Doc M posted:

All I really know about Opel is that the Manta has a legendary reputation in Germany as the vehicle of choice for a certain type of teenager (here in Finland, the rough equivalent would be an old Toyota Corolla). A lovely old Manta also participates in the Nürburgring 24-hour race every year, complete with a fox tail hanging off the back.

edit: I am in no way an Opel Manta scholar so my information may be slightly inaccurate

twistedmentat posted:

What about rolling them down a hill?

Krispy Wafer posted:

I want one of those .justice government email addresses.

Jerry Cotton posted:

Why the gently caress are the only two OSs in the world (that I can easily get) that work on old computers and support SMP Linux (which I don't need another box of) and Windows NT?

Jerry Cotton posted:

I didn't know Beos supported SMP.

Cojawfee posted:

No fair, you changed my music by measuring it listening.

Imagined posted:

I can't help but suspect that that guy probably actually listens to maybe two hours of music a year, too.

Trabant posted:

https://twitter.com/spindlypete/status/1118711994796765186

Cojawfee posted:

Also, this all reminds me of a story from years ago (that was probably fake) that was about an underwater cave. In this cave, they found a self portrait of a giant squid made of the bones of sea creatures.

Cojawfee posted:

Strichzeichnungstift

shovelbum posted:

*checks box sovietishly*

vodka, check

Scarodactyl posted:

I bought the full version of Operation: Inner Space, a game from '94 that still ran natively on windows up to 7 (maybe even on 10?). It is still for sale at its original full retail price, which is sort of cool and sort of a bummer.
Cool game, though the conceit of fighting through levels based on folders and filea on your computer has become a bit unmanageable.

quote:

If the user inflicts a wound upon a process monster, the corresponding process' priority is lowered to give it fewer CPU cycles. When the monster accumulates enough damage and is killed, the associated process is also killed.
[...]
A significant problem with the current implementation of PSDoom is that monsters are much more likely to attack each other than expected. This causes many windows to mysteriously disappear as the program runs. For the same reason, the computer is prone to crashing because certain processes are vital to the computer's operation and should not be killed.

Sweevo posted:

They were reliable enough back in the day. The only problems I ever had were with lovely cassette players chewing up the tape rather than any problem with the tapes themselves. Long term it depends a lot on how they've been stored, but I've got ZX Spectrum games from the early 80s that mostly still work fine.

For error correcting there was usually something, even if it was just a checksum byte. Computers could generally work out if loading had failed even if they couldn't do much about it beside printing an error message and making you start over. So it was more error-detection than correction I guess.

Groke posted:

I should think "pornograph" would be the device for playback, the media itself would be a pornogram.

T-man posted:

I mean I admire the dedication and big dick energy of "gently caress you, no backwards compatibility" since windows has bent itself backwards trying to do the impossible. Probably wouldn't appreciate it as much if I ever used an apple product or *scoff* pay for software. Linux Forever!

Veotax posted:

No, that would be me trying to get a 1997 Mac game working on a Windows PC in 2005, I think. I can't read the date on this old screenshot I pulled off my old Photobucket account.

LifeSunDeath posted:

Always wanted to try out a Datahand keyboard. I really thought they were going to be the future of typing but they weren't.



The keys were supposed to require almost zero movement of your fingers to actuate and therefore be more comfortable and efficient.

You could mount them in weird places too:

Grumbletron 4000 posted:

Drain enough of those mercury puzzles into a tub and you can float cannon balls on that poo poo!

Johnny Aztec posted:

Yeah, this is by design. They want, and need, those people in prison slaves.

Dick Trauma posted:

I think it would be a great promotion to put an elephant on it. What's the worst thing that could happen?

Cojawfee posted:

Everytime I want to watch 2001, I remember I have to get through that ape sequence first.

Some Goon posted:

Anything with a needle can play a record. You'd just have to affix a needle made of something that won't damage it. And with no preamp you wouldn't have anything to offset the riaa curve.

TotalLossBrain posted:

that reminds me of a line I saw in a journal article about some RF spoofing method: "This is the signal-processing equivalent to playing xylophone with a cat: it's ugly and illegal, but it works."

Garrand posted:

https://video.twimg.com/ext_tw_video/1335450108674985991/pu/vid/576x1024/HGfWns69wI0mTNeI.mp4

Dick Trauma posted:

I remember reading that some of those tiny cameras came with a length of thread to indicate the focal length.

Wikipedia posted:

An 18-inch (460 mm) measuring chain was provided with most Minox subminiature cameras, which enabled easy copying of letter-sized documents. The espionage use of the Minox has been portrayed in Hollywood movies and TV shows, and some 1980s Minox advertising has played up the "spy camera" story.

wa27 posted:

RPN for life

Cojawfee posted:

Holy poo poo they are 200 dollars. I think HP could definitely make a new one and sell it to people into retro computing. A lot of those features seem like they would be really useful for assembly stuff on old microprocessors.

