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PromethiumX posted:those things died the instant CDR's came out and rightfully so. god drat what a poo poo piece of media. remember the click of death? Zip drives came out when CD-Rs had been already been around for years and they didn't die until flash media was cheap. Nobody carried documents and other files that were frequently edited to school or work on a CD-R because CD-Rs were slow and a pain in the rear end to use like that. Maldoror posted:all the mame roms were 80 megs The way to get a set of MAME ROMS in the dialup days used to be to send some guy a pile of CDs or DVDs through the mail and they would burn the whole set for you.
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Dec 20, 2015 01:33
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Mak0rz posted:E: No$GMB was a funny name because it only "demoed" Gameboy Color for like ten minutes after which it reset to vanilla Gameboy and asked you to pay the author I think the NoCash guy is still around living on welfare in Germany and writing emulators in assembler on Win95. Free emulators that actually worked like Nesticle and Genecyst were amazing back then because not only were their predecessors kind of crappy in that they could maybe play a few games slowly with bad or no sound, but the people who wrote them often wanted money for them. Not a little bit either, but something like $20-$30 in 1995 money.
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Dec 21, 2015 14:18
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Rambling Robot posted:my friends did this. and made the money back and then some! I built a PIC microcontroller programmer in high school and used it to make and sell Playstation mod chips and burned games to people. It was basically zero-risk since that was still a time when anyone who wasn't a huge nerd had no clue about piracy or copying CDs. The teachers and administrators didn't care about any on-campus transactions as long as drugs weren't involved.
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Dec 21, 2015 15:53
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Bonzo posted:I bought a VooDoo card in 1999 that was like this. I had to remove some of the HDD cages to fit it all in there. The card also had its own power supply that plugged into the surge protector. Pretty impressive considering that card wasn't unveiled until 2000 and was never actually released.
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Dec 22, 2015 15:57
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ColoradoCleric posted:conc jumping really ruined tfc It was fun if you were good at it. It also drew a lot of accusations of cheating and occasionally got you banned from servers too.
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Dec 30, 2015 08:20
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Data Graham posted: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. I have never in my life seen anyone have this problem. What gets me are the people who must buy wireless everything even though the keyboard and mouse never leaves their desk. drunk asian neighbor posted:It wasn't just computers - good luck finding a Super Nintendo that's not yellowed to poo poo these days Try Retr0bright. It's cheap to make and actually works.
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Dec 31, 2015 00:05
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Ehud posted:oh man what about PC Gamer demo discs? "Hello, I am Coconut Monkey."
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Jan 5, 2016 14:58
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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. Back in the day, when you needed some specialty cable or switch box Radio Shack is just where you went because they either had it or could look in their huge catalog and get it in a couple of days. Remember, there was no internet shopping and most of the other retailers had a spotty selection at best. Demand for cables and the other things they sold has only gone up in the last decade, but Radio Shack went under because places like Monoprice sell things like cables for what they are actually worth and there is no need to pay a 1000% markup anymore. The best electronic stores were the ones with plywood shelves and an older guy with coke-bottle glasses behind the counter who still had a supply of vacuum tubes available. The_Franz has a new favorite as of 04:55 on Jan 6, 2016 |
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Jan 6, 2016 04:52
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CaptainSarcastic posted:I'm old enough to remember those days, and also the pre-modular multi-pin phone jacks. I recall how shortly after Bell was broken up there were a bunch of independent "phone stores" that sprang to life, letting you actually own your own phone and get something other than the Henry Ford-esque line of models that had been established for years. After the Ma-Bell breakup a bunch of small long-distance companies popped up and the way they worked was that you had to call a local access number, enter your code and then make your call. Since the codes had to be entered manually they were usually short and it didn't take long for programs to appear that generated codes, tried calling a long distance number and saved the number for later if it worked. Bingo, free long distance calling for a month. These small companies couldn't really do anything about it since there was no caller ID and no way to identify who was calling outside of the access code. Getting records from the phone company wasn't easy and even if you had the records, good luck finding and correlating anything in the huge volume of calls these companies received. This basically worked until around 1990 when direct-dialing via a third-party long-distance company became possible.
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Jan 6, 2016 17:15
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Data Graham posted: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. Eh, a lot of people back then weren't doing things like generating calling card numbers with a "screw the phone company" mindset. Long distance rates were still kind of crazy at that point so it was more of a "well, I want to call these places, but I can't afford a $500 a month phone bill with my allowance or job".
