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packetmantis posted:I still use AIM and IRC. I work for a large, global company and our division, in TYOOL 2016, uses AIM for quick messaging between people in different offices. 
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Oct 30, 2016 22:01
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Collateral Damage posted:If you have the budget for it, fly business class on long haul connections. Getting a seat that converts to a bed and not having to butt elbows with other people for 10+ hours removes a large part of what makes air travel suck. This is true, however, if you have the budget to do it once, you better have the budget to do it every single time, or it will absolutely ruin long-haul flights for you to go back to economy knowing what you're missing out on. I'm speaking from experience here. On topic, a while back someone posted about the 70s-era Canon 8-T calculator that could do math in hours/minutes/seconds in addition to regular base-10 math. I picked up one online and when I pulled it out of the case it had a "NORTHWEST ORIENT PILOT" sticker on the back. I thought that was kind of cool.
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Mar 1, 2017 15:11
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A colleague was cleaning out one of our other offices today and came across a couple rolls of telex paper in a closet. Sadly the machine itself is long, long gone. But surprisingly telexes are not completely stone dead - some German guys have manged to rig up adapters to use the Internet in place of the telex network and convert [whatever character set telex uses] to ASCII, so it's possible (as seen below) to have a chat with someone reading your words via hardcopy on a telex printer. Here, have 10 minutes of telexes doing their thing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p4bQRHQNSVU I would love to have the Telex 2000 shown at around 7 minutes in.
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Sep 8, 2017 14:21
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evobatman posted:HTC Desire Z, from the days when HTC was the hottest company in the world when it came to smartphones. The build quality on this thing, especially the hinge mechanism, was incredible. T-Mobile in the US released their own branded version of that called the T-Mobile G2 and I had one. It's like 5-6 years since I stopped using it and I still haven't owned a smartphone that's as good. 
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Sep 17, 2017 12:45
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Horace posted:While we're on old BBC computer programs, this clip is definitely worth a watch. A chap demonstrates email only to find that his account has been hacked, live on television. It also sounds like his password was only two or three characters at most, based on the number of keyclicks audible when he warns them not to film the keyboard the second time...
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Dec 2, 2017 01:29
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Listening again I’m pretty sure I only hear two clicks, one of which was presumably the return/enter key. Hackers indeed.
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Dec 2, 2017 02:26
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A series of tubes, if you will
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Jun 7, 2019 16:59
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I'm not sure what I'm more offended by, that the left one is supposed to be red-white-blue or the right one is supposed to be purple-white-blue.
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Aug 21, 2019 13:59
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shovelbum posted:i had a mac as a kid and windows always seemed a font desert until calibri/cambria etc
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Aug 22, 2019 03:01
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Bobby Digital posted:This reminded me of buying an iPod before they were USB-compatible and having to buy one of these: And that reminds me of the PowerBook G4 I bought in 2003, right as USB was on the edge of becoming the standard interface, but not yet the omnipresent format it is now. It came with USB ports, but also a PCMCIA slot, and for good measure both a FireWire 400 and a FireWire 800 port, because let's not forget Apple's genius move of coming out with two different FireWire standards that each used a different, incompatible interface. (It also had DVI, S-video out, Ethernet, modem, headphone, and mic ports - it was like a Swiss Army knife of soon-to-be-obsolete interfaces.)
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Aug 29, 2019 12:28
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namlosh posted:My first wireless was d-link in 2000. My dad and I spent the $800 for an access point and 2 cards. It was crazy cutting edge at the time. Heh, that reminds me of the dumb poo poo we had to do for home networking in the pre-WiFi days. In college I was living in a 2-story duplex with 4 other roommates, and fortunately one of them was an aspiring computer toucher. So he rigged up a Linux tower under his desk attached to a hub which led to a spaghetti mess of cables strung along the walls all throughout the apartment. 5 years later a single WiFi router could replace all that with trivial difficulty. This was also in a neighborhood that had not yet been wired for cable internet, so we got a second phone line (lol now at the idea of having not one but TWO landlines), and he configured the Linux box to dial into the college's modem bank and auto-redial whenever we automatically got kicked off after like 3 hours. As I recall the university eventually noticed he had been logged in basically continuously for like 4 months and lowered the timeout on his account, at which point we started cycling through the rest of our accounts. (Yes, 5 of us were sharing a single 56k modem connection. When cable internet arrived the next year it felt like a miracle delivered from on high by Jesus himself in comparison.)
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Sep 3, 2019 15:28
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Among the many amusing things in that cyberpunk photo, the one that always strikes me is the giant Sony Pyxis GPS. This was well before the US government turned off Selective Availability that intentionally degraded the signal for civilian users, so that thing was only accurate to within 100 meters or so. Which was still pretty awesome by 1993 standards, but not really useful for the urban cyberpunk who wanted to geotag the exact spot where they spliced into the corporation's token ring network to gain unauthorized Tymnet access.
