***Vintage PC Technology Mega Discussion Thread***

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spdragoo

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Not surprising, VCR tech (at least for TV companies) has been around for almost as long as cassette tapes. The technology is basically the same, & I would assume would actually have benefits, given the assumed higher bandwidth (wider tape in a VHS vs. in a cassette tape) & greater storage (VHS tapes could store anywhere from 120 to 360 minutes of video, depending on the quality setting, while cassette tapes were limited to 60, 90 or 120 minutes based on the length of tape inside them).

And I don't know how realistic it was, but I seem to remember Tom Clancy's Red Storm Rising having a scene where the E-3 AWACS had stored the data feed from their radar systems onto VHS tapes; after the live feeds were used to identify fuel truck convoys for air strikes, they "rewound" the data to locate the hidden fuel depots where the trucks had come from. Don't know if they were implying that the data itself was being stored on the tapes, or if they were just recording the visual displays from the radar screens, but I don't see why (with the proper hardware & connectors) you couldn't use a VHS to back up your hard drive. Which is only crazy given that the trend nowadays is to convert those old VHS "home" videos to DVD format (kind of like how people first converted their old 8mm & 16mm home movies onto VHS).
 

USAFRet

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Up until at least the mid 90's, fighter jets captured the HUD screen on video tape. Not exactly VHS, but tape nonetheless.

Yes, I had to review many of these during debrief.
"Dude...you didn't do it right" (the tape don't lie)
 

Pimpom

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What about Zip drives? I never owned one but it was a nice innovation for its time - 100MB in a cartridge the size of a 1.44MB diskette, and much faster. And there was the later 1GB Jazz drive. They didn't get a chance to become mainstream before being eclipsed by the CD. I've never liked optical discs - too fragile and too slow. Thank god for USB flash drives.
 
Zip drive chose the wrong transfer medium to be honest SCSI was on its way out by the time they started and by the time they switched to USB, the deal was off for most people and where already on CDROM and USB thumb-drives. I used one for a long time it wasn't fast to be honest but it was a good way to saved documents, and lots fo casettes became available on ebay :p

know what I miss? a 16" carriage line printer, you know the one that zips back and forth, using pins to print? zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz thunk zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz thunk and you did nifty ascii art with ...
 

g-unit1111

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While on the subject I was watching an episode of Psych the other day. And it involved a character who was murdered by a weatherman. I think there was something about the technology in that episode that was off. So Shawn Spencer explains that there was footage from the green screen recording that was captured on computer and was transferred to tape, and part of the quality got lost in the process. That kind of threw me off there for a few minutes. Like I knew you could transfer something from a VHS tape to a computer, but could you record something from a computer onto a VHS tape? That is the part that doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me. Although I was wondering when I saw the episode, it was recorded in 2013, when most credible TV stations would have ditched their VHS technology and moved to digital anyways, so it probably would have made the whole investigation worthless. :lol:
 

Pimpom

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I haven't seen the movie so I can't comment on whether there could be a plausible reason for transferring the recording to tape, or what tape technology was used. But technically, it should be possible to record the AV output from a computer onto analog tape.
 

Pimpom

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There are many errors in movies. I remember reading in a forum several years ago about a movie in which an IP address was given with numbers much higher than 255.

IMO Sci-Fi movies are the worst offenders. I've seen movies set 3000 years in the future in which they use today's standard PC keyboards! And CDs, cars, ....... And then there are post-apocalypse stories where organized society had broken down for years, yet there's always fuel for beat-up old cars to run around all day.
 

g-unit1111

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Really I would have thought most TV stations would have switched to digital by now.

There are many errors in movies. I remember reading in a forum several years ago about a movie in which an IP address was given with numbers much higher than 255.

Yeah I notice that too. I love when CinemaSins calls this out as the "Internet of things". :lol:

Who wants an Apple Powermac G5. I'm getting one this weekend

Not me, I want an AMD R7-1800X.
 
First Computer (one that I don't usually claim) TS1000. Returned within a couple days of ownership. (Issues reading and writing cassette)

First Computer that I actually claim to own: Tandy Color Computer 2 w/16K and ECB. Used cassettes no issues. Later upgraded to 5.25" floppies and used OS-9 (Microware OS-9, which predates Apple's OS9 by quite a few years... and it multi-tasked on an 8-bit CPU) Later upgraded to the CoCo3.