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Jan 6, 2016 22:28
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drunk asian neighbor posted:On the satellite note, in the late 90's a friend's father had a satellite card programmer. Satellite boxes know what services you have or don't based a little credit-card-sized card with a SIM-card-style chip on it. This guy had a little box (connected via 9-pin serial) that he could use to reprogram the cards and unlock everything. I'm talking not just HBO and Showtime, but PPV movies, the porno channels, the whole shebang. Every couple of months DirecTV would send a signal that would fry illegally programmed cards, but he had a big stack of them and would just hop on the web, find the newest codes, and make a new card. I'm surprised he never got caught doing it, I feel like DirecTV would have made an example of him, since he was selling the unlocked cards online. It was one of the satellite companies who, after a big retailer of hack gear got raided, just blindly sued everyone who ever bought anything from them. People were getting letters demanding several thousand dollar settlements and that they sign papers admitting that things that have nothing to do with satellite TV, like Dreamcast mod chips or cables, were bought for the purpose of defrauding Dish or DTV.
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Jan 7, 2016 00:01
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mng posted:40x? Scrub, you need 52x No, non-scrubs had Plextor 40x CAV SCSI drives. 52x IDE CD-ROM drives were the cheap scrub garbage.
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Jan 7, 2016 19:43
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Fabulousity posted:I also remember not all CD recordable media being created equal: Some brands or types of media didn't play nice with some brands of drives. During those days you'd get drive firmware updates that sometimes included fixes like "Brand XYZ CD-R model type ABC should now be recognized by drive". Strange times, it was. There were huge quality differences between vendors. I have 20 year old blue Verbatim CDs that still work today. Other, cheaper brands, not so much.
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Jan 8, 2016 06:55
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SuperTeeJay posted:Wireplay was BT's pay as you play gaming dialup service in the late 90s. It was an FPS paradise - 64 player Quake II, Action Quake, Unreal, the CS betas and Jedi Knight: So, basically a service that charged you to play games that were free to play over the internet?
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Jan 17, 2016 18:50
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Police Automaton posted:What I absolutely hated was Rebel Assault. People were falling over each other to get CD-Drives just to play that game, then it was just a dumb shooting gallery with very, very cheap acting in-between. But hey it was Star Wars and the franchise hasn't been ruined at that point. That game was incredibly frustrating, mainly because the controls sucked. In some scenes they were so unresponsive that no matter how far you moved the joystick you barely moved and crashed into walls, and in others they were so hyper sensitive that you were constantly out of control. Back then bad Star Wars games were the exception rather than the norm though. 7th Guest was another CD-ROM seller that everyone ran out to get because it looked fancy, but it was a pretty garbage game underneath. If your system was too fast the player-vs-AI microscope puzzle was basically impossible to win because the AI would always make a perfect move.
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Jan 20, 2016 18:28
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an AOL chatroom posted:cobol ... Being that close to the hardware Ahahahahaha The only reason COBOL is still around is in cases where decades old software still in use for payroll or whatever. It's not "close to the metal" and nobody writes new software with it or even wants to touch it unless they have to. Most high-performance code is written in C or C++ with no raw assembly outside of maybe a few snippets of SIMD code, and even that is usually done with compiler intrinsics now. Microsoft's 64-bit toolchains don't even support inline assembly anymore. Police Automaton posted:To be fair though, compilers have come a long way regarding optimization. Also the inefficiency simply often doesn't matter anymore and cutting down on development time (=cost) and ease of maintenance is far more important. It matters a lot more now than 10 years ago since there are so many battery powered devices and slow, inefficient software directly impacts battery life. The_Franz has a new favorite as of 18:10 on Jan 24, 2016 |
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Jan 24, 2016 17:59
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Bonzo posted:I still have Zip disks that load up and never failed. I never had one fail either, but I always made a point of keeping them in those plastic cases. I've only had two hard drives fail while still in active use. One was defective from the start and caused read errors two days out of the box and the other was in a 286 that my dad used for running Quickbooks until 2002 or so. It lasted over a decade in an environment that was dirty, humid and had extreme temperature swings, so I'd say that was a pretty good run. Humphreys posted:drat it felt cool being the only kid with the full 'Aircraft Carrier Config' as we called it. Then we played some games and it was lovely and not worth the hype. Especially the games that required both 32x and SegaCD Sure it was huge, expensive and needed somewhere to plug in those three huge AC adapters, but you could play Night Trap with slightly
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Jan 25, 2016 17:04
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Casimir Radon posted:I misunderstood the purpose of the hint-line in Nintendo Power. I thought you called them up and got to pitch your ideas to them. Luckily my parents weren't about to let me call a 1-900 number regardless. When did the hint-line go to a 1-900 number? I remember using it up through the early 90s and it was still just a regular local number. Of course, with long-distance rates back then it might as well have been a 1-900 number.
