Post the very best in obsolete and failed technology

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Sham bam bamina!: Nov 6, 2012; ƨtupid cat

Monkey Fracas posted:

Wonder how much the computer that made this cost at the time.

"Dazzling soupcan doodle graphics power!"

3,000 USD MSRP

The original Amiga cost $1,295 and was capable of much more than that. It was a brilliant machine, regardless of how badly Warhol could doodle on it.

# ¿ Apr 24, 2014 22:55

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# ¿ Apr 26, 2024 23:16

Sham bam bamina!: Nov 6, 2012; ƨtupid cat

GOTTA STAY FAI posted:

A lot of TV shows in the 1990's used Video Toasters for their special effects, which were just Amigas running proprietary software. Seaquest DSV and the Robocop series come to mind, but there were countless others. The machine was ridiculously powerful.

The Video Toaster was actually a hardware expansion. You could do a lot on a stock Amiga, but professional video editing and CGI weren't among that.

# ¿ Apr 25, 2014 00:51

Sham bam bamina!: Nov 6, 2012; ƨtupid cat

GOTTA STAY FAI posted:

I'll turn in my nerd badge.

I honestly didn't know about the additional hardware--I visited a VT booth at an expo in Germany back then and the guy running it swore up and down that the machine was just an Amiga 500 with different stickers on it.

Wikipedia says (albeit with a big ol' ^{[citation needed]}, but who'd bother to make this up?) that they eventually started selling standalone, pre-upgraded systems as an alternative to buying the card and computer separately. It would have been a 2000, though; the 500 was the dinky low-end model without expansion slots and wouldn't have been compatible. It wouldn't just have been a rebranded Amiga, but it would have been close enough that I can kinda see where that guy was probably coming from.

:goonsay:

# ¿ Apr 25, 2014 01:22

Sham bam bamina!: Nov 6, 2012; ƨtupid cat

The End posted:

Have you any recollection of what the original bundled Amiga mouse was like? gently caress trying to do anything creative with that godawful hunk of crap.

https://www.google.com.au/search?q=amiga+mouse&safe=off&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ei=uAVaU5H8GIfMkAXPnIG4DA&ved=0CAgQ_AUoAQ&biw=1420&bih=867

I didn't say that that he was bad at using the Amiga (there are some pretty impressive images in the news articles), just that the can was a crappy doodle. I'm sure that it was just something he tossed off to familiarize himself with the machine, especially given the subject.

# ¿ Apr 25, 2014 18:51

Sham bam bamina!: Nov 6, 2012; ƨtupid cat

GWBBQ posted:

I found a teledildonics community

Please, share more. :pervert:

# ¿ Apr 27, 2014 01:25

Sham bam bamina!: Nov 6, 2012; ƨtupid cat

Mister Kingdom posted:

That looks very Star Trek-y.

Without the blue buttons, it's a First Contact prop; with them, it's an Insurrection prop.

# ¿ May 6, 2014 23:15

Sham bam bamina!: Nov 6, 2012; ƨtupid cat

strangemusic posted:

I've always held the belief that the pre-90s-theater-rerelease VHS were "definitive." I've still got mine and hang on to a VHS machine pretty much exclusively for that reason.

But do you have the widescreen tapes? :smug:

(Probably more "definitive" than the Laserdiscs, actually; they aren't smothered in DNR and have better colors.)

On a related note, lovely letterboxed home media is something that I sure as hell don't miss. What absolute garbage that was.

# ¿ May 7, 2014 01:41

Sham bam bamina!: Nov 6, 2012; ƨtupid cat

Waterslide Industry Lobbyist posted:

I worked at Blockbuster (that's going to be fun to explain to the grandkids) for several years during the VHS phase-out. I left the company in '05 and we'd still have people return movies because of the black bars.

