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hello, captain foo said I should be posting in yospos so I picked this thread does anyone remember the BBC microcomputer? I lived in england when I was a teenager for a bit and it was a line of computers made by Acorn for the BBC, as in the british broadcasting people, and they got put in schools a lot we had old ones and also new ones called Archemedes computers Also I appear to have 15 .pcx files in an old folder made by myself or one of my siblings, here's one for your enjoyment  e. this file is from 1992 so it's almost definitely my little brother's and I think we had a little graphics program that made these, or possibly an app on Prodigy
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Mar 21, 2023 23:23
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Mr. Nice! posted:lol hi leper Hi! Here's another one  this is art imo
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Mar 21, 2023 23:50
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that is some cool history, most of it I didn't know, I was in the UK because my dad was working for IBM (I've Been Moved) and back in the US previously I'd played oregon trail on apple II and commodore stuff plus playing zork on the IBM and that was about it. And then there I was in a british computer class with these absolutely alien computers, I don't recall if we did stuff in BASIC or what, maybe LOGO? Or maybe some weird specific flavor of programming language, it's hard to remember. They did have color CRTs though which was wild, I'd had a 100% monochrome experience up to that point.
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Mar 22, 2023 01:51
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Powerful Two-Hander posted:god yes the BBC micro and acorn pcs were a big feature of my school days because Yeah I think we must have been playing with LOGO although we didn't have a robotic plotter I don't think. IIRC the classroom my last year (1991) was like half and half nice new Archimedes and older BBC Micros, and I think the Archs were networked but the BBC Micros weren't. So we totally learned about NET SEND. We were supposed to make a program as a class project, and I decided to make a choose your own adventure game, but I got bogged down fiddling with the graphics and spent weeks just loving around with a little looping thing that drew cascading circles all over the screen so I never finished the actual game lol. A friend of mine at the time wound up moving to London as an adult and working for game companies so those things actually resulted in at least one programming career at my little rural school. NoneMoreNegative posted:The BBC Micro Bot on Twitter is impressive, running BBC Code in a single tweet That's cool! I doubt I'd remember the slightest bit of how to write BBC Code since it's been over 30 years lol but I love that some people still do. Retro computering is cool. There's this guy on youtube who does a ton of retro computer stuff as part of his job working at a retro computer museum in the UK, he's a musician so the focus is on using stuff to make music. I bet yospos knows about Look Mum No Computer?
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Mar 22, 2023 15:59
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in the US basically all the shopping cart stuff is war on homeless people but with a veneer of cover because the carts are of course paid for by businesses and not the public in the UK it's weird how the rear wheels on the shopping trolleys also swivel, I tell ya moving there it was a very odd experience having the cart go all doriftu at the slightest touch but eventually I got used to it and now I'm like, why don't we do this in the US? It'd be easier to like sidle your cart up to your car or scootch it out of the way in the aisle when someone wants to get bye. I bet it's just that a swivel wheel costs ten cents more than a fixed one.
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Mar 22, 2023 18:17
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Powerful Two-Hander posted:I got stopped by the police for trying to use a shopping trolley to take a friend home when we were drunk and didn't get anywhere really which the police were at pains to point out just to really up the embarrassment a rural school in Hampshire and that's about as specific as I'd care to be on open forums posts but I can tell ya exactly which one via PMs if you keep it a secret!
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Mar 22, 2023 21:49
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That's OK I definitely don't qualify as "from YOSPOS" at this point or probably ever, but also meeting goons is gross, why would you ever do that? Unless it's to swap piles of old computer kit, maybe.
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Mar 22, 2023 22:54
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the truth is that I've made several good friends on SA and I've met probably six or so IRL Hey another funny tech poo poo i just remembered: when I was in high school (in the US) I did two semesters of "library aide" as a class becuase I didn't need more credits or whatever and the major project at that time was sticking little magnetic strips into the spines of all the books in the library. Boring poo poo so we would wait till someone came in the library and try to stick a strip to something they left unattended like a backpack. Then we figured out that the sensor by the door only turned on when someone walked across the mat, like there was a pressure sensor under the mat. So we stuck magnetic strips to the actual big gate thing you walked through right at the end of class and from that moment onward the thing would go off every time anyone walked through it. The librarians had to turn the whole thing off after an hour of that poo poo and then the next day we peeled off the strips so now it worked again and then we told them we just turned it on and it was fine. But we weren't assholes so we never did it again. Just let them live with the loving thing going off all day for no reason and then work perfectly thereafter lol
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Mar 23, 2023 02:22
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The_Franz posted:did high school libraries have a huge problem with students stealing books? I have no idea but I would imagine only certain specific books, but a lot for those specific books. It was a high school library so the fiction section was mostly classic fiction like you'd get assigned in an english class but it did have a little section of sci fi and fantasy. There were also the usual sorts of things that horny teenagers target and take? Really though I'm sure it was just a school district wide imperative, the admin bought the stuff and decreed all schools to use it.
