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thathonkey posted:Rise of the Triad owned. I liked Wing Commander but yeah they were kind of star wars ripoffs... Even had mark Hamill doing voice acting Hey, not just voice acting. Him, John Rhys-Davies, Tom Wilson (aka Biff), and loving Malcolm McDowell. And I could have sworn that was Mike McShane playing Pliers in WCIV, but I guess not.  But I'm glad someone brought up EXTENDED (EMS) memory vs. EXPANDED (XMS) memory a couple pages ago, because Wing Commander was one of those few programs that bet on EMS for their cool effects, whereas most of the rest of the world was using XMS. Extended memory was (as I recall) just a natural extension of your main memory beyond 640K, if you configured your memory manager to handle it properly and you had a 286 or better that could address it; but expanded memory was based some kind of special daughterboard that made itself available to the system through clever masking tricks. Once you had tools like EMM386, you could configure your physical memory to masquerade as either XMS or EMS depending on what programs you liked to run, because everything was written to assume that the world of the future would have either XMS or EMS, but nobody made their poo poo able to deal with both/either. And this configuration happened once, at boot time; you couldn't change it on the fly. You didn't want to split up your precious 2MB or whatever you had between the two modes if you weren't going to use one of them most of the time. So I had to have my badass mofo 386+387 (For Raytracing™) box configured for XMS for almost everything, but a special config to reboot into if I wanted to play Wing Commander. Otherwise you wouldn't get the moving joystick that reflected your inputs, or the little picture-in-picture of your wingman, or (most importantly) the fragments of your ship floating in space when you got fragged. Made it all feel so wistful. https://revoemagblog.wordpress.com/2012/09/21/wing-commander-and-the-art-of-config-sys/
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Dec 28, 2015 22:58
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Can we get a TFR goon in here to comment on this pro-est of barrel designs 
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Dec 29, 2015 03:12
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May I present the Macintosh TV At least that wasn't a VHS slot. But yeah, there was a time when their design clout couldn't even extend to force a third-party CD-ROM drive door to be the same color as the rest of the case.
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Dec 29, 2015 06:27
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Anton Chigurh posted:Using ZTerm to access local BBSes on my Mac in the early '90's Man, I still have to use ZTerm if I want to do serial comms, like for Arduino programming (when I want more flexibility than the IDE gives me). Either that or write my own stupid client in Python or something. Serial terminals are a technology that will never be popular again but will also never die. I still laugh every time I think of the fugly licensing job Microsoft did cramming Hyperterminal into Windows for all those years.
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Dec 29, 2015 19:20
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JediTalentAgent posted:How ATT thought the future would look in the 1993: God I remember these ads, right down to the "AA-AAAAAAhhh" shriek over the final splash screen. They're all 100% right, too, barring minor details like "phone booth".
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Dec 29, 2015 23:32
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thathonkey posted:g4 power mac cube with accessories designed to match was peak apple Surely that's only if you've forgotten about this: 
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Dec 29, 2015 23:53
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And yet that Classic still looks futuristic, like a Porsche 928. Whereas your 386 (or mine) would make us dry heave to see it today.
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Dec 30, 2015 00:30
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Now that it's available as a modern Mac binary, I just spent the better part of an hour going through the POVray demo scene files for the first time since I used it to render all the Mega Man characters in like 1992.
