I have a vivid memory of driving back with my family from...something, dunno what...at night, when I was maybe 12 or 13, and the radio was on a classical station, playing Rhapsody in Blue...had something of an effect on me.
Also, I just made an important discovery. Years ago, we had a PCjr, and I remember playing with the PCjr Sampler disc and wondering what the song that played at the beginning was, since it was stuck in my head for ages afterward. Problem is, we don't have a jr anymore and that disc has been lost for well over 20 years!
Well, enter YouTube. LGR did a review of the PCjr, and the Sampler's startup song is included. It turns out it's a 76489/AY-3-8910 version of the very beginning of Rhapsody in Blue, a song I didn't know in 1990.
hahaha, you had one of these too? The PCjr was our first computer. I was hacking into the community college BBS with that damn thing.
Complete piece of shit hardware platform, unless you played Sierra adventure games like King's Quest. Then it was the bee's knees. It was the closest thing to a decent "gaming" platform that the wasn't an 8-bit for at least a few years. Also, if you knew what you were doing, it was upgradeable enough to handle a 20MB HD and Windows 3.0.
Forsythe: We had two of 'em, actually, and we lived with PCjr video and 128K RAM from 1990 until 1992, when we got a Sanyo portable with a whopping 256K on-board at a rummage sale. We hacked that thing to bits, too, since the BIOS wasn't quite IBM-compatible even though the hardware was (putting in a Phoenix BIOS from another XT motherboard fixed a lot of the weird problems it had) and it had weird, non-standard Chinon floppies in it.
Also, I just opened my mom's TiVo Slide Remote to fix a problem with it, and I noticed two things:
The CPU board isn't screwed down, just friction-fit with a 2 mm-pitch Berg header and a foam spacer. I imagine the case is supposed to hold it together, but it will work its way loose if it's jostled too much—and, being a remote, that will happen eventually. :P
The CPU itself is a Broadcom BCM2042 Bluetooth keyboard/mouse scanner. There's no other chips in it. Amazing.
The Price is Right is fun to watch, and I imagine it's fun to play if you're actually at Television City attending a taping, but the verisimilitude really isn't working for me here. It needs to be more abstract.
You are the end result of a “would you push the button” prompt where the prompt was “you have unlimited godlike powers but you appear to all and sundry to be an impetuous child” – Zero, 2022
Now I'm thinking about the Who Wants to Be a Millionaire Windows game from like 10 years ago. It had voiceovers by Regis Philbin, but he never appeared on screen because the developers couldn't be arsed to animate him.
It has this Easter egg, of sorts...at the beginning, you had to type in the player's name so it could appear on the novelty checks later in the game. If you typed "Regis" or "Regis Philbin", Regis would make a smartass comment, backspace it, and enter in something like "Impostor" or "SoNotRegis".
Wow, this truly ancient (1984) issue of PC Mag actually has plans for building stuff in it, with schematics and everything. One project even uses at least one chip that's no longer in production (and whose days were numbered in 1984, actually, given that it was meant for LED desk calculators and LCD was there to stay by then).
You are the end result of a “would you push the button” prompt where the prompt was “you have unlimited godlike powers but you appear to all and sundry to be an impetuous child” – Zero, 2022
I used to feel "cheated" that by the time I was born, LCDs had displaced LEDs in things like calculators and wristwatches...I find LEDs more visually appealing, though I understand they consume more power and aren't especially well-suited for those applications.
Unrelated, but mindleap: I noticed the 2012 Furbys have LCD eyes. It's like they looked at the originals and thought "how can we make this even creepier?"
Yeah, pretty much the only things you're going to see LEDs in are mains-powered clocks (I have three of 'em staring at me now, actually) and LED backlights running off a lithium-ion battery. The bio-dad had a TI-30 calculator, and it would show odd patterns on its micro-LED panel while it was "thinking", even though it was based on a 4-bit CPU and not the bit-serial madness of the 1960s.
You are the end result of a “would you push the button” prompt where the prompt was “you have unlimited godlike powers but you appear to all and sundry to be an impetuous child” – Zero, 2022
You know, I never thought about it before, but it seems like clock radios and standalone alarm clocks tend to have red LED displays, while clocks on appliances (stoves, microwaves, etc.) tend to have green LEDs. I wonder if there's anything to that.
CA: Aesthetics, maybe: I know that the last two LED alarm clocks I've gotten have been green. Also, the LED panel on my DVD/VCR combo is green, and the one on my cable box is amber.
You are the end result of a “would you push the button” prompt where the prompt was “you have unlimited godlike powers but you appear to all and sundry to be an impetuous child” – Zero, 2022
Huh, I haven't looked at many recent alarm clocks, now that I think about it...I have one with red LEDs here but it's from 1995 or 1997...
I know our old cable boxes (from 2000 or so) had amber LED panels, and our current ones have an obnoxiously bright, almost unreadable blue.
I'm trying to think about our old VCRs, but I think they all had VFDs...
All of our VCRs practically ever had VFDs, with LED for a few key things like the power light. The first VCR I ever got that didn't have a clock on the front was a cheap Funai thing I got in 2001...it just had status LEDs.
