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We used typewriters at the bank for filling out currency transactions reports and filling in cashiers checks. It was incredibly annoying, but I still love a good IBM Selectric. Now it looks like they do all that on computers. Every few months a guy would come in to service the typewriters. A real-life-honest-to-God typewriter repairman.
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May 8, 2014 15:00
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KozmoNaut posted:I had one and it was crap I had one and it was a thing of beauty and wonder. I'm seriously considering getting another one. Still doesn't compare to the Microsoft Explorer Trackball. My grandchildren will hear stories about that majestic piece of hardware.
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May 8, 2014 17:07
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When I was a kid I got my great-grandparent's set of encyclopedias. So old that Rockerfeller's entry had a dash after his birth year. electrohead posted:So, your hand doesn't hit the lower buttons accidentally? I've considered them as I need a replacement for the Logitech Marble Mouse I've had for about 12 years. The Logitech ones are still in production as well, incidentally, however they still do not have any sort of scroll wheel. You'd be surprised how many games use the scroll wheel in a way that can't be remapped or duplicated via other simple means. You control the ball with your fingertips and the buttons require a reasonable amount of force to click. I never had an issue with accidental pressings. The thing about that model is it loving sucks for the first 48 hours of use. Like, "OMG where did I put the receipt" levels of sucking. Then it breaks in and suddenly it's the best input device you ever used.
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May 9, 2014 14:04
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One of the problems I find with modern cars is their engines are too quiet to shift on audio cues. On my old Volkswagen it was easy to know when to up or downshift. On my 2001 Saturn, not so much. You can keep your eye on the RPM meter or a blinking light on the dashboard, but what's the fun in that? Now a lot of cars can switch between automatic or manual mode. You don't get that hot sexy clutch action, but you're also not riding the brake down a mountain road either. And gently caress cars without power windows or locks. If you're hauling people around no one ever remembers to lock their door or roll up their window.
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May 12, 2014 02:08
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p-hop posted:That reminds me of a short story (fiction) about a guy who could never beat some DOS text adventure game from his youth. It was unfinished and impossible to beat, but he had dreams of the game's ending. The guy that made the game cut all ties with society and became a hermit living in his parents' house or something (???) and the narrator went to meet the guy in person. The guy gave the narrator an old school floppy or Amiga tape that had the finished game, I think. He beat the game and it had some kind of twist or revelation. Can't remember. Tangibly related, but I never could finish Infocom's Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and that poo poo haunts me to this day. I think I screwed up some steps and got stuck literally probably 5 minutes from the end. Mister Kingdom posted:I worked at a pawn shop that used VHS tapes for backup (from a PC). My idiot uncle started backing up all his music to VHS because you could fit 8 hours on a tape and it was High Fidelity.
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May 16, 2014 16:18
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Johnny Aztec posted:If you didn't grab the mail out of your mailbox, at your house on Earth, you couldn't finish the game. I got through the Babel fish. I think I missed something when you plug in the tea machine and become a whale. Speaking of obsolete technologies (that aren't text games) I used to call Infocom's 1-900 number for hints. Eventually I learned my lesson and purchased the hint book with the game (via mail order). Boy, waiting 3 to 6 weeks for my new game was awesome!
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May 16, 2014 17:50
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Monkey Fracas posted:Was looking for an image of Blade Runner on Laserdisc when I happened upon this: To really put it in perspective, $20k in 1982 is $48k now.
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Jun 4, 2014 20:00
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I had both a 5 1/4 and 3 1/2 inch drive and was considered a golden god by my friends. Anyone have those PS/1 model 25's at school? Those were the AiO IBM PCs with two 3 1/2 inch drives.  It was stepping into a time machine and seeing the future.
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Jun 12, 2014 23:41
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We had Macs in our newspaper class. I think we used Pagemaker. That software was so cool. Then I got to college and started using pizza box Macs with huge 17 inch monitors and software that let you type in a circle. Mind blowing. We had two of them networked together so play some Star Destroyer versus Enterprise game.
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Jun 13, 2014 16:13
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My wife was one of those Blackberry freaks. She had a work Blackberry and a personal Blackberry. She finally switched to Windows 8 and missed the hardware keyboard for all of about 10 minutes. And what's with the screen sizes all over the place? How can any app display properly when you've got 3 different widely disparate aspect ratios. And now they're supposed to be integrating with the Amazon App store? That's going to be a fantastic user experience.