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Dec 30, 2015 18:29
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drunk asian neighbor posted:I hate to say it but it's getting there. I still use Winamp to manage my huge music collection, but even Google lets you upload up to 20,000 songs and access them for free from anywhere. I used to have a 64GB SD card in my old phone and was wary of my new phone (16GB with no expandable storage) but Google Music has made that a complete non-issue. It even lets you download songs onto your devices off their servers. iTunes redeemed the sinful music world and saved us all from monthly streaming subscription fees and self-destructing music collections... but then once we stopped caring about being able to burn CDs or make video soundtracks or play our music anywhere but on our phones, music itself stopped being a commodity we wanted to own. The streaming model, slow and steady, overtook it. I think the novelty of legal digital music was what kept the ownership model going for so long. Nowadays if you want to hear a song (and you're 13) you can usually just go find it on youtube. Nobody cares that you can buy and keep a song any more than they care about trading illicit MP3s in tyool 2016. Music is just out in the atmosphere now, too cheap to meter. There's no point in having a "collection". I think people are gravitating back toward the radio model as per Pandora/Spotify/etc, against all expectations (or certainly mine), because at least that way you stand a chance of hearing something new. Now iTunes is doing the cloud delivery thing too (with iTunes Match) and being slowly eaten from the inside out by Beats of all loving things. Streaming movies might have been the cognitive dissonance that tipped the balance. It never made sense to buy and download and store (and backup) gigantic digital video files, even if you were convinced that you wanted to own your music files and never have to phone home to maintain the ability to play them. Once we all settled on being comfortable with paying tenbux/month to stream whatever movies we wanted instead of having a shelf full of DVDs, it seemed silly to care about treating music any differently. I know I for one would rather live in an ideal future where I don't have to hoard any poo poo, digital or otherwise. I'd rather just let someone else keep it for me. Assuming ^^ it doesn't all disappear into vapor when the cloud dissolves. Data Graham has a new favorite as of 19:41 on Dec 30, 2015 |
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Dec 30, 2015 19:39
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My favorite part of towers was that if you put it on the floor, your mouse had to plug into it via a seventy-foot-long cord whose weight always dragged your mouse off the back of the desk unless you taped it to the edge or something. Even modern-day cheapo PC keyboards don't have USB hubs in them. It made me so mad, having been used to Macs with desktop buses and mice that plugged into the keyboard since day one.
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Dec 30, 2015 23:51
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Buttcoin purse posted:Also Fractint, and making it render red/blue 3-D fractals, e.g.: Aaaaaa Fractint  Also remember these guys? http://www.alchemymindworks.com (Who am I kidding, "this guy") Graphic Workshop, the other half of my image processing workflow (I had to render my raytraces to 24-bit Targa, which my 386 with its SUPER VGA card had no hope in hell of displaying, and convert them to dithered GIF just so I could look at the finished products). This was before JPEG  e: quote:Should you fail to register any of the evaluation software available through our web pages and continue to use it, be advised that a leather-winged demon of the night will tear itself, shrieking blood and fury, from the endless caverns of the nether world, hurl itself into the darkness with a thirst for blood on its slavering fangs and search the very threads of time for the throbbing of your heartbeat. Just thought you'd want to know that. Unchanged since 1991 Data Graham has a new favorite as of 04:24 on Dec 31, 2015 |
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Dec 31, 2015 04:19
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Cyril Sneer posted:Remember that brief period in the late 90s when MORPHING programs were all the rage? Oh god. I once ordered a MORPHING!!!1 program from my shareware catalog because how was I supposed to know what was actually possible on consumer hardware for free. Filled with visions of making the equivalent of that one Michael Jackson video, I set it to morph one photo of a face into another one that I had on hand. It ground away for about half an hour creating what it promised to be a morph animation with about twenty frames. And in the end, it was... a crossfade. 
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Dec 31, 2015 06:02
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I was visitor #
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Dec 31, 2015 06:44
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blugu64 posted:Seems to be an epidemic of good web design in Texas "Online Store" aka "list of products that you can come in and buy" Also it kills the Awful app, that's impressive. E: my mistake, looks like it's just a bug in the new version. Data Graham has a new favorite as of 13:37 on Dec 31, 2015 |
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Dec 31, 2015 13:29
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HD DAD posted:This was the most satisfying thing. It's a short-lived satisfaction though. For the real slow-burn kind, I'll take "buying my first optical mouse that actually worked (and wasn't one of these bastards:)" 
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Dec 31, 2015 16:11
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You mean like this guy?
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Dec 31, 2015 16:22
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Bonzo posted:making web pages with Hot Dog HTML editor, HoT MetaL, Microsoft FrontPage and DreamWeaver. And don't forget PageMill. Best Silicon Valley pun name ever, wasted on a doomed piece of shovelware. I still remember when my boss at the little ISP where I worked emailed me after I had gone back to college. "By the way, I tried making some web pages using PageMill. The pages suck, and so does PageMill."
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Dec 31, 2015 19:01
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horizon posted:Apple III. I've never seen any photos of one of these being used in the wild, but was this actually the configuration they were supposed to be used in? How did Apple think people would be able to deal with the screen propped up so high? I've always assumed this was just a "serving suggestion" or something, but I get the impression they actually expected this kind of geometry to catch on.
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Dec 31, 2015 19:05
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 (I still can't believe Radius existed before they made a rotating monitor; I mean, that's like the perfect name for a company with that as its signature product, right?)
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Dec 31, 2015 19:45
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I enjoyed making fun of classmates who had a 486sx. Me with my 386 + 387, I could do anything they could do, and a year earlier.
