Tech Relics: Now integrating PIII processors for the wank factor.

The Something Awful Forums > Main > Post Your Favorite: Carefully Curated > Tech Relics: Now integrating PIII processors for the wank factor.

SubG: Aug 19, 2004; It's a hard world for little things.

Grand Prize Winner posted:

Maybe there was some similarity between early circuit board manufacturing tools and leather cutting equipment? I'm reaching here but yeah, that weirds me out too. Maybe it's just that Tandy and Coleco were big enough to try to jump into unrelated fields on spec?

Tandy and Coleco (the COnnecticut LEather COmpany) both started out as leather goods firms. Tandy mostly selling do-it-yourself kits and poo poo, Coleco originally selling shoes and shoe repair kits, and poo poo like that. Tandy ended up acquiring a lot of other crafts companies, including Radio Shack which, at the time, was more or less a mail-order place for ham radio nerds. Coleco ended up selling off most of its leather stuff by the '60s, and became a light industrial company making plastic toys and poo poo like that.

Both companies wound up investing in computers (and other electronics, like handheld calculators) when that poo poo started taking off in the '70s because a lot of companies were. We remember them mostly because their forays into home computing and game consoles were more successful than, say, semiconductor firms Fairchild and Texas Instruments, and a lot less successful than erstwhile toy manufacturer Nintendo.

# ¿ May 31, 2017 10:15

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# ¿ Apr 26, 2024 04:50

SubG: Aug 19, 2004; It's a hard world for little things.

Light Gun Man posted:

It makes sense though, it's not like computers really existed before a few decades ago, and you couldn't* really just become a computer company from nothing.

*unless you're fuckin Apple, I guess.

There were a bunch, but almost all of them went under. There were moderate successes like Acorn, but also flash-in-the-pan companies like TeleVideo, and so on. Same's true with hardware that was aimed at the business/industry market instead of the home market---DEC was founded as a computer company and they were a big name until the market for big iron collapsed, but there were also a bunch of rapid burnouts like Data General.

But yeah. When home computers and video game consoles were first taking off there really wasn't an established business model either for producing or for selling the things. So you ended up with all kinds of companies trying their hands at manufacturing (or rebranding) the things, and you'd find computer and game poo poo in random retail contexts. Like sometime in the early '80s I impulse bought a Timex Sinclair kit from a loving corner drug store, which carried like literally nothing else more tech related than batteries.

# ¿ May 31, 2017 23:01

SubG: Aug 19, 2004; It's a hard world for little things.

FilthyImp posted:

Go pro and get yourself a slide ruler.

You can be that guy. The guy with a slide ruler.

I don't just have a slide rule, I have a favourite slide rule (this one's a Post Versalog 1460):

Assuming I don't need more than about three significant figures I can do vector calculations faster on a slide rule designed for it than more or less any other way. There's actually an awful lot of engineering design work in the high-end and special-purpose slide rules in use right before they were displaced by the handheld calculator---consideration into what the computational workflow would look like, and so what calculations can be easily chained or done simultaneously on a single slide rule.

# ¿ Jun 25, 2017 15:05

SubG: Aug 19, 2004; It's a hard world for little things.

I ran a MUD on a Quadra 700 running A/UX.

Which is a sentence about one mention of FDDI away from collapsing in on itself and forming a black hole of failed '90s tech.

# ¿ Jul 22, 2017 09:14

SubG: Aug 19, 2004; It's a hard world for little things.

For a long time LD was the only way to see a film that wasn't in current release any way other than in pan and scan. Once DVDs came along you frequently got flippy discs with p&s (`full screen') on one side and letterboxed on the other, although early on rental versions were often just pan and scan, and it really wasn't until well into the 2000s that letterboxing became the default/expected format.

If you weren't around before ubiquitous widescreen you just don't know how bonkers a lot of films (like the Sergio Leone Westerns) looked pan and scanned, and therefore how loving amazing watching a LD was, even independent of the better resolution and sound quality compared to a broadcast signal or VHS.

# ¿ Jul 30, 2017 10:39

SubG: Aug 19, 2004; It's a hard world for little things.