First Intel type based CPU was a 386SL (or was it a 286?)... and IIRC EGA graphics, eventually upgraded into 486 based CPUs. Used one or two systems that we VL-Bus based (IO and Graphics) (All Intel based was used parts until...)
First NEW MoBo and CPU involved the AMD K6- 233 and a the S3 Verge 3D GPU... GPU died, got a Razer nVidia TNT.... later upgrades moved to An Athlon XP series... later a Sempron... then Phenom II X4 955BE... overclocked it to 3.7 on air and no voltage adjustment. Lastest build is Intel and has given me headaches. (many of these parts are boxed in a closet.)

So, I've experienced 360K floppies (and 156K floppies on the CoCo) 720K floppies, 1.2M floppies and 1.44M floppies, but never 2.88M floppies. I've used Monochrome to Modern graphics too. I remember pre-internet too... using a modem to call a BBS, and later a modem to Alta Vista, or AOL. I've used modems as slow as 300 baud and up to 56k.

I've got a Vic-20 with a broken keyboard, and had a TI-99/4A too. I still got a soft spot for my CoCo though. Oh yeah I got a Mac LC collecting dust and a couple other macs one with a G4, and one with a G5. I've also used original Mac 128s and 512s.

Okay enough history for now.
 


USR still exists, and is still producing modems... and they're almost the only ones left doing it.
 

g-unit1111

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Ha, I remember the late 90s when files were getting bigger but we still had 1.44MB floppy drives and magazines like PC Magazine were calling for larger removable disks, and the only thing they came up with was the ZIP drive which held 100MB, but those disks were about as useless and unreliable as the drives using them. The 64GB flash drive I have now runs circles around a zip disk. :lol:

Someone actually donated a Working Powermac G5 with the PowerPC architecture... The OS has no GUI, just the CLI, but it's still OSX

I miss the Power PC days. My old Powerbook G5 that I got back in like I want to say 2006 still works perfectly fine and has decent battery life. I fired it up the other day and it still works.
 

Rogue Leader

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in 1998 I worked at a small business networking company. We would carry a parallel port Zip drive with a lot of our clients software on it or use it to back up files when re-configuring a machine. It was so damn slow.
 

g-unit1111

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Yeah I was taking graphic design classes at the time and it was required that we had Zip drives on our personal computers because the files were so large. I copied a 75MB Illustrator file to one and it literally took like an hour.
 

Math Geek

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we think of zip drives as slow now, but at the time, they were a wonderful thing to have if you needed the space.

everything looks slow compared to usb 3.0 but consider how long it took to burn a cd with the first 1x burners. over an hour for that 700 mb and it had a 50/50 shot of failing on you. the zip disks were a step up.

also consider how slow internet was back then. you could save directly to the drive as it downloaded since you were barely seeing 25 Kb/s even on a nice university T1 line.
 

Rogue Leader

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The problem was they were slower than CDs, they were like floppy drive speed. So copying 100mb off a CD took a little bit, but copying it off a Zip disk took WAY longer. Think about how long it took to install a game off 1.44mb floppies, then just jack up the time and size.
 

g-unit1111

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It's funny I came across a purchase log for my dad's company from like 1992 and it was crazy how expensive computers were for what you got. I mean now we're used to $2500 getting you dual GTX 1080s and a 7700K or 6850K. But back then $2500 got you a black and white system with a 16MB hard drive and a 1.44MB floppy drive. Zip drives were nice to have back then but even when they first came out they were crazy expensive and unreliable.
 

USAFRet

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Math Geek

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i love the "lightning fast 20 MHz" part of the description. that and all the OS's it says it will run. so much fun back then with all the different options before windows took over. OS/2 was interesting and tinkered with it back then but MS was the way to go even then with DOS.
 

USAFRet

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Still have options today.
Windows, iOS if you work at it, 57 flavors of Linux, Android, etc, etc.

And can run 5 different systems, simultaneously, in a single consumer grade PC box.