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Sep 24, 2019 16:26
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I will not hear ill words spoken against Sony's shortwave radios  In their day they were the best on the market unless you stepped up into the hard core ham radio nerd/CIA agent level of desktop radios. The absolute peak was the CRF-V21 which in addition to the usual excessive bells and whistles came with a built-in thermal printer for decoding and printing stuff like satellite weather images and news summaries that were transmitted over data streams via shortwave to sailors and other people in remote areas. Not surprisingly it's rare as poo poo and goes for $$$ whenever one occasionally surfaces these days. Have a Youtube video of it in action receiving Japanese newspaper headlines still being broadcast via shortwave in TYOOL 2017: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0XlJ6G4Rp9M
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Nov 26, 2019 14:00
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Bit disappointed that never sparked a scroll wheel war like the one for disposable razor blades. "Logitech: gently caress Everything, We're Doing Five Scroll Wheels"
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Jan 11, 2020 16:32
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Bethany, Ohio?
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Feb 11, 2020 05:56
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Weatherman posted:Imaging having to goatse hams by just describing the picture in detail. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slow-scan_television quote:Slow Scan television (SSTV) is a picture transmission method used mainly by amateur radio operators, to transmit and receive static pictures via radio in monochrome or color. "Television" is a misnomer, the one time I saw some crusty ham radio guy doing it, it was very akin to the experience of downloading an ancient porn GIF at dialup speed. But it would be entirely possible to goatse hams on the other side of the globe.
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Feb 11, 2020 10:20
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Teriyaki Hairpiece posted:Is there any audio of the winning track? https://www.kcrw.com/culture/shows/lost-notes/a-million-dollars-worth-of-plastic Spoiler if you don't want to sit through a half-hour podcast about the saga of the winners, though it's worth it The reporter tracks down the winner, who still has a copy of the disc which he's sure was the winning one. The reporter gets a record player and convinces the guy to give it a play...only to discover it's just one of the millions of non-winning discs. Where's the actual winning disc these days? 
Porfiriato has a new favorite as of 08:36 on Apr 27, 2020 |
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Apr 27, 2020 08:32
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Speaking of 8mm, has Techmoan or anyone ever done a video on the commercial releases of movies in 8mm/Super 8 film format for home projection? It apparently was a thing for a time in the 70s/early 80s before videotape really took off, but I can't imagine it was that popular - most 8mm home movie cameras were silent, so I wouldn't imagine many people had an 8mm/Super 8 movie projector with sound. Here's an article I found that talks a bit about them, but it's a complete pain in the rear end trying to search for info since Google just returns a bunch of results related to the movies "8mm" and "Super 8". https://www.homecinemachoice.com/content/super-8-when-home-cinema-was-super
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Apr 29, 2020 03:23
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Catzilla posted:Unfortunately the crumple zone tends to be the footwells in an accident. On the bright side, it'll solve the problem for the next time around of being too tall to drive a kei van.
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Aug 6, 2020 14:48
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Sweevo posted:i'm the door off its hinges for no explicable reason I'm the bowl of flowers and ??thermos?? delicately placed on top of Mount Projection.
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Aug 12, 2020 04:19
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Relevant to thread is another book by one of the authors of that Spycraft book: The Secret History of KGB Spy Cameras: 1945–1995 which he wrote with a couple of retired KGB officers. It's thoroughly illustrated with all kinds of crazy wearable/concealable still photo and movie cameras, and a fair number of anecdotes that start with "so I was wandering around a flea market in Khabarovsk in the early 90s and..." Just all kinds of really ingenious technology rendered completely obsolete by a cellphone's built-in camera (and digital cameras in general).
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Dec 25, 2020 15:59
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Some guy on Reddit used a Raspberry Pi and a floppy drive to build a "VCR" that can play a full-length feature film on a 3.5-inch disk: https://www.reddit.com/r/raspberry_pi/comments/kkzpuk/i_created_a_floppy_disk_vcr_that_plays_full/
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Jan 2, 2021 01:52
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That Discman in the upper left is real nice. I have a soft spot for Sony electronics that are laden down with a million buttons and menu keys even if the user-friendliness is terrible. Their portable shortwave radios were masterpieces in that regard:
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Mar 17, 2021 16:29
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I'm not a calculator enthusiast but I very much appreciate that you posted them on top of an InivisiClues Zork I map. edit: Actually I lied, slightly. A few years ago I did pick up a Canon sexagesimal calculator, which does time calculations:  Apparently they were popular with pilots back in the day, the one I got had a "property of TWA" sticker on the back. Porfiriato has a new favorite as of 10:45 on Mar 20, 2021 |
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Mar 20, 2021 10:37
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Trabant posted:What, did nobody else try to pirate stuff from FTP servers (found through mIRC channels) with incredibly high upload/download ratio requirements?  Nothing like trying to upload a bunch of crap over dialup to be able to then download something you wanted from some FTP server with an insane 1:1 ratio.