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Feb 2, 2016 17:20
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TotalLossBrain posted:The Robotron case and monitor design can only be described as "Fallout". Have a look: What is it with Russians/soviets and that dingy green color? It as though it was one of the only colors the people's paint factories were allowed to produce because everything east of the iron curtain was at least partially painted that color. Even today, if you watch a tour of the ISS it's extremely obvious when you cross into the Russian section because it's that same drab green.
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Feb 2, 2016 20:53
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Casimir Radon posted:Several months ago I got the midi daughterboard for the SB-Live for my retro machine and hooked it up. Something weird happened and the ribbon cable started melting. The SB-Live was fine, and there wasn't any visible damage to the daughterboard, is it possible for there to be a short inside the ribbon? I had that happen to the cable between an SB-Live and the drive bay plate with headphone and MIDI ports. There were no guides on the pins and I was working in the dark under a desk so one plug might have been backwards or off by 1 to the left or right. The cable melted, but the hardware was fine afterwards. I am glad that Creative's overpriced hardware and sub-lovely drivers are mostly a relic now. I'm pretty sure their drivers were responsible for 99% of the BSOD screens I got on Win XP and they were broken on Vista and 7 if you tried to use them in exclusive mode.
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Feb 3, 2016 15:59
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Keith Atherton posted:Also an issue with prerelease screenshots of Duke Nukem Forever in 2000 or so before they scrapped everything. DNF was already on the cover of PC Gamer in 1997, when it was still based on the Quake engine before they scrapped everything for the first time.
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Feb 9, 2016 20:41
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GI_Clutch posted:Celeron is Intel. It is just their budget alternative to a Pentium. In fact, they just released new Celeron CPUs last month. My Windows Home Server came with a 64-bit Celeron (which I had no idea existed back when I purchased it in 2009 or so). Seeing as it's just a file/backup server, it's more than sufficient. And the Pentium brand is now the budget alternative to the Core series. The Celeron is now the sub-bargain chip line.
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Feb 15, 2016 16:56
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The best part of those graphing calculators was being able to play Tetris and Breakout during pointless busywork time and teachers still thought that you were actually working.
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Feb 15, 2016 22:59
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Rexim posted:I ended up with a 86 because Target was out of the 83 the day my mom went to get one. My college math courses banned the 89 and 92 because they could solve integrals. Only the 86 or lower were allowed.
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Feb 16, 2016 03:00
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Oh yes, and since Apple built a whole advertising campaign around the idea that "Macs don't crash" they had no reset button on them. When they did crash, and they crashed a lot, you had to crawl under the desk and pull the plug because the power button was a soft button and didn't work if the whole thing was frozen. I remember using my uncle's brand new iMac and having that piece of garbage crash just from scrolling down a web page. Ejecting a CD on those things was basically rolling the dice too, even into the early OSX years. When I worked in the library during college there were two Macs with OS 9 in the computer lab and it was easier just to leave them off and tell people they were broken. Speaking of internet relics, this old video nicely sums up the experience of using a Mac about 15 years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GWxC8ezE4Dk
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Feb 19, 2016 18:14
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Computer viking posted:That's a perfectly manageable 88 kB/sec each direction, and if you think analogue phone lines (with their bandpass filters and silence detection and multiple levels of amplification) will end up sounding better than that, you will have to come up with a very good argument. Maybe a local call back in the days of mechanical switches when it basically was just connecting two wires, but, yeah, modern codecs are capable of much better quality at lower data rates than the ancient G.711 codec.
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Feb 25, 2016 17:38
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Quantum of Phallus posted:Is that the heavens gate guy That's Don Adams: comedian and star of Get Smart: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rEGA7eyWeAA
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Feb 26, 2016 01:06
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Fabulousity posted:ISDN is missing in action, but it did have a fun second or two in the sun back there somewhere. ISDN was basically the best you could get for most of the 90s unless you wanted to pay really big bucks every month for a T1. The 56k shotgun modem was a really short-lived thing. They came out at the end of the 90s right as DSL and cable were rolling out and required two phone lines and two ISP accounts.