SLOSifl posted:

If you�re a 1991 Solaris UI developer you are good to go buddy.

If you were developing for Solaris in 1991 you were some kind of space wizard or something because it wasn't even released yet.

And the UI for the first rev of Solaris (which was actually Solaris 2, because of reasons) was OpenWindows, universally known as BrokenWin by those unfortunate enough to have had to use it, and comparing it to ugly audio player skins or whatever profoundly underestimates how bad it was.

The only contemporaneous UI-thing that I can think of from around the same time that was nearly as universally despised was AIX's SMIT, which was the general system config UI and had a progress indicator which consisted of a little animated running guy who would either make the touchdown sign if the command succeeded or fall flat on his rear end if it failed. Which is cute enough, but since this was usually literally the only diagnostic output SMIT provided it wasn't so much as an adorable interface quirk so much as an opportunity for the OS to actively mock you.

# ¿ Aug 7, 2017 23:02

SubG: Aug 19, 2004; It's a hard world for little things.

Collateral Damage posted:

That little snippet of Perl code plus a decryption key (which was easy to find online after the XingDVD key was found) is all you need to remove the CSS encryption from a DVD. Under the DMCA, it's illegal to distribute tools that can be used to defeat anti-piracy measures such as content encryption, so technically the shirt is illegal. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DeCSS#Legal_response

Only one in a long line of theoretically illegal crypto t-shirts. Back during Phil Zimmermann's legal troubles with PGP there were any number of RSA-on-a-shirt t-shirts which were theoretically classified as munitions under ITAR, making it illegal to export them (i.e. wear the shirt while crossing the border) or show them to foreign nationals. I think I still have my original tie-dyed blowfish t-shirt.

# ¿ Aug 10, 2017 07:54

SubG: Aug 19, 2004; It's a hard world for little things.

Mousepractice posted:

My first saxophone and my first motorcycle were made by the same company!

(can an instrument count as a relic? I don't think so, the YAS-62S was a good saxophone and it lasted me a long while)

I don't know about the YAS-62, but the tenor model of that line, the YTS-62 isn't an instrument you'd need to learn any quirks to play. Unlike some tenors made roughly before the '50s, which often have weird pinkie table ergonomics, extraneous trill keys, and that kind of thing.

I have a Conn 30m which probably does count as a tech relic. It was Conn's high-end tenor from the late '30s until the Second World War, and it probably has more adjustments and set screws than any other sax ever made. Conn used to be way more willing to experiment around with the design of orchestral instruments than most of the other big name manufacturers. I also own a Conn 28A cornet, which is one of a series of Conn instruments that (intentionally) blur the line between cornets and trumpets, a relic of the argument over whether the cornet or trumpet was a better soloists' instrument (early in the 20th Century the common wisdom was that coronets were more `musical' than trumpets). Conn also made a line of clarinets using `propeller wood', which is basically just an unstained cocobolo laminate they used when grenadilla became harder to get because of the Second World War (the material was never actually used for aircraft propellers, it just resembles similar laminates that were used for this purpose).

If you want an example of an alto sax that's a tech relic, that's probably the Grafton acrylic alto.

# ¿ Jul 26, 2018 01:57

SubG: Aug 19, 2004; It's a hard world for little things.

Obsolete disc drives? How about the HP 9114B?

A battery-powered 3.5" floppy with an HP-IL interface. A US$800 external storage solution for your HP-41C calculator in 1984. Also worked with the HP-75 handheld 8-bit computer, and a few other devices.

The HP-IL (HP Interface Loop) adapter for the 41C is an expansion module that plugs into a card-edge port in the back of the calculator. Like most of the 41C's modules the HP-IL one adds a new menu to the calculator's internal catalog, adding commands that allow you to read and write data to disc. You could also get an HP-IL-capable tape drive, printer, plotter, and TV/monitor interface, in addition to a bunch of lab/data collection equipment (e.g. there was an HP gas chromatograph that you could get an HP-IL interface for, and poo poo like surveying equipment, for example). The whole HP-IL idea was sorta like a cross between SCSI and USB, before USB existed.

Every bit of this is crazy science-fiction-come-true tech in 1984, and comically obsolete as gently caress today.

# ¿ Jul 28, 2018 21:28

SubG: Aug 19, 2004; It's a hard world for little things.

Ghost Leviathan posted:

One thing I don't think anyone will miss is the dizzying variety of plugs and sockets for mobile phone chargers.

Why did it take them so long to standardise?

Standards are good; everybody should have one.

See also: SCSI connectors in the '90s, serial cables before USB, video cables before HDMI....

...and some dark night we can gather around a campfire and I'll shine a flashlight up into my face and tell you all about pre-10-Base-T network cabling...hermaphrodite cables...AUIs...thicknet...vaaaaaampire taps.

# ¿ Aug 4, 2018 08:54

SubG: Aug 19, 2004; It's a hard world for little things.

Data Graham posted:

A portrait of multiple generations of obsolete network tech:

A knot of BNC Ts (no terminators), an AUI to 10-Base-T transceiver (off my R4K Indigo), and a PCMCIA 10/100 adapter.

# ¿ Aug 7, 2018 00:27

SubG: Aug 19, 2004; It's a hard world for little things.

Pham Nuwen posted:

I once used an AUI to thinnet connector, and then I think a dual thinnet/10baseT hub to connect a modern computer to a DEC Alpha box running VMS. This was circa 2008.

Er, excuse me. Based on the date and architecture I believe you meant to say OpenVMS.
:goonsay:

My first shitposting on the internet was done from VAX running VMS.

# ¿ Aug 7, 2018 00:52

SubG: Aug 19, 2004; It's a hard world for little things.

Buttcoin purse posted:

Apple had their own version, AAUI. Thanks Apple!

Yeah. But it turns out that my experience using AAUI is from using a Quadra 700 running A/UX, so somehow AAUI manages to be the least stupid part of the entire thing. Ask me about getting AppleTalk working over ATM.

But yeah, one-off vendor modifications of otherwise-standard connectors used to be surprisingly common. E.g., DEC invented and used MMJ (an old POTS telephone jack/RJ12 with the latch slightly off-centre) for the serial port(s) on their big iron (and associated peripherals). Connecting a serial terminal to a server used to be an entirely too elaborate black art. I think the most recent application using MMJ is LEGO robotic poo poo.

# ¿ Aug 8, 2018 23:37

SubG: Aug 19, 2004; It's a hard world for little things.

CaptainSarcastic posted:

Firewire.

AGP.

ISA.

ESDI
SBUS
IPI

# ¿ Dec 21, 2018 13:21

SubG: Aug 19, 2004; It's a hard world for little things.

Powered Descent posted:

Every Activision game had an author, prominently credited, and that author got to write a little blurb in the back of the manual.

Same with Infocom.

They'd also mention the author in game announcements, e.g. when talking about upcoming releases in their newsletter (originally called The New Zork Times and later, after legal threats, The Status Line). I don't know how common this was, but I definitely sought out Infocom games based on knowing they were designed by e.g. Steve Meretzky.

# ¿ Mar 26, 2019 10:01

SubG: Aug 19, 2004; It's a hard world for little things.

Code Jockey posted:

I assume you're in Australia by your av, but if you're anywhere near the pacific NW of the USA...

(I already have two racks in my garage, but holy poo poo those look cool and I adore SGI aesthetic)

SGI used to design good gear. The original Indigo is still one of my favourite workstation designs. To quote a post I made on the subject previously (just to include all the case pics):

SubG posted:

Anyway, if we're talking about our favourite desktop cases from the early '90s, mine has to be the SGI Indigo:

It's difficult to see there, but there are two buttons (or tabs or whatever the gently caress you want to call them) right at the top of the front fascia:

Depress both of them with your thumbs and the front fascia swings down and away, revealing the case's component cage:

The big round thing is the speaker, and below it (next to the caution sign) is the power switch (you can toggle it without opening the case by opening the door on the front fascia). The (SCSI) drive bays have a tape drive and two hard drives, all on tool-free drive sleds. On the lefthand side of the cage is that big panel. At the top of the panel is a dzus fastener---one of those things that locks with a quarter turn. Unlock it and:

The panel swings down, giving you access to the processor and graphics cards. Without getting into all of the technical horseshit it's not technically a backplane setup, but it's basically a backplane setup. At the back of the chasis is a boring bus card that is screwed into the case, but all of the other working parts can be pulled out and socketed back in without any tools---drives, memory, motherboard (not technically a motherboard in this case), graphics card.

For environments where you don't want your users to be able to strip your workstations down to the chassis in no time flat, there's a bar lock you can use that runs through the cage and can be locked, preventing what I've just illustrated. You can see the back end of the slot for the bar on the back---it's the horizontal slot under the power connectors. Note that the power supply has a plug and a receptacle---so you can plug your monitor into the workstation's power supply, allowing you to turn both of them on and off together.

It's still a pretty good design even after 25 intervening years of case design.

I still have a shitload of old compute hardware lying around in the garage and in a storage shed: an R8K Indigo², a DEC Personal Workstation 600, a DEC/Compaq ES40 (that's probably going to sit in the garage until I sell the place because fuuuuuuuck manhandling that beast out of the rack), a whole shitload of Sun pizza boxes (an Ultra 2, I think I might still have an original Ultra, a SPARC 20, a couple SPARC 5s, an Ultra 5, and gently caress if I can remember what all else), and enough crappy old 1U x86 hardware to run a couple startups.

Nowdays I don't think I keep anything powered up that isn't a tiny-rear end low-power fanless thing.

# ¿ May 18, 2019 12:32

SubG: Aug 19, 2004; It's a hard world for little things.

Casimir Radon posted:

How does an SGI workstation stack up against a modern consumer graphics card?

Depends on the model and the graphics options. Circa when the Crimson was in production (the mid '90s) being able to do realtime texture mapping was ultra high-end poo poo, as was being able to do 24 or 32 bit colour.

The best graphics available for the Crimson was the Reality Engine option, which gave you resolutions of up to 1600x1200, textures up to 1024x1024, and a fill rate of around 2M pixels/second. That's about five orders of magnitude slower than a modern gaming video card. With the RE option, a Crimson would run you about US$100k. The only step up from there was the Onyx (with RealityEngine² graphics), which would set you back about US$250k.

Deskside SGI workstations without the highest-end options ran around US$30-40k, although if you were buying a shitload of 'em you'd tend to get a substantial price break (and miscellaneous other poo poo---big iron sales reps would throw all kinds of crazy poo poo your way if you were remotely involved in the purchasing process in those days.

# ¿ Jun 11, 2019 22:09

SubG: Aug 19, 2004; It's a hard world for little things.

Monday_ posted:

I have no idea if this is true but I remember a few years ago reading that a modern gaming PC is roughly as powerful as the entire render farm ILM used to make Jurassic Park.

That is not true but only because a modern gaming PC is many orders of magnitude more powerful, by all metrics, than the computers used by ILM in the early to mid '90s. And in addition to raw compute/render power, there are a shitload of things like normal maps, dynamic and volumetric lighting, and so on that just weren't available back then.

And really all of that is rounding error compared to the much more mature toolsets and workflows that a modern team has. Because with raw render power if you need more you can either buy more or wait slightly longer, but having poo poo like automatic motion tracking and being able to preview poo poo on your desktop is huge on terms of what's actually feasible.

# ¿ Jun 11, 2019 23:50

SubG: Aug 19, 2004; It's a hard world for little things.

tactlessbastard posted:

What, like an Xbox?

If you're asking about motion tracking, kinda. poo poo like the Kinect is the low-end, consumer-facing side of motion capture, match moving, and so on. The high end being Andy Serkis in a gimp suit. But none of that was available in 1993 when Jurassic Park was released, and all the animation, compositing, and so on was done by hand. Which means you had a bunch of people spending hundreds of hours of their time manually doing poo poo that can be done automagically in minutes these days. That makes a much bigger difference, in terms of what a production looks like and what projects are considered feasible, than whether it will take your render farm two minutes or twenty hours doing a render.

# ¿ Jun 12, 2019 00:22

SubG: Aug 19, 2004; It's a hard world for little things.

Pham Nuwen posted:

he means the xbox is huge, friend.

Old computer hardware gives you a different idea of what constitutes huge. I've broken elevators.

# ¿ Jun 12, 2019 00:43

SubG: Aug 19, 2004; It's a hard world for little things.

SCheeseman posted:

The original Toy Story doesn't look good these days. It was rendered in sub-1080p, shadows are pretty noisy and geometric and texture detail looks worse than most games released today.

1536x922. Low enough that they did a new render for the blu ray. And since it's a film real time means only 24 fps.

Jerry Cotton posted:

Quite the non sequitur there

Not a non sequitur. Actually literally put an elevator out of commission by trying to roll a fully-loaded SPARC 690 chassis onto it. And those guys were tiny compared to like the System/370, VAX 11/780, and poo poo like that. Big iron used to be big.

# ¿ Jun 12, 2019 09:39

SubG: Aug 19, 2004; It's a hard world for little things.

Vanagoon posted:

Apparently Google is removing FTP support from Chrome in version 82

https://www.ghacks.net/2019/08/16/google-chrome-82-wont-support-ftp-anymore/

Godspeed, protocol that's literally older than the internet.

And by godspeed I mean 2400 baud.

# ¿ Dec 14, 2019 05:13

SubG: Aug 19, 2004; It's a hard world for little things.

longview posted:

Mac update:
I now have AppleTalk file sharing over Ethernet working!

I just had a flashback to having to get AppleTalk over ATM working.

# ¿ Apr 3, 2021 03:08

SubG: Aug 19, 2004; It's a hard world for little things.

Buttcoin purse posted:

Wow, there's something I haven't thought about in a long time. I still have some ATM LANE PCI cards that are supported by Windows NT 4, but no switches to connect them to, only routers, so I never got to experience that particularly failed and obsolete technology fully!

We had FORE ATM cards in a bunch of Indigo²s and Crimsons, which is pretty loving peak '90s tech relic right there.

# ¿ Apr 4, 2021 09:13

SubG: Aug 19, 2004; It's a hard world for little things.

longview posted:

Everyone was either on an actual bus (i.e. same physical coax) or connected using hubs (which basically emulate a bus network even though it's wired as a star network).
There was no way to avoid collisions where two or more computers wanted to transmit at the same time.
So each computer was required to try to detect if it had tried to transmit on top of another computer, if this was detected then the computers involved would delay a random amount and try again.
If the network isn't super busy this works (the random delay is to prevent them from immediately colliding again).

Pictured above is an actual packet colliding on a 10Base-2 network with only two computers on it, from earlier this year. The normal signal amplitude is 4 divisions, when the collision occurs the voltage doubles.

This really just begins to scratch the surface of how much thinnet sucked. Like collisions are a way that thinnet could suck while still theoretically functioning, but it also had dozens of ways of sucking that would bring down literally the entire network.

Improper termination, improper physical spacing of devices, segment too long, improper grounding, all poo poo that could take the entire segment down. A single bad BNC connector (or fried AUI) on one device could gently caress the entire segment, and the only way of troubleshooting it was usually to go from host to host swapping poo poo out until it started working. Also a lightning strike nearby could fry every AUI on the segment.

# ¿ May 5, 2021 03:06

SubG: Aug 19, 2004; It's a hard world for little things.

Does anyone sill make server hardware with a physical ignition key like old RS6000s and like Sun E450s and E10ks?

# ¿ Jul 14, 2021 00:48

SubG: Aug 19, 2004; It's a hard world for little things.

Porfiriato posted:

https://archive.org/details/radioshack-catalog-1984/mode/2up

e: TRS-80 stuff starts on page 170

Gendered calculators.

# ¿ Jan 10, 2022 03:54

SubG: Aug 19, 2004; It's a hard world for little things.

my turn in the barrel posted:

I didn't know they made a tape drive flashcard thing for the 2600.

The Starpath/Arcadia Supercharger library, while tiny, is surprisingly strong for something built on top of the 2600. There are a bunch of knockoff/clone games: Phaser Patrol which is a pretty good Star Raiders knockoff; Communist Mutants from Space which is a decent Galaga-like; Fireball which is a lacklustre Breakout clone; and Suicide Mission which is a good-for-the-Atari-2600-but-not-good Asteroids clone.

There is also a surprisingly good very early console RPG for it called Dragonstomper which is one of the best games on the 2600, and a 3D maze/puzzle thing called Escape from the Mindmaster which is cool but kinda janky.

And that's like 3/4 of the games for the Supercharger. There were a couple more released at the tail end of the Supercharger's life, and a couple that were mail order only, but I never played any of them.

# ¿ Feb 13, 2022 12:41

SubG: Aug 19, 2004; It's a hard world for little things.

CaptainSarcastic posted:

I checked, and it's not Microprose, but this game holds a special place in my heart:

My stepfather did the voicework for the colonel or whoever gave you the missions, and the city you can fly missions in is a rough model of my hometown of Eugene, OR.

The game was pretty fun as I recall, and let you do all sorts of poo poo you shouldn't be doing, like shoot down all the B-52s you were supposed to be providing ground cover for.

Doodle-y-dooooo-do-doot doot (doot doot)
_{Doodle-y-dooooo-do-doot doot (doot doot)}
Doodle-y-dooooo-do-doot doot (doot doot)

# ¿ May 26, 2022 14:53

SubG: Aug 19, 2004; It's a hard world for little things.

Data Graham posted:

An SGI big-rig once came on campus and parked itself between the student houses and the computing lab, and supermodels hung out the trailer door to lure the students in and see all the cool gear and drop out and work for SGI. There were monitors arranged around the interior with flight simulators much like that

Yeah, the Magic Bus. They were using it to show off the Onyx back in like '94 or '95 and the flight sim doing 3d with real-time texture mapping was absolutely loving mind-blowing, like literally never seen poo poo like that before. But around that time a bunch of guys left SGI to found 3Dfx, and a couple years after that PC 3d accelerators were a thing, and suddenly everybody could do it.

# ¿ Jun 29, 2022 11:23

SubG: Aug 19, 2004; It's a hard world for little things.

lobsterminator posted:

Yeah in many early machine language books the process was often that you wrote assembly on paper and transcribed it to machine code yourself and entered the hexes into the computer. This book for example shows the hexes always alongside the assembly. Assemblers became more of a thing in later 8-bit years and 16-bit computers.

http://www.atarimania.com/documents/6502%20Machine%20Code%20for%20Humans.pdf

I'm old enough that I wrote games for computer magazines in the '80s, the ones that printed the source and expected the readers to type everything in.

One time I wrote a text adventure whose parser was written in assembly. When I submitted it, the editors liked the game, but said that the didn't publish stuff written in assembly. Because most of their readers wouldn't have an assembler.

I converted the parser into a bunch of DATA statements and a loop to POKE it all into memory—which made the listing a loving nightmare to enter by hand—and they accepted it.

# ¿ Jun 22, 2023 20:53

SubG: Aug 19, 2004; It's a hard world for little things.

ExcessBLarg! posted:

Which platform? Was there no commonly available machine language monitor?

TRS-80 Color Computer. They did have a built-in ML monitor, but I think the problem was that different hardware revs got different versions of the tools (or some weren't shipped with it?). I recall using a "separate" editor and assembler that was sold as a standalone product by Radio Shack (and loaded off tape), but I don't remember the detailed differences between it and the builtin tools.

# ¿ Jun 22, 2023 22:54

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# ¿ Apr 26, 2024 04:50

SubG: Aug 19, 2004; It's a hard world for little things.

fondue posted:

When I was in college in the 90s at the University of Minnesota we had a whole lab of SUN systems that had this as an optional filesystem.

They must've been SGIs, because fsn was an IRIX-only thing, and there wasn't a SPARC version of IRIX.

# ¿ Feb 13, 2024 05:23

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