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Mar 23, 2023 16:02
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like there's actually valuable books that can get stolen, there's people who just prefer not to bother with library cards and needing to return things, and there's people who get a thrill from shoplifting most people are honest and even more people are honest if you just give them a small push towards honesty, just the barest little nudge in the right direction
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Mar 23, 2023 17:08
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I just remembered Scantrons, and also dittos the lovely wonderful smell of a fresh purple ditto
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Mar 24, 2023 19:01
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taking the ball out of the mouse and cleaning the horrible ring of gunk off of the two little plastic rollers inside
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Apr 3, 2023 03:42
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FidoNet
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Apr 3, 2023 23:07
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apparently yes! there are still basically nostalgia BBSes out there and FidoNet is one of those things people use just because it's old, I guess
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Apr 3, 2023 23:57
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reading the lists of components and their prices in the ads at the back of Computer Currents and Microtimes to see what stuff cost picking out my 486-dx2-80 mobo and proc based on the best price in the city and taking the bus to some random hole in the wall shop with stacks of sun faded generic keyboard boxes and spindles of CD-RWs in the window and asking at the counter for the good ram
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Apr 6, 2023 04:16
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xmodem vs. zmodem vs. kermit
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Apr 6, 2023 05:18
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I left out ymodem because I never used it
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Apr 6, 2023 05:20
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The SVG file format permits embedded bitmap images, I guess so you can like, put icons into a diagram or something, but lately we've come across images that are "converted" to svg by just slapping the SVG xml header in front. How very smart thanks folks that is super helpful.
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Apr 6, 2023 16:58
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Cybernetic Vermin posted:svg always had an extremely poorly defined domain, and i think just about everyone who worked on it realized it and abandoned it. Well for example all of the diagrams in google cloud's architecture papers are SVGs. This makes them editable with a vector editor, like Illustrator or Inkscape or something, and that's actually useful and it works well because maybe you want to modify a reference architecture for your own organization's deployment. I don't know if there's a better format for that that is also open source (is draw.io open source?) so it's still in use in some domains. But if you give me a vector graphic and it's actually a bitmap image that you just plonked into an SVG, I just have to wonder why you did that. What were you accomplishing.
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Apr 6, 2023 17:30
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it's fun to open an SVG where the text was converted to vectors instead of embedding a font, so you can't really edit the text haha that's great note this also prevents translation! and blocks screen readers! fuckin great
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Apr 6, 2023 18:00
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qirex posted:this is why it's only really suitable for pictures, a svg is a rendered vector image not an original editable source except you can in fact embed fonts, making the text editable? like I think the editability is half the point
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Apr 6, 2023 19:07
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Agile Vector posted:it could be murky for accessibility, depending on how the svg is embedded… maybe? i've not tested a bunch of text in a svg because that's discouraged from the days of raster images https://stackoverflow.com/questions...nt%20to%20show. I don't immediately find clear answers but it does appear that at least some of the text embedded in an .svg markup could be readable by JAWS etc. The W3C says SVGs have lots of accessibility features, but of course it's up to implementers to take advantage of them. https://www.w3.org/TR/SVG-access/
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Apr 7, 2023 19:12
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Captain Invictus posted:jeff gerstmann uploaded some photos of some failed 90's magazine that had a bunch of random "youth culture" stuff in it, which included MTG This was a post about magic but I'm laughing at the classic horrible speakers (I had a pair of CS-800s) and also the internet resources. Anonymous FTP hosted on a university server! A subdomain at yoyodyne.com! The deckmaster usenet group! hosed up line spacing for style, in a graphic reeking of early 90s photoshoppery! Leperflesh fucked around with this message at 16:45 on Apr 12, 2023 |
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Apr 12, 2023 16:42
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I worked preload shift at UPS in the mid-late 90s, I worked on the line for the 94105 zip code which is downtown san francisco and so every few days some company on my line would get in an order of gateways. The parade of cow boxes heading across the conveyer belts was always a discouraging sight, foretelling the doom of some unlucky loader who would have to figure out what the gently caress to do with 80 monitors or whatever. I developed a sort of pavlovian aversion to gateways, lol
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Apr 12, 2023 18:55