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Mar 21, 2016 03:31
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JediTalentAgent posted:Anyone else have vague memories of I think K-mart offering a free/discounted internet service (Bluelight.com, I think)? It was that or another one that was heavily ad-supported to offset costs, and then users figured out how to kill the ads or something. The old lady who lives next door was still using a free Netzero account on a Win98 machine up until a couple of years ago. All she used it for was checking her email, but goddamn it's easy to forget how painfully slow dialup was even for things like that. At the same time that those free ISPs popped up, the dot-com boom also gave rise to companies like AllAdvantage that would pay you for running software which ran ad banners on the bottom of your screen. They tried to be clever and would stop tracking you if the mouse didn't move for a few minutes or the screen shut off, but naturally it didn't take long for all kinds of methods and software to cheat the system to appear. Initially my friend would tape one end of a rod to his mouse and the other end to an oscillating fan and run it all night. Later, software that randomly moved the mouse like trembler.exe appeared. While they tried to detect and stop it, it was easy to work around this since their heuristics kind of sucked. Then there was full-blown cheater software (I think it was called SoA?) that let you run multiple accounts and rack up quite a nice sum of money quickly. We actually made some money off of this service before a letter eventually arrived with the check which said something like "We can't prove anything so we are still paying you for the last month, but your account is now closed and you are banned from the service". Unsurprisingly, AllAdvantage went bust less than two years after starting. The_Franz has a new favorite as of 14:29 on Mar 21, 2016 |
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Mar 21, 2016 13:58
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Quote-Unquote posted:This was like a prototype bitcoin many years earlier, in that it cost way more in electricity to keep your computer running and showing ads than you could possibly get paid, but lots of very stupid people (or people stealing electricity) did it anyway. If you used it legitimately, yes, but I imagine that most legitimate users quit after a few weeks at most since it wasn't worth the time and the ad bar was annoying as hell. On the other hand, the cheater software would make a lot of money quickly by running multiple accounts at once, generating fake referrals, running the fake referral accounts, etc... Every somewhat technical person in school was easily making over $100 a month (in some cases much more) just by letting this software idle for a few hours. I would wager that most of the company's payouts after the first couple of months were going to people somehow cheating the system. They did eventually flag and ban everyone even somewhat suspicious, but that was only a couple of months before, in a completely unsurprising twist, the company went under. drunk asian neighbor posted:IIRC a bunch of botters were doing things like submitting enough points for 3 Xbox 360s, i.e. greedy fatwallet assholes not realizing that MS would obviously not send out 3 Xbox360s to 1 person when it would take like a month of human input to earn enough points for 1 system. I might be wrong on the actual prize, but yeah, if you submit claims for 5 copies of Vista Ultimate, obviously you're gaming the system. Speaking of scams involving the 360, back when it launched they had a giveaway in conjunction with Mountain Dew where the bottle caps had codes which were tickets that you could enter into raffles to get a 360 before launch day. You could enter as many codes as you had (up to a point) so the more disgusting soda you bought, the better your chances. They also had a site that let you enter your email address and send a code to yourself to fulfill the "no purchase necessary" part of the contest rules. This site did limit you to one code per email address, but they didn't filter out those sites that give you a one-time throwaway email address and had nothing like a capcha to stop bots. Naturally people wrote programs that generated a bunch of throwaway addresses, sent codes to them and then scraped and entered the codes into their account so they could dump the maximum number of entries into one raffle which practically guaranteed they they won. They did quickly catch on and shut this down, but not before giving away a lot of essentially free 360s. The_Franz has a new favorite as of 17:28 on Mar 21, 2016 |
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Mar 21, 2016 16:14
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GutBomb posted:Yeah, for a long time AOL had no internet access. It was around for a while before '93, and I think that's when they added Usenet and I think the internal web browser was '93 too (For windows only). Yep, September of 1993 is known as "Eternal September" because that's when AOL opened the floodgates of it's users onto Usenet. September was when new crops of university students would get access to the internet for the first time and Usenet would inevitably be flooded with "METALLICA RULES!" types of messages a few weeks before they learned some manners or got bored. Once AOL users could access Usenet though, September of 1993 became the September that never ended.
