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Way back when in 95, my first computer was one of these: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9-RyvZxKufo The IBM PC XT. It was built like (and weighed as much as) a tank. It rocked an 8088 processor at a blinding fast 4.77 megahertz. It "fell off the back of a truck" at my mom's work, after they upgraded to a  286 WITH MATH COPROCESSOR" for accounts payable/receivable.My XT was PIMP (as we said back in the 90's). It had the full 640k of RAM, a clock card, a CGI graphics card, and a 20MB full-height hard drive in addition to the half-height double-sided double-density 5 1/4 inch floppy drive (360k per disk!). I can still remember the sounds it made when you started it up - first it would roar like a loving jet engine as the case fan and hard drive spun up, then it would check the 640k of RAM in 16k increments so slowly you could watch it count through on the screen, 16k at a time. Then the disk drive would grind, then the hard drive would start loading PC-DOS - but this hard drive would beep in two different tones, for some reason. It was always the same pattern of beeps, too. I wonder if it had something to do with the specific sectors/tracks that DOS was stored on on the hard disk. One day, after reading a PC World article about the importance of backups, I calculated it would take 52 floppies to back up my XT's hard drive. I ended up just backing up the important stuff - like Quattro Pro and Professional Write, and the files I made in those programs. My XT played games! In 4 colors! I had Reader Rabbit and DuckTales. I had Rescue Rangers and Mario Teaches Typing, too, but they didn't run right. We had long since lost the feelies for DuckTales that would let us get past the anti-piracy check, so me and my brother would have to just guess at the secret code for Scrooge's vault until we finally made it in. And once we did, the program was so slow it was kind of like playing a TAS!  But my XT also had a virus! The green caterpillar virus, to be exact. This was a memory-resident file virus that would interrupt your work by showing a green caterpillar made of ASCII graphics on screen exactly two months after infection. But since the battery on my XT's clock card had long since died, my XT always thought it was January 2, 1980, so the virus never triggered. Whoops! I would run Norton Antivirus over and over, but since I didn't understand what "memory resident virus infecting command.com" meant, it never went away.* On my 13th birthday, my dad passed down to me his Packard Bell Pentium running Windows 3.11 (FOR WORKGROUPS). That was the end of my XT. I transferred all my files off of it via serial cable, but kept it around for a while out of nostalgia. One day my mom threw it away while I was visiting my grandma. RIP, my XT. You were da bomb diggety (as we said in the 90's). * Later on, in junior high, I stuck a 3 1/2" disk with a file I'd transferred off the XT into the CNC machine control computer in my school's industrial tech lab. I never got to see if it activated, but my brother claimed that when he was in the CNC module 2 years later, one day there was a little green squiggle crawling across the screen when he was doing his work, and the teacher just told him it happened sometimes and to reboot until it went away. In retrospect it was a dick move, but it was hilarious to me at the time.
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Jun 23, 2013 02:46
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Jedit posted:You've been using PCs for 20 years and you still don't know what a POST is? I never said anything about the POST except it counted the memory really slowly. The beeping I'm talking about literally came from the hard drive anytime it was accessed.
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Jun 23, 2013 15:41
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I have very distinct memories of it being an actual beep, but apparently it was just the sound old MFM hard drives made, because it sounded almost exactly like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NYEkC7FBXa4 Hey, I was 10 at the time v  v
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Jun 23, 2013 16:26
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Please don't tell me there are people on these forums who have never encountered a split-flap alarm clock before. My mom used to have one on her nightstand. I'm only 28, I'm not that old!    To contribute: Floptical disks. These came out in the late 90's just around the time the first CD-R drives were turning disks into coasters at 1x speeds. They used electromagnetic fluctuations like a floppy, but at such a tight density that they needed a laser to align the heads, like a CD-ROM (but not really). They were capable of holding a whole 21 megabytes! I remember reading about these in PC World and marveling at the fact that just one of these could hold the entire hard drive from my first computer plus a couple extra floppies. It was the first time I knew what my parents felt like when they looked at a Nintendo.
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Jun 28, 2013 23:14
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mystes posted:Yahoo just announced that it's shutting down AltaVista. Apparently AltaVista still existed. Oh man, they're discontinuing FoxyTunes.  It was a browser extension that would let you control your music player from in your browser. Not that it takes that long to switch programs on a modern computer, but it was convenient.
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Jun 29, 2013 04:21
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Britain doesn't have schoolbuses? Finally, an area where the US pulls ahead in education unless you live within 2 miles of the school, then your rear end is walkin
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Jul 10, 2013 00:53
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Mr. Flunchy posted:Someone made a joke in a D&D thread about wanting a government run by a benevolent AI. Then someone linked PROJECT CYBERSYN: Just machines to make big decisions Programmed by fellas with compassion and vision We'll be clean when their work is done, We'll be eternally free and eternally young https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sogYgHlNnqo (I have this album on vinyl, the best obsolete technology)
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Jul 11, 2013 13:24
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Coupon dispensers are definitely still around. They're a lot smaller now, too, and they usually have a little plastic holder on top so when your kid pulls all the coupons out you can leave them behind for the next person. I think they're more common in smaller chains. I'll try to remember to take a pic next time I go shopping. The coupons are always so crappy too. Save 45 cents off three boxes of Cheerios (55oz. or larger)! 25 cents off a $10 can of Folger's! Buy 2 Tide 150oz bottles, get 50 cents off a Tide to Go pen!
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Aug 11, 2013 18:58
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einTier posted:Usually, when people talk about "chiclet" keyboards, they're talking about the original IBM PCjr. Damnit, I came here to post this. You laptop users are babies. Imagine trying to type on a cheap Chinese calculator, or a remote control. THAT is a chiclet keyboard. What you have now is a perfectly good keyboard that just doesn't wake the dead with every keystroke.