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Jan 1, 2016 03:27
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 Look at this saucy bitch Bet nobody realized they were dialing into an actual physical rack of thirty of these things, each with its own phone line, all plugged into a Livingston PortMaster  I'm serious, this was real
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Jan 1, 2016 04:29
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Descent was tits. I loved how disorienting it was, having unmoored itself from traditional gravity/coordinate systems and making you think in three dimensions with a wireframe map you could rotate around and no real sense of "up". It was innovative and gave you a real sense of accomplishment once you mastered moving around in it. Then the sequels turned it back into a standard fly-around shooter with regular up/down gravity and everything. I couldn't believe so many game franchises could so easily lose sight of what made them special to begin with.
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Jan 1, 2016 06:56
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Jan 1, 2016 21:02
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Oh, and—mcbexx posted:The game that pushed 386 cpus into our homes... Every frame of animation, every note of music. loving bitch rear end Dralthis, present a bigger target why don't you (Also lol @ them giving you a moe waifu as your wingman right from the word go)
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Jan 1, 2016 21:28
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im_sorry posted:QWK was awesome. It was really the only way you could keep up with lots of Fidonet echos, since most BBSes had strict time limits. I used a program called Jabber on an old Tandy 1000 with one 360k disk drive back in the day, but I eventually switched to Silver Xpress once I got a better computer. I know exactly where my tagline collection is: on a 3.5" floppy that I put on the top of a pile of crap from my high school years just before sealing it up and jamming it on the top shelf of my bedroom closet before heading off to college. Oh poo poo, it's on my current laptop too, jesus christ. *reads* "Are you running under Windows, or just using an XT?" What an intolerable fucker I was ("was") (I used Jabber with a local WWIV BBS. I remember being horrified to discover that there was a Christian discussion group on it; I was like, what? People still believe in that stuff?) Anyone use a BBS with RIP Graphics? Vector assets transmitted over 9600 baud and rendered lovingly in EGA. RIP in peace E: "None of you people exist. My sysop types all of this in." Data Graham has a new favorite as of 01:36 on Jan 2, 2016 |
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Jan 2, 2016 01:33
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revmoo posted:Scrubs. Post the NCSA Mosaic animation Anyone got a copy of the giant N striding the earth (the one after the throbbing blue N but before the one with the meteors)? I'm coming up blank.
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Jan 2, 2016 02:27
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revmoo posted:Also lol if you didn't have win32 and trumpet winsock. We all could put up with this poo poo just fine. But woe unto anyone who was doing support for an ISP in those days, trying to get bewildered bluehairs connected with their Packard Bells. "I clicked on Trumpet Win... Winstock, but I don't know what to do next! When I was on American Airlines it was all so easy..."
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Jan 2, 2016 02:31
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Alceste posted:So many memories. Our first family computer was a Zenith Z-100 with a 20 MB hard drive that cost my dad a bunch of extra money and he thought he'd never fill up. Over the years he maxed out the RAM and installed some card that upgraded it to 286 specs, I think. I also remember when he upgraded it with the real-time clock add-on. Prior to that you had to manually set the date and time at every boot. Holy poo poo The Print Shop still exists. http://www.broderbund.com/c-31-the-print-shop.aspx Holy poo poo Broderbund still exists
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Jan 3, 2016 01:33
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  Would you look at that, monocolor Apple logo in 1988.
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Jan 3, 2016 02:14
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That's a good relic in itself. Remember when knowing the difference between serial and parallel communication ports/cables was a key chapter in any computer manual? You had to know the benefits and drawbacks of each, and know what kinds of peripherals used each one. Serial was slow but reliable and had a nice compact cable/jack (good for modems and mice/keyboards), whereas if you went parallel (like for printers or disk drives) you could transmit 8 or 12 or 47 bits at the same time and go super fast, but you had to have an enormous cable with a separate lead for every bit. Kinda like running SLI on your cables, complete with all the finicky electronics necessary to handle the intricate timing between transmission pulses (I seem to remember that above a certain speed and/or cable length, your parallel cables would start to exhibit wacky characteristics like some of the bits falling behind others or experiencing relativistic effects or something). I remember Apple II series manuals with cute cartoon drawings showing bits traveling serially or in parallel down a cable. I guess for anything external (and even anything internal that isn't soldered down), it gradually just became way easier and more advantageous to just crank up the clock speed and run your data serially rather than trying to parallelize poo poo.