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Jun 20, 2014 14:54
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Pham Nuwen posted:iPhone user? I use Android and iOS. But those are varying resolution sizes of the same general aspect ratio. And even iOS in all it's design glory has to stick black bars on some applications when the ratios don't perfectly match up. Blackberry 10 has the Z line (full screen), Q (half screen), and now this thing (square screen). A developer could make an app that looked good on all three variants, but it's not like Blackberry has the most robust ecosystem. And their recent plan to use the Amazon app store means you'll be able to use apps that were never designed to work on those sized screens. Keiya posted:I mean, have you never used a desktop computer? It's not like we've never dealt with that before... My Samsung netbook could not use Photoshop because some of the pop-up windows expanded beyond the screen border The application required a minimum screen height of 720px, but most netbooks had 600px. It's not a desktop, but still goes to show the problem with non-standard sizes.
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Jun 20, 2014 18:47
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Speaking of Sony screw-ups: The hardware was awesome and since it didn't have wifi or a touchscreen the battery lasted a month easily. It had a cool pleather cover and - get this, SD card support! It was Sony hardware without Sony proprietary poo poo! Except for the Sony book store, which was a terrible piece of crap. I remember trying to take advantage of a 30 free book offer (all public domain classics) and being unable to complete it because everything was listed alphabetically and each page took about 20 seconds to load. And when you picked a book the list went back to the A's. I think Sony creates products by writing 'functionality', 'compatibility', and 'design' on a whiteboard and then tells their designers they can only pick 2. Collateral Damage posted:I think a lot of Sony's apparent stupidity when it comes to media products stems from their different businesses being natural competitors. Sony Pictures and Sony Music wants everything locked down tight and riddled with DRM, while Sony Corporation wants to make products that appeal to the market. Those factors are often mutually exclusive.  Krispy Wafer has a new favorite as of 15:55 on Jun 30, 2014 |
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Jun 30, 2014 15:47
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minato posted:An important thing to remember about format wars is that if you win one, you win big and for a long time. The floppy disc, the CD, DVD, Blu-ray, and Betacam (Betamax's broadcast & professional brother) formats were all from Sony or Sony coalitions. From a business POV (but certainly not the consumers') it makes perfect sense to try and foist a proprietary format onto everyone else, because if you win then you can just sit back and reap the licensing fees for a good decade or more. But when they screw up, they do it spectacularly. The Sony Memory Stick launched in 1998; SD cards in 1999. I don't know which, if any, was faster - but Memory Sticks looked cooler and found their way into consumer electronics much sooner. But only Sony consumer electronics. SwissCM posted:SD cards are simply an extension of MMC cards, which were launched in 1997. They're even cross-compatible to some extent. Well there you go. I never used a MMC card so I didn't realize they were related. Krispy Wafer has a new favorite as of 19:27 on Jun 30, 2014 |
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Jun 30, 2014 18:37
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p-hop posted:Unless it was top-of-the-line audiophile poo poo, most of the vintage radios/amps/speakers got junked. I took home a few of them and have a radioshack model with an 8-track slot for my kitchen stereo. Hooked up to some late 50s speakers. The sound isn't amazing but they just look so nice! I love the aesthetic on electronics from back then. I've got a 1950's Admiral console stereo which powered on, but I couldn't get the radio or phonograph working. So I snipped the speaker wires, ran them to a digital receiver and plugged that into a Bluetooth transmitter. I'm not an audiophile so I can't speak for the quality of the sound, but holy hell it can get loud.
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Dec 17, 2014 00:15
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Yeah, firewire is both awesome and awful. If you weren't using a Mac it was just a terrible experience. I remember all kinds of weird poo poo trying to import video via a firewire PCI card to my PC. I had a situation 3 years ago where I needed to import a whole stack of miniDV tapes and all I had was a HP laptop. I ended up buying a $150 ancient iMac G4 just for that precious 6 pin firewire port.
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Dec 22, 2014 23:47
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DoctorWhat posted:why would anyone willingly use up a data plan rather than storing their music locally? Music doesn't take up much space on a modern 32 or 64gb ipod/iphone/android device. T-Mobile doesn't count streaming against your data caps for most music services. Net Neutrality in your face!
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May 12, 2015 14:54
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SubG posted:Early to mid '80s Squier Strats were made in Japan and are the loving tits. My mid-80s MIJ Squier Strat has the best neck on any Strat or Strat clone I've ever played. After the mid '80s some were made in Japan and some were made in Korea, and the Korean Squiers had much spottier quality control than the MIJ ones. Someday I'll figure out how to use a sliderule. I have my father's on a shelf in my office. It makes it look like he was some kind of engineer, but in reality he used it to calculate interest rates or some poo poo.