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Aug 13, 2013 01:36
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DrBouvenstein posted:The flicker reminded me that no one ever had the refresh rate of their CRTs set properly! Having to choose between 640x480 at 75hz or 800x600 at 60hz was Sophie's loving Choice.  Although I'm pretty sure no monitor ever defaulted to 45hz, even in Windows 3.1 days.
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Aug 13, 2013 03:43
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Zonekeeper posted:If I'm not mistaken you could pick up the audio from television broadcasts on AM. I distinctly remember discovering this and played the audio for ABC's saturday morning out of the TV and Radio simultaneously once.  You could listen to channel 6 if you had a FM radio that would tune low enough: Wikipedia posted:The analog audio for TV channel 6 is broadcast at 87.75 MHz (adjustable down to 87.74). [...] As a result, FM radio receivers such as those found in automobiles which are designed to tune into this frequency range could receive the audio for analog-mode programming on the local TV channel 6 while in North America. Of course, that was before the DTV transition.
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Sep 16, 2013 22:59
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Ensign Expendable posted:Might want to edit out the pictures you quoted so he doesn't go to jail. Yeah, because the page of replies saying "take those pictures down, that gun you have in your possession there will send you to jail for a long time" are in no way incriminating and cannot be used as evidence 
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Oct 4, 2013 11:58
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Phanatic posted:The BATF at one point issued a ruling that copper wool scouring pads are, legally, regulated as firearms and subject to a $200 transfer tax, and at another point issued a ruling that a 14" length of shoestring is a machine-gun. Yeah, gonna have to ask for a citation on this.
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Oct 5, 2013 00:11
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So "solely and exclusively" are just meaningless words over in TFR-land? 
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Oct 5, 2013 00:30
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DrBouvenstein posted:So did Nintendo just agree to do that as some sort of last-ditch middle finger to Sony after their planned "BFF" console from the mid 90's fell through? No, that was the CD-i.
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Oct 12, 2013 06:10
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Tuxedo Ted posted:I could see it used at hospitals and clinics and such to keep patient data away from folks who'd misuse it. They take that stuff pretty seriously and already use those special screen filters on monitors to make it a blurry mess to anyone not standing directly in front of it. Honestly my satisfaction with my doctor would improve 100% if she whipped out a pair of badass aviators every time she looked at my chart.
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Jan 5, 2014 18:49
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Okay. Mr. Clam, *puts on shades* IT LOOKS LIKE YOU'VE ENTERED THE DANGER ZONE.... for type II diabetes, you should consider exercising more.
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Jan 5, 2014 18:52
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I used to have one of these: The IBM Workpad z50. It was like a small laptop that ran Windows CE. Think a larger version of the HP Jornada. No hard drive, just internal memory and a compact flash slot. No USB or Ethernet, you connected it to your computer via serial cable and transferred files that way. It came with a cord you could use to hook the serial port to your cell phone and use the internet at outrageous cost (this was back in like 2001, before I got a cell phone, so I never tried it myself). I wrote a ton of papers on this thing. The biggest problem with it was there was no good way to not use it for a while. You could suspend it, but it'd still draw from the battery, and after a week or so the battery would die. And for some reason the internal storage was dynamic memory, so after the battery died, well, hope you had your files backed up...
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Jan 22, 2014 02:28
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MA-Horus posted:This fuckin' bad boy here. I literally have one of these. If anyone wants it, pm me and I'll see if it works.
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Jan 22, 2014 07:42
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JediTalentAgent posted:Actually, that seems sort of cool if a sim would randomly throw you a major error that may or may not be a no-win and you got graded/rated on your handling of it. That's literally what they do to train pilots in flight sims.
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Feb 8, 2014 13:34
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If anyone is interested in owning some obsolete and failed technology themselves, someone in YOSPOS got a job selling stuff sent to electronics recycling and started a thread about it. Caveat: requires reading YOSPOS.
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Feb 12, 2014 23:29
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GOTTA STAY FAI posted:
GE Money also handles the ahitty credit cards they try to sell you when you check out at walmart. 25 dollars cash back y'all!
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Apr 11, 2014 13:31
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Yeah the fdiv bug was really insignificant to like 99% of users. And nobody ever talks about the F00F bug.
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May 11, 2014 12:43
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I remember being so geeked about OS/2. It ran Windows 3.1 programs... and DOS programs... andos/2 programs! What could be the downside?! Myu only actual interaction with OS/2 was with my college's IBM-sponsored mainframe program, which still had a PIII OS/2 box controlling the DASD. I changed the theme on the windows 3.1 session to hotdog stand, and no one noticed because no one ever touched it.
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May 17, 2014 20:00
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I used to use PFS: Professional Write on my XT; it was the poo poo. I loved it so much I refused to stop using it until I upgraded to Win95 and gave in to the siren call of long filenames.
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Jun 19, 2014 19:25
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the best star trek movie was galaxy quest
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Jun 23, 2014 02:05
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quote:Doary said the decision will result in one employee layoff. Clearly business was booming!
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Jul 15, 2014 22:26
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DoctorWhat posted:How the hell did THAT happen? All the banking websites use ActiveX. I think they just passed a law allowing banks to modernize in the last week or so.
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Sep 15, 2014 12:05
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Faxes are also recognized by the law in a way scans and emails are not.
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Sep 16, 2014 00:13
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Krispy Wafer posted:That's part of the reason why Tesla is so disruptive lol
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Dec 19, 2017 14:18
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