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yeah I've chatted with captain invictus at length about our shared UPS experience, although mine was only like 2 years compared to his apparently lifetime career position that thread is a pro click, and he updates it regularly too which is very nice actually though, the UPS stuff reminds me of a bit of old mid-90s tech: a wearable scanning tool made by Symbol. Consumer handheld devices like palm pilots and handsprings etc. couldn't hack an industrial factory/warehouse environment, so a company called Symbol made durable hardened devices and sold them for like a thousand bucks each to big companies. I split a belt which meant in addition to loading a truck (or two or three) I stood at the head of a belt and turned all the packages label up, positioned them on the belt depending on address (first three pickers took stuff in front, second three in middle, last three the stuff I put at the back of the belt) and scanned every single one of them. You needed both hands free to do that poo poo so the wearable scanner fit on the arm like Leela's arm thing in Futurama, and then had a little clicky laser scanner that strapped to two fingers and activated with a thumb switch. This isn't the actual one I used, this is actually like 20 years newer, but you get the idea  At absolute peak load I was sorting more than 60 packages a minute, e.g. faster than one per second. That's not sustainable but I could do it with a big pile of next day air envelopes for example. At that speed the rate at which the scanner could acquire and read the bar codes was the limiting factor. It felt cool to be faster than the computer lol.
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Apr 13, 2023 00:15
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eschaton posted:there’s a lot of the newer ones on eBay for various levels of cheap, they’re cute and hackable I wonder how many of them are stolen, lol. Captain Invictus posted:I loving hate the heads and the straps they attach to your fingers with, if you don't tighten it just right, it either cuts off the circulation to those fingers or goes flying the gently caress off your hand when you frisbee a flat package or something. I eventually finagled my way out of doing loading and much prefer it because lots of trailers have stupid amounts of dust on the floors of them I don't recall having a problem with mine, but it undoubtedly had a different strap arrangement in 1997 than nowadays. I do think I tended to slightly curl my forefinger and middle finger, to aim the laser anyway, and that probably helped keep it on. I also tended to hold a pen in that hand (the art of having a bic in your hand while using both hands to load packages is another one of those highly specialized UPS brownie loader skills) and I could even grab a tape gun and use it right-handed without dropping the pen. Which as you know is frequently necessary, hah. Oh yeah also I was always wearing a pair of weightlifter's gloves. The only things that would hold up for at least a couple of months, had some padding, left the fingers free. My facility in SF never got down to freezing though, so the gloves were just for protection, not warmth.
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Apr 13, 2023 20:10
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going shopping for electronics components at a store called radio shack, where they mostly sold radios and components
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Apr 20, 2023 15:59
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I used to live like a quarter mile from a Jameco, spoiled me forever compared to the retail electronic component buying experience but also the Fry's like four blocks from my house closed, lol at the people who ran Fry's, that place was actually open but half empty for a couple of years, it was baffling Fry's goes in this thread now I guess! I remember the fun store themes, the aztec one in particular I liked
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Apr 26, 2023 18:09
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I went to the palo alto one a couple of times when I was living on the peninsula, but that would have been circa 2004 or so and it wasn't as bad back then. My fondest memories of Fry's are from my haydays of buying computer stuff back in like 1993-8 or so, mostly the sunnyvale and los gatos ones; and then here in concord from 2010, which was less "fond" and more "convenient" due to proximity. also weird stuff was not far from sunnyvale fry's so sometimes we'd go there first and then hit frys for whatever we couldn't get cheap & used Putting returns back on shelves was a long-term problem at fry's, but balanced by their good return policy. I knew a guy from our old BBS days who would basically steal from them by buying, say, a modem, taking it out of the package, putting his old busted modem in, and returning it. The return people did not like closely inspect the circuit board for a serial number, it looked like a modem in a box so they'd take it. That guy was kind of an rear end in a top hat all around really.
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Apr 26, 2023 18:48
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code:
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Apr 28, 2023 17:45
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Basically that, yes. The dark ages of "winmodems" and "windows PnP" modems and similar, which mostly didn't loving work. I avoided the winmodems, but you had to manage IRQ conflicts and poo poo. In this example I also had a serial port joystick configured with kcard and then configured pnpset after that to prevent a conflict. I think. Unless kcard was something else, I may be misremembering. mgreen was the green energy settings/driver for a viewsonic monitor, probably the .28 dot pitch 1024x768 super vga 14" monitor I got some time in 1995ish. The filedate on this one is 11/24/1997 which seems awfully late to me, I would have been on windows 95 by then, but I might have also been running dual partition dual boot at that point in order to still be able to use a handful of noncompatable legacy dos apps.