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May 19, 2015 14:14
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p-hop posted:We had people bidding on the whole computers just to get the keyboard. They'd be like "you can keep or scrap the rest of it, just give me a shipping quote for the keyboard on its own." They are nice firm clicky mechanical keyboards, but could you even use them on any modern computer without an adapter? I've been on the fence for a while on grabbing an IBM Model M keyboard for clickety clack typing myself, the tactile response from a keyboard like that is so... pleasing. My brother has a really nice ~niche enthusiast~ modern mechanical keyboard, and I love using it. Anyone in this thread have a Model M? How do you like it? I used a Model M with a PS2 connector on a modern computer. I needed a special adapter, but it otherwise worked fine. A standard PS2 to USB connector won't work. I can't use them anymore. At the time I was a team lead overseeing contractors who just had to deal with my loud clicks and clacks. Now I'm a contractor and the day I bring in a Model M is the day I take it back home with the rest of my stuff in a cardboard box.
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May 24, 2015 23:17
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Kugyou no Tenshi posted:Someone's never heard of Flooz, which got a toxic reputation before its shutdown due to its use in money laundering. Flooz was awesome in its terribleness. I remember Whoopie Goldberg doing some fluff interview in People magazine and sticking Flooz into every other answer. Like, "what's the best gift you ever got?" The gift of Flooz!". I guess a lot of DotCom start-ups tried to get celebrity endorsements by offering a percentage in the company, creating these desperate circle-jerks as everyone tried to make it to an IPO. I think William Shatner is the only one who actually made money doing that with Priceline.
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May 28, 2015 17:29
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I had a C64, but poor parents who thought buying the computer was a closed transaction with no additional costs. Eventually in desperation I started trading parts for games. First I traded away my tape drive. I remember loading up Blue Max and playing it in memory for a week before there was a power outage. Then I traded my whole C64 for a Vic-20 with two dozen games. I figure I was just continuing a family tradition of terrible computer decisions. Later we bought a PCjr.
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Jun 2, 2015 16:49
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I had to install a copy of OS X using their internet restore and it was kind of scary how well it worked. My MacBook had an optical drive, but I got rid of it and stuck in a SSD. That said I do keep an external drive around. It's not that I don't need a CD or DVD drive, it's that I don't need one to carry around everywhere. And sure enough, I've used it like twice.
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Jun 8, 2015 03:00
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SubG posted:So if physical media is becoming obsolete, more's the pity for the media, because anyone looking at any of those mediums through a digital-only lens is going to miss out on a whole shitload of content. Are you referring to DVD extras? Because I thought NetFlix was moving towards offering those options via streaming? It'd make sense as it'd be pretty cheap to provide a directory commentary track alongside the regular audio. Or a couple of hours of low quality behind-the-scenes features.
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Jun 8, 2015 15:20
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Fozaldo posted:Wow nostalgia trip, I had the 150 in 1 unit too. Talking about the relay I remember thinking I wonder what would happen if I trigger the relay and when the relay makes its connection it switches it off, and then when it springs back maybe I can get it to switch back on and repeat......BUUZZZZZZZZZ loving awesome, I just made a buzzer with a bit mental theorizing. I can't remember, was it possible to get shocked by those? I don't recall ever getting juiced by my electronics kit. I just purchased the 750-in-1 Snap Circuits kit for my 9 year old's birthday. Here's hoping I didn't just blow 80 bucks.
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Jun 8, 2015 19:44
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Fozaldo posted:There was a couple of transformers on there so if you knew what you were doing you could up the 9 volt battery a bit I guess, nothing unsafe though, probably not even noticeable without licking the wires. I figured as much. I was just trying to figure out if my lifelong propensity for getting shocked started young. "turn it off at the circuit breaker? naaah."
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Jun 8, 2015 20:59
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ToxicSlurpee posted:You know, one of the reasons people pirated music rampantly in the early days of music piracy was that the music industry seemed to think it was totally OK to release $25 CDs with two good songs on them. How many albums came out that were exorbitantly priced but were mostly just bullshit filler to pad it out to 50 minutes? I remember getting burned several times by that. The album would be hyped like crazy, the one or two good songs would be getting spammed everywhere. then the highly anticipated album would consist of those two songs and then poo poo. No wonder people pirated music; there was no justification in waiting that long to buy an album for those two songs when you could just download them before the album was even fully released. Holy hell does the music industry have a long history of sucking a lot in many different ways then blaming their customers for it when they started losing sales. The lowest moment in my professional career was selling a Lou Vega 'A Little Bit of Mambo' CD to a teenaged girl. For $21 and change. I hope some fucker at RCA choked on the appetizer be bought with those profits.