I'd mercifully forgotten that that was an actual mindset that people had. Thanks for the reminder, rear end in a top hat. t :mad:

# ¿ May 7, 2014 02:07

Sham bam bamina!: Nov 6, 2012; ƨtupid cat

sudont posted:

For years, I had an Optigan in my kitchen--when my ex moved out he couldn't store it, so it stayed with me. In my kitchen. Where people would ask, "Why is there a weird piano in your kitchen?" I'd fire it up and it'd usually work, though they were basically made to be toys, not musical instruments, and the turntable made so much noise it was hard to hear the optical disk. There was also a lot of "bleeding" when you used the chord buttons, they all sort of sounded the same. Disks were really pretty though, and it had a real kitschy sound, like a porno was about to break out. In the kitchen.

If anyone's curious, this is what it sounds like (the compression makes it sound fuzzier than it actually is, but not by much):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RQZDulUk-I8

Lovely little album as a whole, by the way.

# ¿ May 7, 2014 23:15

Sham bam bamina!: Nov 6, 2012; ƨtupid cat

Code Jockey posted:

Speaking of fond memories of old machine sounds, someday I need to hook up my C64 dot matrix printer. Maybe I'll fire up Print Shop Pro or something, make some nice banners for the next birthday party I throw.

I'm that guy, that guy that legitimately loves the horrible, screeching buzzing noise oldschool tractor feed dot matrix printers make. That's the soundtrack to my childhood right there.

So many school reports printed off of my old one.

Also totally buying a Model M / Unicomp as soon as I can spare the cash. Modern squishy silent keyboards just don't feel right, y'know? I like my typing to sound like the wrath of god!

I think I might have already posted this, but it's still great:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o0QHY7S-OtU

# ¿ May 8, 2014 18:24

Sham bam bamina!: Nov 6, 2012; ƨtupid cat

My family still has the '97 World Book; I think that a demo of Encarta '98 might still be lying around somewhere too.

Those blocky volcano clips were so fun to watch. :kiddo:

# ¿ May 9, 2014 15:55

Sham bam bamina!: Nov 6, 2012; ƨtupid cat

Sunshine89 posted:

Much like e-cigarettes and Linux OSes,

I'd just like to interject for a moment. What you're referring to as Linux, is in fact, GNU/Linux, or as I've recently taken to calling it, GNU plus Linux. :rms2:

# ¿ May 12, 2014 13:10

Sham bam bamina!: Nov 6, 2012; ƨtupid cat

Humphreys posted:

Give me 10 minutes at work and I can make a cable that looks $500 worth

Unless it somehow stops looking like a friggin' audio cable, no. You can't. :v:

# ¿ May 25, 2014 14:23

Sham bam bamina!: Nov 6, 2012; ƨtupid cat

Collateral Damage posted:

http://butwithbitcoins.com/

I've been playing with this thing since it was first started, and it still cracks me up every time. :allears:

quote:

Introducing an amateur dried strawberry documentary

...but with bitcoins!

# ¿ May 25, 2014 14:54

Sham bam bamina!: Nov 6, 2012; ƨtupid cat

GreenNight posted:

Here is a url to a group of pictures of some badass old tech:

http://imgur.com/gallery/Jb6jW

Unbelievable.

I love the comments there. "Monochrome display? WOW ITS JUST LIKE FALLOUT ON XBOX"

gently caress, it's the first response in this thread too. :cripes:

# ¿ May 31, 2014 01:27

Sham bam bamina!: Nov 6, 2012; ƨtupid cat

Jose Pointero posted:

A buddy of mine back in middle school had one of these. It had a pretty kick rear end motorcycle stunt game that I can't remember the name of.

Kikstart?

# ¿ Jun 8, 2014 07:09

Sham bam bamina!: Nov 6, 2012; ƨtupid cat

Lowen SoDium posted:

the ABACABB blood code

Was that seriously the code? That's beautiful. :allears:

# ¿ Jul 10, 2014 16:23

Sham bam bamina!: Nov 6, 2012; ƨtupid cat

Albums are great, and if you (in the general sense) don't have the patience to sit through A Love Supreme or Abbey Road or The Dark Side of the Moon or Fear of a Black Planet and appreciate the music as a coherent whole, that is absolutely your problem, not the ~~medium's~~ format's.

Also, how did everyone just let this go?

Jerry Cotton posted:

Congratulations, you don't like most pre-60s popular music. (Nor a shitload of 60s popular music.)

Jerry Cotton posted:

I said congratulations do you not know what congratulations are?