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Sep 20, 2021 16:15
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In the replies she says it's an original program she wrote in the present day, but I actually dug out a copy of Basic Computer Games I have on my bookshelf and started thumbing through it because I was convinced this was a page from there.
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Feb 24, 2022 03:27
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Unless you click through to the tweet or embiggen the photo it's easy to miss the buried lede that in the process they got Doom running on a John Deere. (  )
Porfiriato has a new favorite as of 05:38 on Aug 16, 2022 |
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Aug 16, 2022 05:36
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Imagined posted:I'm not worried about fire from the cigarettes. I mean that most submarines don't use unnecessary paneling (flammable or not) of any kind anywhere because, in a submarine, if anything anywhere is leaking or on fire (which could be any of it), you really want to be able to see it and access it easily. Unlike the Nazis' insistence on chugging along with hydrogen once helium became difficult to source, the smoking room was pretty thought out: quote:The smoking room was kept at higher than ambient pressure, so that no leaking hydrogen could enter the room, and the smoking room and its associated bar were separated from the rest of the ship by a double-door airlock. One electric lighter was provided, as no open flames were allowed aboard the ship. There was also a bar just outside where one of the bartender's main duties was to make sure no smokers wandered out of the lounge with anything lit.
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Sep 30, 2022 12:56
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Yeah, that appears to be a Sony DXC-1820P, which seems like kind of a wild thing to find laying around in a thrift store. The lack of a tape deck means it's meant as a studio/broadcast camera, though if you were fond of destroying your shoulders even more I suppose you could attach to a standalone deck slung over your shoulder.
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Oct 23, 2022 08:28
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 e: as can be seen from the link above, 150 pages of it is pinouts for wiring cables to connect various types of printers with various types of computers 
Porfiriato has a new favorite as of 12:00 on Nov 7, 2022 |
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Nov 7, 2022 11:55
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Even for 1990 I'm impressed that mall had a B. Dalton and a Waldenbooks AND what seems to be an independent bookstore. (Plus both an Electronic Boutique and a Babbage's.)
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Nov 9, 2022 02:50
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I don’t agree with the breathless Twitter Take there. That clip seems like it’s predicting something like the Sony Watchman (itself obsolete technology), not a modern cellphone. Everyone is passively watching television/videos on their magic box, no one is playing Candy Crush or shitposting on dying forums.
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Feb 27, 2023 05:13
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Dick Trauma posted:What I like about it is that it looks very much like modern day folks staring at their phones oblivious to what's happening around them. Yeah, it's a pretty cool clip regardless. Speaking of the Watchman, just look at that thing:  This being the "sports" version now I'm imagining someone going for a run wearing earbuds with that thing strapped to their upper arm like a cellphone (or in earlier times, an iPod). e: hope you don't poke yourself in the eye with the antenna!
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Feb 28, 2023 10:52
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But what if not everyone on the trail wants to listen to Evening Shade??
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Feb 28, 2023 12:43
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There is a shocking number of those on Ebay complete in case/box, etc., for < $100 (albeit "untested") and uh, I should really stop browsing before I end up hitting "buy it now" on something
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Mar 22, 2023 04:05
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Here's a video of a similar model in action, with a fancy remote control that automatically opens and closes the projector/mirror part: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pm0oLFr0j2s I was more annoyed that the guy casually mentions in the video description that he has a 1956 color television but then doesn't have a video on his channel showing it so I found this one about the same model instead: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wf3M0LYeJdc
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Apr 23, 2023 15:14
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PLEASE PUT DOWN THE WHOPPER JUNIOR. YOU HAVE TWENTY SECONDS TO COMPLY.
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Jun 1, 2023 13:47
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“Likely” disconnected years ago I mean, it’s Boston, let’s not be too hasty in our assumptions here
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Aug 8, 2023 22:04
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Kwyndig posted:Imagine if you had an account at 7-11 though, where you could just buy gum and monster energy drinks and get billed at the end of the month. Wasabi the J posted:Feels like they have something like that in Japan they do everything at 711 
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Sep 14, 2023 02:17
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Redbox, circa 1985. https://twitter.com/heisenherr/status/1713436021684129922
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Oct 15, 2023 18:22
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