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Jun 9, 2015 17:10
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drgnwr1 posted:Don't forget being ran through with the laundry, or dropped in a parking lot, rained on, and ran over by cars. Well, paper money does pretty well in the wash too since it's more fabric than paper. I love coins. I particularly love huge rear end Eisenhower dollars. But switching from bills to paper is more or less a moot point as we move towards a cashless society. By the time anyone actually does something meaningful (like ditch the penny) no one will be using them anyway. I can hardly imagine what being a cashier these days must be like. More than half the time you're not handling cash and when you do credit card transactions you never forget to give the card back to the customer. Must be dreamy...
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Jul 15, 2015 14:28
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Last Chance posted:We're skipping over it for stuff like ApplePay and whatever Google does. No point in bothering with chip and pin now. Chip and pin are the cards with microchips, right? So yeah, we're getting there. My AmEx has it, but my debit card (where it's probably needed most) doesn't.
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Jul 16, 2015 14:34
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Antifreeze Head posted:The article was published in April of 2007, the Kindle released in November of 2007. Tablet computing gained popularity a few years later and now they pretty much all come pre-shipped with a few e-books. I guess there is an argument to be made about dedicated e-book readers flopping, but you could almost use that same line of argument for any device which a smartphone includes in its repertoire. I had one of the e-readers from Sony they reference. If you were basing the future of electronic books on your experience with that (or more specifically the Sony Connect store) then yes, e-readers are a flop. The problem is people were trying to create new markets while taking on entrenched interests that wanted your product dead. If the efforts are terrible (like the Sony Connect store) then the baby dies in the womb and it's a failed product. Amazon was the only company that could make it work because they had lots of book-selling marketshare and were not burdened by retail stores full of unsold paper books. So ComputerWorld would have been correct, at least for the foreseeable future, if not for Amazon.
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Jul 16, 2015 16:58
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Siri gets cited because it was the first real voice recognition that got wide spread marketing, not because it's the best. This is what Siri translated when I tried to ask it how tall Arnold Schwarzenegger is.  I get it, it's a tough name to pronounce. But why does Siri even know THAT word?
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Jul 16, 2015 19:11
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John Big Booty posted:Yeah, they sucked balls. Mine just stopped working after two weeks or so. I thought the hardware itself was great. Unlike every other Sony product, it actually took regular SD cards for storage and the e-ink screen was as good as anything else at the time. This was before WiFi or touchscreens so the batteries could last a month on a single charge. It was Sony's effort at an online book store that sucked so bad. I remember them bundling 30 free books with the e-reader. These were all public domain titles and in a special section of their store. So you'd go through it in alphabetical order, pick your copy of Aesop's fables and maybe Beowolf. At that point you realize it's restarting you back at A each time you pick a title. So you had to cycle through scores of very slow loading pages as you trudged through your 30 titles. By the time you picked a S title, it'd take almost 5 minutes to get back to where you were. It was easier if you knew your title, but the storefront was dog slow regardless.
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Jul 17, 2015 15:07
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ElwoodCuse posted:What's the current status of laser eye surgery? The way it was advertised always made it seem low-rent and "will it gently caress up your eyes in 10 years? who knows!" If it was a super safe, super easy solution to 20/20 vision for everyone, would it really need to be advertised on buses and FM radio? It's pretty safe. I remember reading all the horror stories before I had mine done 8 or 9 years ago. This one guy got infections and scarring and had to have the procedure redone multiple times and the doctor hosed up just about everything that could be hosed up. The result? He has to wear glasses and he sometimes gets halos at night. Not the desired result by any means, but that's with everything going wrong. In the end it's a reset button for your eyes. I went from about 20/200 to 20/25. I will need glasses again at some point, but my vision will probably never be as bad as it was. As for why it's not advertised as much anymore - everyone who wanted Lasik got Lasik. Sure there are always new patients, but nothing like the huge deluge of backed up demand there once was. So a lot of the providers went out of business and the ones that are left don't need to advertise as much to get patients.