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Apr 28, 2023 18:31
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I would ask my online buddies, and by online I mean the people on hot city BBS (gilroy, california), for help when I got really badly into the weeds of config.sys/autoexec.bat nonsense which reminds me of another funny tech poo poo: the absolute minimal DOS install could be missing both edit.exe and edlin.exe, and if you needed to fix a problem with one of these .bat or .sys files, you could still do it by using: code:
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Apr 28, 2023 19:01
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funny tech poo poo u just remembered: there's no such thing as a permanent archival format, the only way to preserve information "permanently" is by constantly copying it to whatever the latest format is, forever, and since the total amount of information increases over time, this is an asymptotic curve of effort in which actual success at the stated goal of preserving everything, or even just everything "worthy", would mean a horrific dystopian future in which all of human effort by every living person is expended in the menial task of swapping reels on the reel to disk transferal machine (by which of course I mean its futuristic counterpart, I dunno, telling AIs to copy the internet archives onto the data crystals). Humanity enslaved by the duty to preserve its own past, unable to create anything new because of the burden of all that was made before, each passing century adding an ever greater volume of babble and Very Important Debates about events current and past and saying "lol". Or perhaps a brave clean future in which archeologists muck around in the tattered scraps of what was lost, filling in the 99% of what's missing with imaginative narratives that more or less fit the evidence, while the rest of us nod interestedly while watching the holovids specials about the ancient peoples of pre-collapse north america and then move on to whatever new thing is of proper interest to their time and place, like playing holo-tennis or inventing better nuclear fallout cleaning robots or invading proxima centauri before they invade us. How dissatisfactory to our own present-day venalities, to think that all of this time and effort we've spent on our clever jpegs and ironic-but-not-ironic-but-actually-even-more-ironic jokes about holocaust denial will have been, in the end, lost like tears in rain, time to die? Some clever digger may yet pore over the last fragmentary remains of YOSPOS and confidently declare: "these were a subspecies of humanity, genetically similar but clearly differentiated by their mutation for monochromia, unable to see other than amber or green. Curious!" Let me tell you, there is that aforementioned middle ground: we can take only that which we hold most dear and carve it into the rocks themselves in giant laser-etched forms, universally understandable memetic glyphs, that future generations cannot help but notice and understand, like so many pyramids of giza or statues of Ozymandias; or if you like, print out your tweets onto archival paper and store them in the deepest vaults. Curation! Select only the gems, the diamonds in the rough, encase them in amber and set them aside, and future generations may queue up and pay a modest entry fee to peer at them and clutch their chins and nod and hmm before boisterously clambering back aboard their hyberbus to return to their space school, orbiting above the clouds. But to do this first you must make choices, what to preserve and what not to, and such has been the volume of our effluent digital converse in these recent decades that you might well spend all your days sifting through just your own shitposts in their tens of thousands, and thus as a microcosm of that dark dystopian future - become personally a shadow cast by the spectre of your own wasted potential, a basement-dwelling goon whose creative juices have dried up, left with just a crusty old sponge myopically dabbing at the messy spill of your youthful energy, dribs and drabs that stain the archived threads of a dead gay forum, sopping up a drop here or a drop there, to place into the folder marked "DO NOT DELETE" in the vain hope that your grand-nieces and step-nephews will bother to gingerly poke through your ancient dusty computer poo poo before they toss it in the bin as they prepare for the estate sale of your post-mortem remains. What was I saying? Oh, right: lmao, I just remembered this poo poo, it's hilarious Leperflesh fucked around with this message at 17:29 on May 10, 2023 |
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May 10, 2023 17:24
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i don't have time to read or respond to replies to that epic post of mine, I'm too busy scribing it into a slab of granite that I'm gonna secure in a cave for future generations to marvel at
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May 10, 2023 17:51
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yeah like I still have all my files never had a castrophic unrecoverable drive loss so my first stuff is IBM Writing Assistant files from the mid 1980s homework assignments I did as a child and I still have them it's actually far easier to just copy everything than it is to weed it out, but this also makes it just so much trash for whoever inherits my stuff when I'm dead, nobody's going to go spelunking for possible treasure, especially since we never had kids. And in the end, entropy will grind all that we ever were into so much frozen dust.