We even once had a Panasonic PV-1330K with a relative rarity in it: A Futaba direct-view VFD, with the phosphors on the viewed side like a CRT and the filaments on the back (the exact reverse of a typical VFD).
You are the end result of a “would you push the button” prompt where the prompt was “you have unlimited godlike powers but you appear to all and sundry to be an impetuous child” – Zero, 2022
(03:30:08 AM) Solstace: "Oregon Scientific projection clocks use a red LED for the projection display. This redcolor does not dilate the your eyes--making it is easy to go back to sleep." <- Oh hey.
(03:31:03 AM) Solstace: There you go, CA, dilemma solved.
There are no more barriers to cross. All I have in common with the uncontrollable and the insane, the vicious and the evil, all the mayhem I have caused and my utter indifference toward it I have now surpassed. My pain is constant and sharp, and I do not hope for a better world for anyone. In fact, I want my pain to be inflicted on others. I want no one to escape. But even after admitting this, there is no catharsis; my punishment continues to elude me, and I gain no deeper knowledge of myself. No new knowledge can be extracted from my telling. This confession has meant nothing.
You are the end result of a “would you push the button” prompt where the prompt was “you have unlimited godlike powers but you appear to all and sundry to be an impetuous child” – Zero, 2022
The fact that we have only one thread tagged "greed" is mildly disappointing
Anyway, rememebr that Sanyo portable PC I mentioned several posts back? Here's a review of it from 1985. They even mention how the drives are custom...
The computer I had during my first (and, so far, only) year of college: an IBM PC 350. I had the cheaper 75 MHz model and still ended up paying too much for it.
"Globalyst" is the worst name for a computer range I've ever heard. It's way too "crunchtastic". I have this vision of the computers being used by the same sort of smiling dorks that were in their "talking about nothing in particular" ads back in the 1980s. (AT&T was never that good at selling PCs anyway, and after NCR was spun back out in 1996, they stopped bothering except for ad-hoc point-of-sale gear.)
The list is a complete trainwreck. (*It's also entry-level as fuck, but that's besides the point*)
Madonna? Deadmau5? Some faceless Gabber compilation? Bangarang?
And there are some one that, while good, still shouldn't be on a best of list (*Tranceport, Sound Of Silver, You've Come A Long Way Baby*)
Meanwhile, they've left off essential albums like Timeless, Tri Repetae, Songs About My Cats, Attack Decay Sustain Release, Kill Sound Before Sound Kills You.....
Continuing my earlier post: It seems like 1995!John Dvorak had an uncanny gift for accurately predicting the future as of now, then declaring it so silly that it couldn't possibly happen, not ever. Pretty much anything he says about "portable Web terminals" and what we'd now call cloud computing is
spot on;
laughed off as a pipe dream cooked up after Larry Ellison did too much blow, or something.
And then I read that issue's Inside Track (his gossip/rant column), on the very next page, and he accurately predicts the dot-com bubble. IN 1995. God damn, son.
The list is a complete trainwreck. (*It's also entry-level as fuck, but that's besides the point*)
Madonna? Deadmau5? Some faceless Gabber compilation? Bangarang?
And there are some one that, while good, still shouldn't be on a best of list (*Tranceport, Sound Of Silver, You've Come A Long Way Baby*)
Meanwhile, they've left off essential albums like Timeless, Tri Repetae, Songs About My Cats, Attack Decay Sustain Release, Kill Sound Before Sound Kills You.....
>expecting Rolling Stone to have heard any electronic music in the past 20 years.
And now I'm looking through PC Mag's 1997 Best of the Web, and a surprising number of the sites mentioned still exist. The first one they mention is, of course, Amazon.
JZ: Pretty much every place has some place you can take unwanted electronics to. I know some stores will even take them back in a pinch. Check with your county's recycling people first.
Comments
You needed TKT
uncontrollable and the insane, the vicious and the evil, all the mayhem I
have caused and my utter indifference toward it I have now surpassed.
My pain is constant and sharp, and I do not hope for a better world for
anyone. In fact, I want my pain to be inflicted on others. I want no one
to escape. But even after admitting this, there is no catharsis; my
punishment continues to elude me, and I gain no deeper knowledge of
myself. No new knowledge can be extracted from my telling. This
confession has meant nothing.
i get so angry sometimes i just punch plankton --Klinotaxis
http://www.rollingstone.com/music/lists/the-30-greatest-edm-albums-of-all-time-20120802
Thank you for reconfirming your utter retardedness.
And how does a website have a mental disorder?
Madonna? Deadmau5? Some faceless Gabber compilation? Bangarang?
And there are some one that, while good, still shouldn't be on a best of list (*Tranceport, Sound Of Silver, You've Come A Long Way Baby*)
Meanwhile, they've left off essential albums like Timeless, Tri Repetae, Songs About My Cats, Attack Decay Sustain Release, Kill Sound Before Sound Kills You.....
>expecting Rolling Stone to have heard any electronic music in the past 20 years.