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Jul 18, 2015 16:36
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Humbug Scoolbus posted:My LASIK surgery took 22 minutes total a from the time I walked into the doctor's office to the time I left. The process is absolutely painless and you don't see anything out of the eye they're working on until the surgery is done. The exam takes about an hour and is pretty non-intrusive as well. Do it. Yeah, definitely don't mention the burning smell. I was told it was just the laser outgassing, but I'm pretty sure it was my cornea cooking. I can't do anything foreign near my eyeball. I can't even keep my eyes open for camera flashes. As a result they had to tape my eyelids back and I'm pretty sure the vision in my right eye is worse than my left eye solely because I couldn't stop uncontrollably twitching. Still a success. Burning tissue smells and all.
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Jul 20, 2015 19:29
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drgnwr1 posted:Also heard a rumor when HD DVD went down that HD DVD and Blu-ray were close in competition but the porn industry decided to support Blu-ray which destroyed HD DVD. It was pretty close for awhile to the point that it was kind of shocking when all of a sudden Blu-Ray was crowned the winner and everyone abandoned HD-DVD. People had been expecting a more drawn out battle, like with Beta and VHS. In the end I think the winner was picked during a trade show. Probably shortly after Disney decided to go Blu-Ray. I remember people using the first HD-DVD players, which were essentially Linux PC's and cost about $1000.
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Jul 23, 2015 02:46
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My entertainment center is obsolete. It's a big massive wooden thing with glass curios on either side to show off all our precious stuff. There's a cabinet at the bottom that's supposed to hold all your electronics. It has one hole as a vent and that's also where all your cables enter and exit through. Wire enough stuff through there and you all but block it. I had my DirecTV HD DVR and first-gen Xbox 360 in there. About 20 minutes into Halo everything suddenly shuts down and opening the glass doors was like peeking into an oven. Amazingly the Xbox lasted another 3 years once I figured out what heat dissipation was.
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Jul 23, 2015 14:00
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DrBouvenstein posted:Speaking of obsolete TV tech, DLP TVs were the new hotness for all of a couple years in the mid aughts. I really enjoyed my Samsung DLP. It didn't have the same pixelation of the LCD's at the time (2005) and had more natural colors. We replaced it with a plasma, which I guess will be an obsolete tech pretty soon. Can someone can explain why a plasma at 600mhz doesn't have that terrible soap opera effect that 240mhz LCD's have.
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Jul 24, 2015 19:04
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axolotl farmer posted:this was on the imgur front page The new Sony Linear Tracking LT79 Pro not compatible with non-Sony media
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Jul 29, 2015 18:52
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drgnwr1 posted:When it decides to work. Say long message. Phone responds "I'm sorry I can't take any requests right now, please try again later." Much help you are Siri. Or the voice recognition software on your smartphone in general doesn't understand what you're saying and guesses completely wrong. That's because the iPhone doesn't decode your speech. It sends your request to a data center in North Carolina and transmits the results back to your phone. I think I read iPhones will start doing all of that in-device in the next year or two, which should make it more reliable. I don't know if Google and Microsoft do it the same way, but they seem to work better than Siri.
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Aug 1, 2015 14:35
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Mister Kingdom posted:The pawn shop I worked for in the early 90s used VHS tapes as backup. Not sure what system they used. My dumbass uncle had the fantastic idea to back up all his music to VHS. In his own words, you could get 8 hours on one tape and it's in high fidelity. You just had to remember the tracking number for each song.
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Aug 1, 2015 23:53
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spog posted:And yet it takes just as long - if not longer - to boot up to a usable state. My Windows 3.11 machine (66mhz 4gb of RAM) was lightning fast to boot. It took only marginally more time to boot than my SSD drive laptop now. But yeah, like others have already said, apparently you haven't experienced the joys of solid state hard drives. Rebooting is so much quicker now. I still don't apply upgrades when I need to, because gently caress having to wait two minutes. But if I did, it'd be really quick.
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Aug 2, 2015 20:36
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Pingiivi posted:4 gigs of RAM? Really? poo poo...megs. I knew looking at those specs seemed odd. Was it 4gb or 2gb, why doesn't either option look right? Jerry Cotton posted:My dad's work PC had OS/2 Warp 4 and 80 megs of memory and that was like more than anyone had on their home computers. We tried OS/2 Warp on that same machine and it choked completely. I think the recommended requirements were 8mb. So yeah, my 4mb technically ran it - but glacier-like slow.
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Aug 3, 2015 04:17
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