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May 10, 2023 18:49
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yeah that's what I'm saying it's cool that SA has been scraped and stored by the library of congress, though, I'm sure their archives will survive longer than my sixth grade homework files, albeit on a geologic scale... not by much.
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May 10, 2023 18:59
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I mean if I'm replicating a PBF strip that's actually cool and good, but also that's hardly the first instance of the idea either
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May 10, 2023 20:25
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I worked as "the computer guy" at a private speech language pathology practice in san franciscon while I was in college, for a few years (it was co-run by my mom, lol). They had a whole lot of important stuff on one computer, so I insisted that we set up a backup system and selected zip drives as the best/easiest way to do it. I documented a process, and taught the admin assistant how to use it. When I left that job I made sure the backups were there, working, valid, etc. A year later, that admin assistant left, and my mom immediately discovered she hadn't been doing her job in several ways. Unfortunately, then they had a big crash on the computer and lost the drive. The most important stuff were medical records and those were all stored physically in filing cabinets, but second-most-important was the quickbooks install, and that was gone. So of course I said just grab the last backup from the zip disks. And they looked and.... every zip disk was blank! Somehow, the admin assistant had wiped the backups but not taken new ones. And she was gone had moved to Spain, no phone number. They had to painstakingly reconstruct the quickbooks system, which included billing for a bunch of clients including school districts, from receipts in the filing cabinet. They had to hire someone and it took months and cost thousands of dollars. Lol zip disks
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May 11, 2023 17:54
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lmao my stepdad handed me: an ancient Sony digital camera that writes to little tape cassettes, a slightly less ancient Phillips DVDR recorder that accepts various inputs, and a stack of tapes of incredibly important home movies of family members and said "I can't get it to work, you do it." The camera has has composite video output, which does not seem to work at all; but it also has firewire output, and the Phillips has a firewire port inside the front door that my stepdad didn't notice and I got that to function. The Phillips recorder's remote control is broken, so everything has to be done using the front panel buttons: and the goal is an actual digital file, so after burning to a CD-R I have to take the CD-R to a computer and pull the file off and convert it to mp4. I got it to work! ...once. Second try, the tape has some corruption, you can see the video but with some artifacts in it during recording to DVD-R, but the DVD-R is subsequently unreadable. Might be due to age so I bought new(!) DVD-Rs, haven't gotten around to trying them yet because the entire process is frustrating... as you can imagine, the Philips has primitive functions for like, doing chapters, putting a label on each chapter, timestamps, etc. all of which make the whole deal feel even more fragile and fraught. And of course it records at playback speed only. I tried bypassing it by downloading the sony-specific PlayMemories application but even running it in compatibility mode it cannot understand that I do in fact have a firewire port or notice data coming in on it. I have here in my hands a firewire add-on card that my stepdad bought based on a recommendation on a crusty old website for trying to get data off these loving things, but I'm not bothering with it. Obviously poo poo like component video to USB doesn't work, why would it. These videos of my siblings as kids and me as a 20-something are very important. Lol at this old poo poo. Carthag Tuek posted:i mean trashing the backups and not taking new ones sounds like it would have been a problem regardless of storage medium lol Exactly Like I warned them when I left "backups are only reliable if you practice both making them, and occasionally, restoring from backup, here is instructions for how to test a backup to see if it's real" but instructions only work if someone reads them and then does what they say. I was not blamed for this issue but I also have no idea if something about the clunkiness of an external zip drive and a pile of disks and doing backups to them from windows 95 or whatever led the admin assistant to believe she had made a backup when she'd actually wiped everything clean as a whistle. Leperflesh fucked around with this message at 22:44 on May 11, 2023 |
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May 11, 2023 22:42
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eschaton posted:that’s not ancient though, that’s practically yesterday, just plug it into a FireWire adapter and go That does not work, alas. I think it's some Sony-specific iteration on the standard firewire implementation. My stepdad was trying to use this to get an add-on card to work but without success: https://www.studio1productions.com/Articles/Firewire-1.htm Windows 11 didn't support it (nor do I have a port anyway) and https://www.sony.com/electronics/support/articles/00022457 this poo poo doesn't work, the camera doesn't recognize it's plugged in to anything, no video out happens There's a pretty good chance the camcorder is broken in some way, too. Sony DCR-TRV19 is the model, I guess they were selling it as recently as 8 years ago on amazon which is impressive because my stepdad was making recordings with it in 1999. But the phillips works so that's what I'm doing Leperflesh fucked around with this message at 16:49 on May 12, 2023 |
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May 12, 2023 16:33
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