Congratulations, you (in the specific sense) are a disingenuous rear end in a top hat! Christ, twelve-year-olds aren't this obnoxious.

Sham bam bamina! has a new favorite as of 21:00 on Jul 16, 2014

# ¿ Jul 16, 2014 20:41

Sham bam bamina!: Nov 6, 2012; ƨtupid cat

Jerry Cotton posted:

I wish people would respond to posts, not arguments they make up in their own head. Do you want me to list a hundred or a thousand or ten thousand albums that absolutely exist just because it's the go-to format, not because there's an album's worth of good or even decent music on them? Because it would not be hard to come up with them and you know it as well as I do. (I won't do it of course.)

Jerry Cotton posted:

Well no I'm not against a. I guess I should've said "studio albums" although maybe that's ambiguous as well?

Fake edit: This is what started it all so it's obvious I'm not arguing against a: "Of course the concept of an album as a more or less monolithic or cohesive work of art as opposed to just a format was pretty much set up to fail from the start, and will hopefully be rarely used if not obsolete in my life time." I added emphasis to what was my original point.

So, because of Sturgeon's Law, you'd prefer that nobody tries to make the most of the format? Of course there are going to be lovely albums; it's inevitable, with so many bands and solo musicians, that not everything can be perfect or even good. Maybe if I listened to more disposable radio pop (a genre whose albums are basically defined by the singles+filler stereotype), I'd be more sympathetic to your point, but the idea that the concept of a "cohesive" album is "set up to fail" is just ridiculous. People generally write more than one song (which is why albums exist at all), and when putting them together, they generally want some cohesion. It's an inevitable consequence of giving a poo poo.

You're trying to argue that there's no middle ground between "completely disconnected songs that happen to be distributed together" and "excessively ambitious concept album", and that's plain wrong. Most albums, even lovely ones, have some sense of individual identity, if only because their songs were all written and played by the same people around the same time (and often because of conscious effort to give them that identity, effort which you seem to specifically dislike for some reason). Just read or watch or listen to almost any interview with a band or musician from when they're working on or have just released a new album; almost as a rule, they'll talk about their specific vision and goals for that album as an album. To divorce that vision, however weak or nebulous (again, Sturgeon's Law definitely applies, and sometimes people do just want to write a bunch of good individual songs), from the album itself is to fundamentally misunderstand the creative process that goes into the album.

Sham bam bamina! has a new favorite as of 17:53 on Jul 17, 2014

# ¿ Jul 17, 2014 16:54

Sham bam bamina!: Nov 6, 2012; ƨtupid cat

There's also the issue of needing to keep up with what's popular; Weird Al's complained about some of his parodies becoming outdated before they end up being released, because the first ones written are held back by the last ones.

# ¿ Jul 17, 2014 20:35

Sham bam bamina!: Nov 6, 2012; ƨtupid cat

peter gabriel posted:

Out of all the people we could choose as a metric, we are going with Weird Al?
Is he still well known in America or something? Last I heard of him was Eat It or something in the 80s.

He had something of a comeback in 2006 with the "White and Nerdy" video, then his album in 2011 was a big deal because it was his first since 2006, and his new one is back to being "another Weird Al album". His music really would make more sense as disconnected singles, which is why he was brought up here in the first place.

# ¿ Jul 17, 2014 20:59

Sham bam bamina!: Nov 6, 2012; ƨtupid cat

Antifreeze Head posted:

I'm confused, but probably shouldn't be.

Are you agreeing or trying to say that Yes albums are somehow support or oppose the statement?

If the later, could you expand upon the point some? I can sort see the argument I guess since they shuffled the lineup some and things changed drastically then shuffled it again and kind of became a combination of the two earlier sounds yet still something else.

He's just agreeing with me, you huge dork. That is the definition of both the words "emptyquoting" and "yes" (which sometimes is actually not used in reference to the band).

On the other hand, the new Yes album is so bad that it probably works as a case against albums anyway, and music as a whole. :v:

# ¿ Jul 18, 2014 20:34

Sham bam bamina!: Nov 6, 2012; ƨtupid cat

mints posted:

Man that's why I used Usenet.