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Jan 4, 2016 17:21
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drunk asian neighbor posted:Speaking of SLI, I still have a hard time believing that GPU SLI for gaming is good for anything other than giving Nvidia another $2-500 for no reason. Nah, same thing, just making an analogy. Like, hey, twice the processing power, in parallel! But then you have to have all that extra engineering to make it all sync up, and the cost of the complexity weighs down any speed gains, and eventually everyone just goes back to one giant fast pipeline (i.e. serial).
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Jan 4, 2016 17:59
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drunk asian neighbor posted:Oh man, having a B: drive. Hard drives started out as add-on luxuries. For the longest time a tricked-out PC was one with dual floppy drives, A: and B: -- usually both 5.25" or both 3.5", but mine had one of each  But if you were really hot poo poo, you had a hard drive too, and that was naturally just a big volume to store data; it wasn't a boot disk or anything. So it was C: . A couple years of that being the status quo, and by the time hard drives started being standard equipment, all the software in the world had been written to assume the two-floppies-plus-maybe-a-hard-disk setup, often with drive letters hard-coded and printed in a million copies of glossy manuals. It was simpler to just get used to your main drive being a hard disk called "C:" than to try to force the world to redo all its legacy poo poo just for the sake of elegance. (After all, if elegance was what you wanted, let's face it, drive letters and 8.3 filenames were not a hill you wanted to die on anyway.)
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Jan 5, 2016 01:06
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thathonkey posted:it's a miracle they made a digital camera that used the regular 3.5in floppy instead of some new weird sony format I had one of these fuckers  The thing was the size of a 3.5" floppy drive because it was one. But not only that, it also took the Imation SuperDisk, which had 120MB capacity  Thing could actually shoot usable (small and grainy and short) video, in 2000. E: I actually had to use it as an external USB floppy drive a few years later to pull some data off an old floppy I found; none of my computers had an actual drive anymore, but yay for obsolete oddities taking up space in my closet!
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Jan 6, 2016 03:42
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Bonzo posted:I remember those days. We did same things with cable TV in the 80s and 90s. I'm pretty sure one of the reasons Radio Shack went under is because no one needs 25ft of phone cable or cable TV splitter boxes. But they sure as hell have four of the six resistors I need
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Jan 6, 2016 04:20
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thathonkey posted:the first "songs" I had on a computer were MIDI files i dunno where i got them they were mostly movie themes like indiana jones and jurassic park mixed in with classical pieces And then you had the MOD/S3M scene 
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Jan 6, 2016 05:28
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This is still one of my favorite pieces of music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2a6I0FBo0O4
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Jan 6, 2016 05:29
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Zveroboy posted:Oh wow, I remember having one of those. Though of course, as a kid having no patience to actually read the book I mainly used it to make annoying screeching noises from the buzzer.  YyyyyyupI still remember the feel of bending those springs to stick wires in. I think I remember being disappointed that they didn't all go twonnnnggg like those ankle-high door stoppers so I couldn't play a symphony on them.
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Jan 6, 2016 12:49
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Then again it's not like the people who were into computers back in the day were somehow more savory characters on the whole than their modern counterparts are. not to impugn your work, sir
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Jan 6, 2016 21:53
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Mak0rz posted:Playing doom like this sucks actually It sucks even more if you try to adapt it as a UNIX interface. quote:psDooM can monitor processes with shareware Doom 1, registered Doom 1, Ultimate Doom, or Doom 2. 'Plutonia Experiment' and 'TNT - Evilution' will run, but no process monitoring will be done.  (must be kinda fun if the only tasks you ever needed to accomplish on UNIX were killing processes)
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Jan 7, 2016 15:29
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Buttcoin purse posted:The first time my parents bought me any computer games (instead of just getting This reminded me of when my parents brought me home a secondhand copy of TurboCAD, complete with giant dog-eared manual held together with rubber bands. My high school spoiled me by having an entire lab full of CADKEY machines; they were all Amstrad 8086's, but holy gently caress 3D wireframe modeling on them was efficient and sweet and I loved the goddamn semi-textual interface. Creating arcs tangent to lines, circles through three points, extruding a shape and rotating it... I wanted for nothing. The school's brand-new 486 sat in a corner playing SimCity while I happily plunked away on those Amstrads, which were the only machines enabled to run CADKEY by a parallel-port dongle. I remember the hard drives of the day (the kind you had to "park" before shutting down) made squeaking sounds when reading data instead of clicking like they do today. I could never get TurboCAD to run. 
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Jan 7, 2016 15:38
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from people they worked with), here's what they got: