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remember when instead of just a youtube link sites would have a video available for download in quicktime, realplayer, mpeg and like three other formats for you to pick from, and all the formats sucked
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Jan 15, 2021 02:24
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Jim Silly-Balls posted:crts are weird in the realm of vintage tech. I work in e-recycling and crts are one of the only vintage technologies that have not only depreciated drastically, but gotten more costly to deal with. yeah nobody wants that old VCR deck, but as a recycler I can at least get something out of it. the only way I can do that with CRT’s is to mark up my costs on them I was gonna take a CRT to an ewaste day but my friend told me they're starting to be worth something on ebay for VINTAGE COMPUTING. It was just a not special 17" Dell CRT, but a comparable one on ebay sold for $80 + $150 or something. But then when I tested it out the colors were messed up so I decided to scrap that, I didn't really want to deal with shipping it anyway.
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Oct 16, 2021 02:47
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anyone else waste a bunch of time using Hyperstudio? That was the preferred Mac OS 9 time waster in my fifth grade class over Oregon Train and Number Munchers. it let you do things like have different pages/slides and buttons you could tie to animations or music or page advancement, so we would build different adventure type games where you had different buttons you could pick with different outcomes. I remember at the end of the year the teacher took me aside and was like, if you like this, let me show you...powerpoint. This is the grown up version of Hyperstudio. we had a mix of Apple IIc, iMacs, G3, and a few of what I believe must have been the Power Mac 5200s we also had a Sony Mavica. Good to be in the "tech rich" classroom with the geek-friendly teacher
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Dec 29, 2021 04:58
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the keith lynch site reminds me of my 14-year old self's website, what with the taking pictures of my room and describing everything in them. fortunately I grew out of describing things in mind-numbing detail. i discovered if you go to his site with https: instead of http: it's a totally different site with recent blog commentary The_Franz posted:i spent the whole day staking out this pizza shop and setting up a con, but it was worth it for a single free pizza (probably this brought me way back to like 9th grade when my friend and I would watch this show. we were too young to drive so we did "warbussing" by firing up netstumbler on a laptop from the school bus 
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Jan 9, 2022 03:06
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at the time)
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Hoped this would be this video, it was, watched again, because it's that good.
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Feb 13, 2022 03:28
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back in HS my geeky friends and I all got into Palm PDAs people who got into them later had Bluetooth, but I only had Infrared. Remember pointing two devices at each other for an entire class period to transfer a big game or something. Also, IrDA is reminding me of AlphaSmart. Anyone else have these things in school? They were basically portable keyboards with a three line LCD you could use to type up your paper. Then you could hook it up to a computer and it emulated a keyboard and would "type" in what you wrote to a ClarisWorks doc or other word processor so you could transfer it for printing or whatever. Basically a way to let more kids in the class be able to type up their papers without needing more computers. The AlphaSmart 2000 (this was when you would add "2000" to the end of things to show that they were advanced) added IrDA as a transfer option, although I never managed to get it to work
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Feb 15, 2022 05:06
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I recently discovered that that quote is not actually from RMS, but his response to it might be even better: https://www.gnu.org/gnu/incorrect-quotation.en.html quote:It is OK to call it “GNU” when you want to be really short, but it is better to call it “GNU/Linux” so as to give Torvalds some credit.
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Mar 27, 2022 20:50
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Trillian people being excited about getting broadband so they could leave their AIM away messages up all day
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Jun 5, 2022 03:58
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Netbooks
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Jun 24, 2022 19:51
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remember this crap user bars https://www.userbars.be/userbar/582 I found a whole folder of them I made
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Sep 16, 2022 18:49
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KOTEX GOD OF BLOOD posted:sony xplooood were these the cool looking speakers?
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Sep 30, 2022 04:07
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rotor posted:they were yeah, there was a great palmos universal remote app back before harmony remotes existed Used my Palm to turn off the TV while it was playing a video during Drivers Ed and the instructor threatened everyone what would happen if he figured out who did it
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Nov 21, 2022 05:57
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what were those profile pictures on AIM? they had a more AOL-y name, like buddy icons or something I spent hours created custom animated ones in whatever the Adobe suite thing was you could use to make animated gifs two old tech things i remembered but not the names of
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Jan 6, 2023 04:22
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git apologist posted:as a young nerd of 11 or 12 or whatever i was proud that i had memorised this. i used to read any computer magazine i could get my hands on, including years old UK business IT mags from the library, and had a detailed knowledge of $6000 486 compaq laptops wow I had forgotten about this, reading all the back issues of PC World that my local library had cover-to-cover. that really brought me up to speed on computers, though and catapulted me from "computer=cool" to "I can decently discuss computer components and make useful recommendations on purchasing and troubleshooting to family members". I think I, too was 11.
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Jan 10, 2023 04:50
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git apologist posted:hell yeah. how good were those massive detailed ads with a whole computer stores catalog in the back pages. i used to pore over those I remember there was an ad they ran in the back of like every issue with a big picture of a woman with a server rack in the background and the text said, "NOW THAT'S A GREAT RACK!" and I spent a lot of time as an 11-year old trying to figure out if there was a joke there and why the woman was so prominent. There was also an ad for a dongle-less PCMCIA Ethernet card that had a picture of Michelangelo's David statue with the headline "BECAUSE THINGS THAT STICK OUT GET BUSTED" that at the time I thought MIGHT have been a penis joke but wasn't quite sure.
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Jan 11, 2023 04:53
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as a 12 year old I would sell candy on the schoolyard, then take my earnings to radio shack, where I would buy various audio cables and cassette tapes. I managed to hook the family TV to a portable cassette recorder and then would record audio of my favorite TV shows onto cassette tapes so I could listen to them on the go! I thought this was pretty cool at the time (it wasn't). I just know there's a huge box of all these tapes somewhere that my parents are going to give me and I'll have to figure out what the heck to do with them. mom VCR story: my mom figured out what time the commercials were in the shows she was recording so would set up multiple recordings programmed for each segment of the show between commercials also I just discovered this beauty in mint condition, unopened 
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Feb 19, 2023 03:53
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The_Franz posted:you still can in most places confession time ok, this is yospos we have people with a stack of microcomputers, no one will care i have a copper POTS line just because I enjoy it. i like being able to hook my vintage rotary phone and fax machine to it. i like when I don't have to care if my phone is charged or in another room to make a call. i like testing it by looking for 48V with a multimeter. but yeah it's definitely more expensive than a VOIP plan or prepaid smartphone plan with data. the point about reliability is fair, there's definitely less upkeep of the copper plant, so I probably have to have someone out every couple years to troubleshoot the lines. the awesome thing is the POTS guys were like cool that I was into it and I had two of them give me their cell numbers and they just have me call them directly because they know the actual phone company is totally incompetent. One time they de-provisioned my line in the process of giving me a $5/mo discount, and insisted it was something a technician had to come fix. (Which I guess it kind of was since he was the only one competent enough to figre out they did that). It does have FREE LONG DISTANCE though. obviously it's a nerd splurge and will be getting replaced with VOIP should I need to cut costs though. also you're always looking over your shoulder because the phone company would love to get you off the service so they don't have to maintain it.
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Apr 4, 2023 03:41
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as a young nerd I was a big radio shack fan, spending my earnings from selling candy in the school yard buying various cables and adapters. as a young adult i finally got over my nostalgia and enthusiasm for it when I got into an argument with the guy trying to sell me a $20 warranty on a $10 thermometer and refusing to let me pay without providing him my phone number and email address.
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Apr 22, 2023 02:34
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was thinking about Eudora's chili peppers today
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May 12, 2023 03:11
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Volmarias posted:Nostalgic not-yet-tech poo poo: awkwardly holding entire birds nests of tickets because gently caress if you were going to throw them away, and feeling like a tiny smaug on your horde of ski ball tickets (that would ultimately be worth like $2.73 lol). One place would weigh your tickets instead of counting them so people would lick their tickets before having them weighed
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Jun 3, 2023 02:49
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Jonny 290 posted:silverface gear is very nice and also extremely bid up. broken poo poo going for $500+, etc I'm pretty sure growing up my dad had one of those silverface Technics tape decks that didn't work and replaced with a black Radio Shack model at some point in my childhood. But of course kept the Technics just sitting on top of the new one. Are you telling me I should have him put it up on eBay for $$$$?