So you were the obnoxious kid with the floppy.

# ¿ Jul 31, 2014 16:56

Sham bam bamina!: Nov 6, 2012; ƨtupid cat

mints posted:

Now I want to dig through old discussions about TNG. Or see if anyone made any posts about summer blockbuster movies back in the mid 80s.

I remember reading archives (can't remember where, or I'd link them) of the BBS nerd slapfights when The Empire Strikes Back was released in 1980. Good stuff, especially when people got mad about it screwing up their fanfiction. :allears:

# ¿ Jul 31, 2014 21:29

Sham bam bamina!: Nov 6, 2012; ƨtupid cat

Arsenic Lupin posted:

But, you say, that's not obsolete! Quite right. But in 1855, a man named James Allen Edward Gibbs saw a single woodcut of a lockstitch sewing machine, then started messing around to see if he could puzzle out the mechanism. His solution, although he didn't realize it at first, was entirely original.

And pleasant to look at, too:

# ¿ Sep 16, 2014 04:21

Sham bam bamina!: Nov 6, 2012; ƨtupid cat

ReidRansom posted:

Speaking of disk drives, I found a big box of these things cleaning up around my office today.

I have literally never seen one of these before today. According to the label, they contain images from scientific expeditions from the early-mid 90s that have long since been published and backed up and archived elsewhere, but I was told to store them in a disused office instead of throwing them away.

Wikipedia says that it's a removable hard disk. I guess that, for space-intensive stuff like archived photographs, it was easier to have a stack of these and one drive for reading them than to have a whole bunch of individual hard drives.

# ¿ Sep 16, 2014 20:01

Sham bam bamina!: Nov 6, 2012; ƨtupid cat

spog posted:

Nah, it was more like a higher density floppy disk.

Functionally, yes. Mechanically,

PhotoKirk posted:

It's (more or less) a hard disc platter in a big plastic case.

# ¿ Sep 17, 2014 04:49

Sham bam bamina!: Nov 6, 2012; ƨtupid cat

drrockso20 posted:

Okay since today's my birthday, I think it'd be a reasonable request for everyone to tell me all the interesting things you can about the Commodore 64, 128, and Amiga family of computers, since I think they are really cool and want to know more about them

It's weird that you'd call them a "family", since the Amiga has absolutely nothing to do with the 64/128. It was actually Jay Miner's pet project when he still worked at Atari (he designed the 2600 and 800/5200 there); then he started his own company to make it (Hi-Toro), which got bought out by Commodore. The Commodore 64, the 128, and the Amiga family.

Cool Amiga Fact: 14-bit stereo sound?!!

Cool C64 Fact: Bob Yannes really wanted to make full-scale synthesizers; the SID chip was just a little thing that he did on the way to his main goal. In a strange twist, the main chip in his flagship synthesizer line ended up in the Apple IIGS.

Cool C128 Fact: ??? What's there to say about a C64 with more RAM? I could probably dig up something in this book, but it's packed up in a storage unit right now.

Incidentally, that book and this one are absolutely essential if you're interested in the history of Commodore and their hardware. Unfortunately, the author got burned out halfway through writing the standalone Amiga volume and has put the project on hold for the time being, although he might finish things up in the future. :pray:

Sham bam bamina! has a new favorite as of 18:23 on Oct 21, 2014

# ¿ Oct 21, 2014 17:50

Sham bam bamina!: Nov 6, 2012; ƨtupid cat

drrockso20 posted:

Thanks for the info, might have to take a look at those books

The second one that I linked is a good overview of the company's story with some in-depth looks at major products and politics. The other is the same length but covers half the timespan; if you're into the 8-bit stuff specifically, that's the one that you really want. There was supposed to be a follow-up volume called The Amiga Years that would have given the same attention to the second half of the company's history, but like I said, it's been shelved for now.

They're fantastic books. They really capture the spirits and characters of the people behind everything, to the point that they almost resemble novels (the author interviewed absolutely everybody relevant who was still alive before writing the first book - at least a quarter of the text is their own direct words - and there are even little "where are they now" sections at the ends of both), but they don't skimp on the technical side of things; there's a wealth of hard information on what the computers did and how they did it, along with concise explanations for unfamiliar readers. And the overal history is laid out with clarity and life, not just in the major scenes, but in the individual moments - the author knows the story and knows how to tell it right.

