Olds go nostalgic for the good old days of tech

fright-night-1985-w-roddy-mcdowall-and-william-ragsdale

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As am I, and I also remember the consequences of plugging the wrong peripheral into the wrong port.

@RAvery of all the boneheaded design decisions Apple has made through the years, using a freaking RJ-11 connector for the keyboard has to be right up there in the top 10.

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(image not mine)

Sega CD ↔ Genesis/Mega Drive → 32X → XBand → Game Genie → Sonic & Knuckles → Sonic 3

The funny thing is I think this cursed stack of peripherals would actually still be functional.

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In their defense, they intended it to be familiar and unintimidating.

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image

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Been a while since I saw a Centronics SCSI terminator. That’s for damn sure. And that takes me back to the dark days of having to think about things like SCSI termination.

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Came on those guys:

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NGL, that’s a lovely looking connector.

ETA:

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You could just plug plugs into plugs until you had all your peripherals connected to your computer via one terminal. I found this rather convenient.

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I found it funny years ago when I had to get a USB to GPIB connector to connect an ancient HP 3070 circuit card tester (with flying probe!) to a WIN7 laptop. I had this stack of GPIBs connected to just one USB adapter, and it worked fine

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782a14b587c47fc72e23ef2d098e8136e8bc8db7 (1)

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We didn’t have a mouse four our Apple ][, so we used a joystick for anything that would normally use a mouse for. Not that there were too many pieces of software that needed one back then, of course.

I couldn’t find a picture of the one that we had, in no small part because I couldn’t remember what make and model it was, but here’s a pretty close approximation:

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Ours had a black plastic bat on the stick, and the buttons were both red and taller, mounted on top of the case rather than set into it. I think it had rounded corners as well.

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Choplifter! ? (Or did it use the keyboard? It’s been a while.)

Anyway, I remember remember joysticks very much like this, and instructions/kits to build some based on the analogue joysticks for RC models, with a handful of electronics thrown in to convert the signals from the potentiometers into something the machine could digest.

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Spot old friends and mythical machines greybeards wax lyrically about!

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Sorry, I may not have stated that clearly enough. Plenty of games used joysticks on the Apple ][, but very few used (or at least that I experienced) mice and pointers. For those, we would use the joystick instead. In particular, I remember Fantavision and Publish It! as having interfaces that would benefit from a mouse.

Also, I neglected to mention that the joystick was connected directly to a socket on the motherboard via a ribbon cable that went through one of the ventilation gaps in the case, if I recall correctly.

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I learned from this video that apparently they do not have weather warning sirens in the Seattle area.

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