echinopsis posted:

that one time I tied to used a fit bit but it told me i was too fat for it to measure my pulse thru three inches of salty saturated fat

Silver Alicorn posted:

I used a dialup modem in 2006

rotor posted:

echinopsis posted:

we still use faxes all the fuckin time and later this year laws come into effect that ban the transmission of prescriptions from faxes, well to be clearer they won’t be able to be used as a legal prescription anymore I don’t think they could ban that it happens altogether. the fax itself won’t go away, faxing is incredibly convenient for certain tasks

Shaggar posted:

its more that they don't want to spend the time to enforce TLS on their email when the faxing works right now.

rotor posted:

faxes are great because I can draw a picture of a butt and fax it to my friend dave at work and then call him and tell him I sent him a fax and he has to go to the fax machine and pick up the picture of the butt that's been sitting there for an hour where everyone can see it and it's got "HEY DAVE CHECK OUT THIS rear end" written on it

Shaggar posted:

also, for maximum authenticity, send it to the wrong number a couple times first

Silver Alicorn posted:

i've always wondered why they never show off products/services with oiled up male bodybuilders. i'd turn out for that

eschaton posted:

it makes some of the people whose both it is feel kinda funny in ways they can’t put their finger on

Beamed posted:

my bitter bi rival posted:

remember having a job? lol good times

Bloody posted:

alcohol 120%

Notorious b.s.d. posted:

nero burning rom

`Nemesis posted:

CD and/or DVD drives where you had to put the disc in a cartridge first and then load the cartridge into the drive.

Silver Alicorn posted:

remember when the main feature goal for cell phones was making them smaller and this thing took the cake

PIZZA.BAT posted:

rotor posted:

speaking of quark has anyone mentioned Kai's Power Tools or whatever it was?

Jim Silly-Balls posted:

I was looking for something in my basement the other night and came across this big thicc monstrosity. Its a Toshiba T3200SX and its a "portable", really a "luggable" 386 and was my first "laptop" ever. I have great memories of playing Commander Keen on this and writing Turbo Pascal assignments with it for high school. Released in 1989 and being a 386, it was pretty ancient by the time I was in high school in the mid 90's, but actual laptops of the time were wildly expensive and way out of my reach. I can recall going to a classmate's house to work on a programming assignment and while he tapped away on his shiny new Pentium desktop, I sat on the floor (near an outlet of course) with this thing, writing terrible Pascal code and slowly roasting my lap. I loved it though, because I could just pick it up and move, which was a real game-changer during a time when actual laptops were only for business executives and smartphones were a decade or more away.





It had a whopping 80mb hard drive, if I recall, which I remember being loud as hell in the 90s and I was pretty sure it doesn't work today.



Look at all that expansion!!! More than anyone could possibly ever need (just like 640k of RAM). That plate on the back labeled EXP is for expansion, but not in the way you'd think (more on that later)



More options! A floppy drive! A PS2 port! Switchable printer ports! WELCOME TO THE FUTURE!! Also a reset button for some reason, despite the power button being easily accessible on the back and the reset button requiring something thin to poke in there



The actual expansion slots. Currently filled with more serial and parallel ports and a USR Sportster modem. That EXP plate on the back that I mentioned a couple of posts up? When you remove that, its how you get these cards out, they sort of pop up out of the ISA slots and out through that plate. Obviously you're quite limited by the space available in all axes, but this did mean you could do things like put a dedicated graphics card or ethernet card in. Mid 90's Jim Silly-Balls had no practical use for ethernet and dutifully used the USR Sportster to get on the internet.



Let's fire it up and see what happens! Oh, dead battery, of course

I forgot to mention that this is a gas plasma display. Red/Amber/Orange only. Despite being monochrome it's sharper and has better contrast and less ghosting than comparable LCDs of the time. Anyone stuck using an LCD in the late 80's/early 90's when this was made knows how terrible they are.



A quick trip to the BIOS where you can literally only set the date and the hard drive specs, and it boots!! Mercifully it has the factory hard drive, whos values are preprogrammed into the BIOS, because there is no way in hell I could figure out sectors and platters and whatnot anymore in 2020. I used to know that stuff like the back of my hand.





Let's see what's on the hard drive. Commander Keen of course!! Loved that game back in the day. I did also see the Turbo Pascal IDE and compiler in the C:\ drive as well. This thing is literally a time capsule into my highschool computer life. As you can see the gas plasma display acts like a CRT and has a refresh rate that gets picked up by the camera



It also has Windows 3.1..........



Which immediately crapped out and required a reboot. Oh well, let's try again and hook up the RADIO SHACK SERIAL MOUSE (hell yeah) this time.



First things first, live that Hotdog Stand life.



Hmm it appears that monochrome red gas plasma displays are immune to the powers of Hotdog Stand



Lets see what else is installed. mIRC! Unregistered, naturally. Set to connect to irc01.irc.aol.com. I completely forgot you could even connect to AOL chat rooms with a regular IRC client? Thats ~9 0 ' s I n t e r n e t S e c u r i t y~ for you



Also a thing called WinProbe? I don't remember this at all, but its apparently a monitoring program of some sort? I guess for when you're trying to squeeze every ounce of performance from your 386?



Lets see what the screensaver is. I guess I must have caught some poo poo for this machine back in the day, as the screensaver is set to marquee and it says "Hey, don't laugh, it gets on the internet!!!!". Fantastic



Aaaaaaand, I set a password on it because that's ~9 0 ' s I n t e r n e t S e c u r i t y~ for you. I have no clue what I would have used back then. Owned. Oh well.



Looking at the bottom of the machine reveals the best feature I forgot it had! THE HANDLE! Hell yeah. This thing had a cloth case, which was good because you had to tote the power cable around and a phone cable and usually an RJ11 gender changer and a bunch of bullshit to make it work like floppies and whatever back in the day, but when you had it out of the case it was nice to use the handle because man is this thing heavy.



Also it has a decidedly non-kensington lock on it that looks like it probably is just for a straight up padlock and also adult me realizes it would probably make a great bottle opener, since its steel and heavily anchored to the chassis. Teenage me did not realize this as my drinking was limited to clear alcohol that I could refill with water after I stole it from my parents.

Anyway, thanks for reliving my terrible high school computing memories with me!

eschaton posted:

Citrix