The only problem is the shameful (nonexistent?) proofreading in the original single-volume book; there are tons of typos that anybody could have caught. On the bright side, I think that there are later editions which clear a lot of that up, so look for them if you plan on getting that one.

Sham bam bamina! has a new favorite as of 03:09 on Oct 23, 2014

# ¿ Oct 23, 2014 03:05

Sham bam bamina!: Nov 6, 2012; ƨtupid cat

Collateral Damage posted:

I've see some programs where the save icon is an arrow going into a stylized hard drive, but even that may be anachronistic as mechanical hard drives will probably be suitable for this thread in a couple of years.

The cells in solid-state drives lose data over time and with rewrites, so I don't think that they'll completely replace hard disks, at least as backup storage.

# ¿ Nov 9, 2014 21:54

Sham bam bamina!: Nov 6, 2012; ƨtupid cat

Johnny Aztec posted:

I was thinking he was referring more to that anti SSD talking point about how you can wear one out with write/rewrite cycles(which is so much data/time that you are very very very likely to never see it).

That was more for the sake of completeness than anything else, which is why I tacked it on at the end. Rewriting does play a small role here, but the real issue is that cheap solid-state storage is significantly volatile out of the box. I've had to deal with it myself; when I got a cheap, lovely storage card for my MP3 player, I ended up replacing it after about a year because glitches would constantly pop up all over my music, one every few weeks or so. The replacement hasn't given me any headaches at all, but I've learned the hard way that you get what you pay for with this stuff, and it's hard to shake the feeling that not even the best is completely immune.

Sham bam bamina! has a new favorite as of 08:27 on Nov 10, 2014

# ¿ Nov 10, 2014 08:01

Sham bam bamina!: Nov 6, 2012; ƨtupid cat

Groda posted:

Trifecta!
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-12380027

Oh, the Rome in Italy. That Rome. Thanks for clarifying that, BBC.

# ¿ Nov 13, 2014 00:10

Sham bam bamina!: Nov 6, 2012; ƨtupid cat

32MB OF ESRAM posted:

i work at a tv studio and when it came time to replace the CRT's with LCDs the ones mounted in rows to the ceiling just got drywalled over and LCD's mounted over them. you can pop your head in behind the set and see them still.

Take them. :pram:

# ¿ Dec 5, 2014 19:45

Sham bam bamina!: Nov 6, 2012; ƨtupid cat

Aardvark Barber posted:

All of my childhood movies are filmed on those VHS-C tapes, and putting the little tape into the big one and hearing the mechanical whir is a staple of my childhood.

My family's video camera was a gigantic bastard that recorded to regular VHS tapes. No clue where it is now. :sigh:

# ¿ Dec 17, 2014 02:47

Sham bam bamina!: Nov 6, 2012; ƨtupid cat

Phanatic posted:

Includes basics on helicopter aerodynamics, including things like ground effect and autorotation, height-velocity diagrams, and writeups on Soviet military hardware that were cribbed right from Janes.

Jane's had a couple of actual helicopter simulators; I've never seen them myself, but I bet the manuals were :pcgaming:

as hell.

# ¿ Jan 5, 2015 22:01

Sham bam bamina!: Nov 6, 2012; ƨtupid cat

Also, the cells in SSDs slowly lose data over time, while platter drives from the '80s still have perfectly intact Andy Warhol images on them.

# ¿ Jan 23, 2015 03:44

Sham bam bamina!: Nov 6, 2012; ƨtupid cat

Geoj posted:

I wonder how much of it was "manufacturing QC went down the drain" rather than "everything being sold today is new old stock that has been collecting dust in a warehouse for 10+ years." I used to work for FujiFilm, who used 3.5" floppies for backup data, and any time the software driving the printer was updated or reloaded we had to make a fresh set of backups. From about 2007 until I left in 2012 it wasn't uncommon to have a failure rate in the high 60% pulling from a "new" box of floppies.

Beaten, I guess.

# ¿ Jan 23, 2015 17:50