does anyone use them anymore? Most people just use their computer.

My parents have one, but even they are moving to smartphone radio apps. One of their favourite radio stations can't seem to hold on to their FM license, so they go net-only whenever their license expires. I guess I ought to buy them an AirPlay dongle at some point.

# ¿ Oct 20, 2015 09:23

hirvox: Sep 8, 2009

Lincoln posted:

This has probably been brought up, but does anyone defrag hard drives anymore? I converted to Mac about 6 years ago for professional reasons, so no defragging since then. And SSDs don't get defragged at all, regardless of OS. Do current versions of Windows require defragging?

Yes, but the OS handles it automatically. And while running defrag on an SSD before Windows had proper support for them was a good way to reduce the drive's lifetime, the latter versions are smarter and do SSD-specific optimizations.

# ¿ Dec 16, 2015 14:05

hirvox: Sep 8, 2009

Aphrodite posted:

Do you have Cortana off? I think it needs to be on for most of what it can do.

Hell, I can't even turn Cortana on. And I'm not asking for miracles most of the time; Just find a file that's in an indexed volume. Windows Explorer has no trouble finding those files.

# ¿ Jun 27, 2016 14:35

hirvox: Sep 8, 2009

RC and Moon Pie posted:

36K would have been a dream. My dial-up didn't go past 14.4K. The first modem I had was 2400 baud. Even going to an interface as simple as Yahoo's was back then needed about 10 minutes to download a single page.

1200 bauds for me. I wasn't allowed to use the modem at first, but then I learnt that our local bank had a dial-up service for paying bills. You had to wait for the text-based form to render line by line, but it worked. Downloading anything from a BBS took about an hour. At some point BBSes started supporting SModem, which was bidirectional and had a text chat to kill time while file transfers were active. Good times.

Upgrading past ISDN was a pain, though. The cable companies only catered to downtown residents, satellite Internet wasn't available and only companies and university dorms had direct Internet access for a long while.

# ¿ Jun 30, 2016 17:08

hirvox: Sep 8, 2009

Johnny Aztec posted:

How do you seriously listen to all that? You can't even know what you have with a collection that large.
Do you just add random stuff? You hear something and think " well, it didn't make me barf, so I'll add it"?
Do you treat your collection like the radio, where you have a ton of non-offensive, but bland, background noise?

You know how big mine is? 513 mp3s. Curated over a decade. I'm not OCD about it. I just only keep songs that I really enjoy.

I have 27k tracks, and I've listed to everything in there at least once. Even after filtering the crap out, I can treat it as a personal radio station that can play good stuff nonstop for a month without any repeats.

# ¿ Mar 10, 2017 06:38

hirvox: Sep 8, 2009

Buttcoin purse posted:

I assume Zone Alarm is a tech relic, when I upgraded to Windows XP I had to find something else to do the job, but maybe they updated it later?

The latest version is Windows 10 and Android compatible, but they don't stand out from the crowd anymore. Every competitor, including Microsoft, included zone- and process-based firewall rules in their Internet security software suites.

# ¿ Mar 22, 2017 10:52

hirvox: Sep 8, 2009

Metal Geir Skogul posted:

Oh god I can hear it, but only at certain angles. At off angles it's silence, but my head wants to explode.

The frequency is so close to my regular tinnitus that I just thought the play-pause button was making an odd noise.

In my case there were two causes: A fireworks mishap as a kid, and firing blanks in an ambush training scenario without ear protection. After all, if you know it's coming, it's not much of an ambush.

# ¿ Dec 7, 2017 07:28

hirvox: Sep 8, 2009

If you can make do without most of the GUI like Start Menu and Explorer, there's always Windows Server Core. However, it still has all of the bits for a full installation in WinSxS, so you can run Uninstall-WindowsFeature -Remove afterwards for all of the features you don't need.

# ¿ Jan 16, 2018 17:14

hirvox: Sep 8, 2009

GRINDCORE MEGGIDO posted:

Is the music from Deus ex made with a tracker?

Yes. Deus Ex was built on Unreal Engine.

# ¿ Apr 19, 2018 19:02

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# ¿ Apr 29, 2024 06:56

hirvox: Sep 8, 2009

Proteus Jones posted:

It�s been well over a decade for me, and I clearly remember the ramp of which you speak. I was so pissed because it�s very much not obvious and it took me 15 mins or so to finally stumble across it.

A common theme in the HL2 developers' commentaries is "the playtesters didn't notice x, so we did y and z to draw their attention." And creating a visual language from repeated uses of y and z is a difficult balancing act. If it's done well, you don't even notice it's there. And if it's not, it can be difficult to articulate what the problem is. And testers will not necessarily help here; They're veterans, so they can "read" the game much better than the average player.

# ¿ Apr 24, 2018 11:50

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