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Jun 7, 2023 03:43
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Beve Stuscemi posted:The Cobalt Qube and Raq I remember seeing an ad for the cobalt Qube in the back of some computer magazine and really wanting one when I was like, 11. "It's a cube shaped blue computer!!"
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Jun 23, 2023 13:58
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I was thinking yesterday, I have a vague memory of some friend in HS showing off either some browser or browser plugin where you'd navigate and do shortcuts by drawing gestures with your mouse. anyone remember what this was?
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Sep 14, 2023 03:20
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I had a bunch of ThinkGeek shirts in HS, then I went to an engineering school for college and everyone wore them and I realized how dumb they were and stopped wearing them. Nothing makes a "10 types of people in the world: those who know binary, and those who don't" shirt less funny than seeing it five times a day.
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Sep 15, 2023 16:18
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I remember being very excited in like 8th grade I got one of those RCA -> USB adapters so I could digitize Ed Edd n Eddy recordings. The only problem was the family VCR was not near the family computer, so I used the line out composites from my parents' giant VHS camcorder to play back the recordings I made to VHS to the capture device. Regarding the earlier eBay chat, my most heart warming experience was probably a couple years ago I decided to try to sell the Athlon XP CPU/motherboard that was sitting in my closet. Some guy bought it, and sent me this excited message about how he was building a Windows XP retro computing machine. Definitely had kind of a middle aged dad vibe, he even had an ieee.org email address. I told him all the other stuff I had and he bought it from me, too.
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Oct 28, 2023 18:19
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I think I learned some Javascript thing from PC World where you you could type it into the address bar and it would pop up the page creation date, so I was the king of fully completed bibliographies in middle school.
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Dec 5, 2023 04:00
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speaking of IDE cables I have a vague memory of repositioning the connectors on the cable so they could reach my hard drives scattered around the case and having to recrimp the connectors on the cable using my dad's bench vise.
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Jan 6, 2024 04:40
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i used to avoid putting my stuff in the My Documents user folder, but I gave in mbecause it's easier and everything kind of defaults to it the reason I don't like using it because it's a "special" folder which has unique properties. for example, if your computer dies and you put the drive in another machine to get the files off, it will complain about permissions on the My Documents folder when you try to access it. It will let you override it if you're an Administrator, but then just hang for a really long time. I found out recently that's because behind the scenes it's rewriting the permissions on every one of the files to give you access, lol
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Jan 22, 2024 19:06
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I remember learning about MIDIs when I was like 10 and thinking they were amazing and trying to sell "bootleg" MIDIs unsuccessfully.
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Feb 4, 2024 05:18
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WilWheaton posted:probably needed to also sell a way to organize those midis beautiful
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Feb 9, 2024 04:03
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Hed posted:remember old computers that would have 7-segment display readouts of the processor speed. In high school some of my friends discovered that these could be programmed just by moving some jumpers around and made them say "LOL".
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Feb 27, 2024 05:03
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funny tech thing I just relived I wanted a simple way of playing back some audio recordings, so I got out an old Rio Karma digital audio player. Since it supports Ogg Vorbis, I figured why not, and ripped all the CDs I needed to listen to Ogg. As befitting its legendary status, the Rio Karma's dock has an Ethernet port. Plug it into the network, it has its own little webserver where you could download a jar for transferring files to it over the network. Amazingly, I was able to get this 15+ year old .jar to work fine against a modern OpenJDK on Windows 11. Then the player didn't like the headers on the vorbis files. After comparing them with some vorbis files I knew I had put on a Rio Karma in high school in a hex editor, it looked like the tagging software I used to tag all the tracks after painstakingly entering all the details into MusicBrainz was starting the header fields at a different offset. I managed to recall the sweet sweet ID3 tagging program I used in high school and found a semi-modern version. After a couple passes with that, it cleaned up the tags in a way the Rio Karma liked and I was in business after transferring the files at Fast Ethernet speeds.
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Feb 27, 2024 05:27
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