Shibawanko posted:

teachers prescribing how you should write or tie your shoelaces was so stupid back then. what the gently caress does it matter how you do it as long as the result is there

Humphreys posted:

Might be due to the most common letters in English language being E, T, A, R, then S? Not sure if translates to most common opening characters in a sentence, but need thing I learnt from a cryptography course (and Wheel of Fortune)

Arsenic Lupin posted:

Spearphishers are frighteningly good at what they do. If you're personally worth hacking, or if you're in an organization worth hacking, it's going to be addressed to your correct name, apparently from somebody you have an existing connection to. I saw a news report the other day of people being hacked because they opened the conference program for a conference they were going to be presenting at. It wasn't actually from the conference organization, and the payload was something they would reasonably have opened.

quote:

The Nigerian criminal group known as London Blue, has even used legitimate commercial lead generation sites to gather information on CFOs and other finance department employees.

Johnny Aztec posted:

I kind of want you to send me a box of burnt out Photomultiplier tubes.


I don't know why, but.....I do.

quote:

Mounted on an inside superstructure are about 13,000 photomultiplier tubes that detect light from Cherenkov radiation.

LifeSunDeath posted:

what do you think scrap value on that thing is?

Computer viking posted:

Oh yeah, as I said the writing was on the wall for sgi long before the first itanium machines came out. High end MIPS was probably doomed by intels ability to convert massive sales into RnD.

I'm not equally sure about Alpha, but I get the impression HP/Compaq wanted to get out of CPU design and worked closely with Intel from the start; it's hard to keep an architecture going when the new owners actively want to retire it.

Same story for PA-RISC, I guess - I know less about it, but I have a maybe unfounded feeling that there were more Alpha than PA-RISC machines around?

Was the threat of itanium one of the reasons sun/Oracle kind of gave up on sparc as a competitor, or was that just market forces or a desire to be more of a services company? What about desktop PowerPC?

afen posted:

https://twitter.com/WillDeacon/status/979738912062148608

VictualSquid posted:

So, I mentioned that plotters don't have to be digital.
Have you heard the good word of x-y writers?


You see those lab connectors? This is where the signal goes.
You generally have a function generator that generates a fairly slow triangle wave on the X. And some sort of result to this on the Y input.

Trabant posted:

But yeah, engineers will probably be the last group to give up on that approach, esp. those that have to develop code. Everyone else... yeah, I can see it happening. If your computer or application has a halfway decent search capability, highly structured organization may not be worth the effort.

His Divine Shadow posted:

Stuff that's lying on the shelves around here:


Some kind of coax to ethernet stuff?

Pham Nuwen posted:

thepopmonster posted:

I know there are a few retrobuilders in this thread, if anyone wants any or preferably all of:
* AGP radeon 9800 - 256M/128 bit (unknown if works, don't have any AGP machines)
* PCI ATI TV Wonder 650 (probably works - the PC I pulled it from just had a dead PSU)
* PCI no-name card with 3xUSB and 3x firewire ports (same)
* PCI-E passively cooled full-height PCIE 512M Sapphire Radeon HD4670 (this one works enough to come up in at least 2D mode in Linux and the caps look good, so I'd say this one works)
* 2x patriot PC3200 400mhz DDR dimms cl 2-3-2-5, PDC-1G3200LLK (unknown)
* a PCI-E Dell 4350 adaptor, 1/2 height card, full height bracket, no fan (parts only)
* 2x2GB DDR2 667Mhz ram (works, compatible with Celeron 420)
and are willing to pay the postage from NOLA (close-enough in SA gift certs is fine) please PM (or email me if you don't have PMs.)

So, with that out of the way, let us all praise the transputer.

The what?

The Inmos Transputer was a UK development - the idea was there was a very simple stack-based processor with on-chip ram (4K) that had built-in serial interconnects (4x20mbit, which in the days when 10mbit ethernet was "fast" was a big deal). It was basically supposed to be the next big thing - parallel task-based message-passing architecture - but pretty much sank without a trace. I recall an anecdote that they had a symposium or whatever themed around the transputers and someone went to the trouble of going round and asking all the presenters how many transputer nodes each of them had and none of them had more than two, so that might have had something to do with it.

http://people.cs.bris.ac.uk/~dave/transputer.html)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cdK3PXKvYgs

Kwyndig posted:

Cats, in a computer office? Were they at least MS certified?

barbecue at the folks posted:

Membrane keyboards were necessary to get early 8 bit computers down to their desired price point, but boy howdy I can only imagine the kind of carpal tunnel syndrome you got from having to learn to code on one of these:



Sinclair machines still manage to surprise me every time with how small they were. Also that design!