In my first job out of college I was a file clerk at a bank. I helped put lots of their files onto Microfiche. The wave of the future.
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I love microfiche!
How else could I read about Kitchenerâs advance on Khartoum from the London Times?
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And so long as 17th century level glassmaking technology exists, it can be read. Beat that SD cards!
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grrr.
let the mac eject the disk for youâŚ
drag the disk into the trash
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Till it doesnât because itâs powered off or the OS is not responding.
(It always seemed to me to be an unfortunate metaphor too, as most naive users would surely think this deleted the disk contents. Well, my wife did.)
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I imagine that happened more often in 1986 or whenever it was.
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Every freaking time.
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I love this guyâs channel. Itâs taught me about so much weird and wonderful tech I had never heard of before.
I was big into LD in the mid 1990s before DVD was a thing and LDs were plentiful (both new in stores and used on the secondary market.) I could buy entire collections from folks selling them over Usenet for cheap. (Itâs actually amazing how much crap I bought over Usenet and didnât ever get ripped off. And this was before things like PayPal so I really was taking a gamble every time any time I mailed somebody a check or on rare occasion cash for some goods.)
I watched this video with much anticipation only to be reminded that for the most part LD quality was actually pretty crap and the media itself sucked (big, bulky, delicate, and pervasive disc rot).
The nice thing about LD was that most films preserved their original aspect ratio and being a film snob this was very important to me.
I sure wish I had kept my Star Wars OT LDs though.
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During my formative years, I was a fixture on many of the SF area BBSs in the mid 1990s. (Not The Well, though. I was a young teenager with a hand me down computer and 1200 baud from a family friend with no money to âpay to playâ.)
I made many lasting friends and relationships thanks in large part to the time spent in these virtual communities.
If you have 5 hours to kill, you should watch this:
(I was fortunate enough to get the box set back when it was being sold.)
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I ran one of these once upon a time.
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I ran several out of my bedroom with a variety of software for fun. My favorite to run was Renegade if I recall correctly. It was just so damn easy. Of course everything worked with WWIV.
I was much more of a user though, preferring to sysop other peopleâs BBSes rather than running my own.
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If they were easy then, why are they so hard now?
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I donât even know that itâs hard - itâs just very esoteric. Definitely a lost art.
You could certainly set up a telnet or SSH based front end to a virtual modem backed by old DOS-based BBS software running in a VM (or go completely home brew).
Few would put forth the effort.
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the teen-aged girl next door that watched me after school had a Colecovision in her den with Zaxxon and Donkey Kong.
Colecovision was really the best OG console, their graphics were exactly the same as the arcade.
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Attack surface
Presence of large numbers of criminals online
User expectations
Off the top of my head.
I can remember years ago having to come to grips with things like 4chan in seeking to understand the attacks being made on our webserver. Script kiddies were rampant in the late 1990s. There was of course the mild amusement of watching them try Windows attacks on a Linux box, but it took up far too much of my time till ISPs started to get their act together.
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the other place is running a post on the internetâs âfirstâ viral video which was disproved immediately in the comments. I remarked that we waited for Santa vs Jesus to load seemingly longer than it took to actually watch the video. I remember being annoyed but ambivalent about the quality and aliasing, which, having never seen internet video before, was unexpected and really weird-looking.
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I had a friend who set up a BBS in the dorm room (back when every room had its own phone) and wasnât it nice of the campus to include such fancy features as Call Waiting.
It took him a solid month to track someone down who could figure out how to disable call waiting on his room so he could host a BBS that wasnât getting knocked off line anytime some called the room.
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I still listen to those tapes! They sound like raucous bursts of pulses, I love them!
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Hmmm, reminds me of these:
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