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Apr 12, 2016 18:50
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Cojawfee posted:I'm to the point where I can use ribbon, but it is still totally poo poo. I hate when I have to do anything where I have to step back and think "we'll what category would someone else think the thing I want would be?" And then see if it is under that. If you have to get into a certain mindset to use a program, it is designed wrong. I haven't bothered with MS Office since the 2010 version and just use LibreOffice since all I ever use it for is typing the occasional simple document. It was so nice to go back to menus after spending a couple of years dealing with that ribbon crap. Doing Table->Insert Table or Insert->Image in the menu is immensely more intuitive than crawling through rows of icons trying to find exactly what you need (and sometimes what you needed just wasn't there and you need to go into the ribbon settings to add it).
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May 3, 2016 16:52
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DrBouvenstein posted:Yes, my God, how could anyone possibly figure out how to insert a table or picture with the Ribbon. I'd have more relevant examples if I took notes, but I honestly can't remember every random instance from years ago where I was annoyed by the ribbon.
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May 4, 2016 15:55
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error1 posted:it's all buried beneath a mountain of bad decisions, ugly UI and "modern" apps you don't want to use because they are less functional than the old ones. Solitaire is the perfect summation of modern Microsoft practices. It was a Windows staple which was simple and had you playing cards within a second of clicking the icon on a 486. Now it's some bloated "modern" monster with sign-ins, micro transactions and a lot of other garbage which nobody asked for.
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May 6, 2016 14:21
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WebDog posted:I remember even on a Pentium 90 it was nigh impossible to play an MP3 and work away on Word at the same time. The tragic solution was to have a midi collection. I managed to play an mp3 on my old 66 MHz 486. It had to be low bitrate, 22KHz and mono and you couldn't do anything else with the system while it was playing, but it worked. Then I upgraded to a Pentium 2 300 and could listen to all the CD-quality music I wanted to while doing my homework.
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May 31, 2016 17:35
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drunk asian neighbor posted:Speaking of emulation, I was going to post this as a legendary dead website but holy poo poo it still gets multiple daily updates: http://www.zophar.net/ Most of the updates are weird edge-case behavior in crappy games which only one or two people played enough to notice. drunk asian neighbor posted:And yeah, nowadays if I want to jump into an SNES game really quick I just default to ZSNES. There's probably some better emulators out there, but I've never had a problem with ZSNES. I definitely remember when they added in chip support and it was a huge deal. Also when they got transparency layers right so you didn't have to disable a graphic layer to get through, say, Proto Dome in Chrono Trigger or the aforementioned FF2 Mist Cave. ZSNES is only slightly less outdated than Nesticle. At least grab something like Snes9x that was updated in the last decade and has a user interface that isn't a DOS relic.
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Jul 1, 2016 16:20
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thathonkey posted:Yeah i have tmobile but the signal is pretty bad especially outside of the city and inside big office buildings. But its so cheap and their international stuff is the poo poo. AT&T cost more especially when traveling but i never had service issues even in elevators They've been enabling LTE band 12 on a lot of their towers and it makes a huge difference you have a phone which supports it. I spent Saturday driving around rural Wisconsin and only very rarely lost coverage. The rest of the time I had LTE service. With my old phone I dropped to 2G as soon as I went beyond suburbia.
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Aug 9, 2016 20:41
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I've never actually stopped that scene and looked at the picture, but it's just shapes. No sailboat. I guess Kevin Smith couldn't see it either.
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Aug 12, 2016 05:08
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In the time before Steam PC games shipped on CDs much longer than they should have. There was a comic-themed shooter called XIII that came out years ago which shipped on multiple CDs and the game's copy protection would ask you to insert certain CDs at different times during the game. The non-cracked version of the game was considerably more annoying to play than the cracked version. That probably qualified as an actual rootkit. I had to wait months for a crack so I could play whatever Splinter Cell game came out in 2005 or 2006 because I had 64-bit XP and the Starforce driver wouldn't work on it. The game itself ran fine once cracked, but the copy protection wouldn't let me play something I paid money for. I remember looking at the Ubisoft support forums back then to try and find a solution and anyone who had trouble with the copy protection was actually treated with contempt by the turbo-spergs there.
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Aug 12, 2016 23:22
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Three-Phase posted:ASIDE: I always giggle when I see the HUGE UK power plugs with the built in fuses. Compared to the US plugs they're so comically large (but arguably safer and they have a build-in fuse). UK home wiring (and some of their plumbing practices) is genuinely horrifying compared to countries with actual modern electrical codes with giant ring circuits being common. Each plug has a fuse so that a malfunctioning washing machine doesn't start a fire in a bedroom.
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Sep 6, 2016 23:29
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