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A Little Laugh from Aged Tech
emnmnme
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
With the rate technology is doubling, I figure that in 20 years our progeny will be making fun of our old timey tech the same way we mock 8 Tracks and black and white TV sets. So let's not waste these good ol' days now; let's get our kicks in before twenty years passes us by. Post anything related to pioneering technology that looks silly today. NASA computers being outmuscled by TI-86 calculators, IBM computers costing thousands of dollars for 64K memory, overpriced Atari games, a $700 3DO, etc. These things were powerhouses at their height but now we can't help but snicker a little.
What can you buy today for $8500?
I'm especially impressed by the 'ooohs' and 'aaahs' from the crowd when the Apple starts speaking.
Faithful recreation of arcade graphics? What's an arcade?
What can you buy today for $8500?
I'm especially impressed by the 'ooohs' and 'aaahs' from the crowd when the Apple starts speaking.
Faithful recreation of arcade graphics? What's an arcade?
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NASA's computers are so weak because they have to survive exposure to cosmic radiation. It's not the march of technology so much as the huge problem the lack of a giant magnetic shield around the computer.
Whippersnapper.
What about all those stories about computers that filled rooms in the early 70s at the Johnson Space Center?
It's possible, I don't know the specifics about any of those specs. I just know the space borne electronics are primitive for a damn good reason.
There's a large debate on the Lemon64 site about whether or not the shuttle still uses the Commodore 64. I think the power requirements make it a ridiculous claim.
Nothing's forgotten, nothing is ever forgotten
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_Guidance_Computer
As for the 1984 Macintosh unveiling...that WAS a big deal. Sure, computer voice had been done for a long time, but this was on a consumer machine for the home market. A tiny little box...
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8-bit machines were producing speech long before the Mac... obviously not as clear, though.
Nothing's forgotten, nothing is ever forgotten
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J2jRuh1bAxw&mode=related&search=
And, my god, how did kids play video games back then?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=phV1bV1aHeE
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vj-08eYywgI
The orbiters do not, in fact, use Commodore 64s. In the beginning, the GPCs (General Purpose Computers) were IBM AP-101, which were 32-bit computers. Magnetic core memory (424Kb, no, that's no typo), 400k processes/second, software loaded from those retro magnetic tapes. In the 1990s, during tech overhauls, the GPCs were replaced with IBM AP-101S's which had 3 times the memory and processing speed and dropped the magnetic core memory.
The software used during flight (if you've ever seen simulator or mission footage) shows a lot of green on black text/basic graphics, which can imply a C64-type system, I guess. The software is, of course, written by NASA. Can't trust Microsoft or Apple or Linux with such things. The screens are actually fairly easy to read/interpret at a glance, and navigation between screens is a simple matter of a very few keystrokes. There's 5 displays that all display various screens, and two small keypads can control the whole she-bang, since the only screen/computer that accepts commands is Display 0 (middle). Need to powerup APUs (Auxillary Power Units)? Bring up Spec (specification, ie: Screen) 78 on display 0, type in the commands to power up the APUs (after the appropriate switches are thrown, of course).
Now, you need to manipulate the orbiter attitude from the MNVR EXEC (Spec 1042) screen, but still want to keep an eye on those APUs? Disp 1 Spec 78 is the command to change Display 1 (top left) to the APU screen. Now the APU screen is in two places. Spec 1042 will then change Display 0 to the new screen, and allow you to manipulate it.
It's a deceptively simple system, and while your gaming computer might out process it, and certainly beats it in graphics quality and other such areas, the orbiter computers are damn good at what they do, and don't really need to be any better.
Truth. I suppose this rumour came from the fact that the 6502 is in use on Hubble, as it is a very well-known and reliable chip, with all of it's bugs and flaws mapped. The guy arguing that the C64 is, in fact, on board the shuttle, is an idiot anyway.
Nothing's forgotten, nothing is ever forgotten
Off the top of my head, no. I could look into it though. I've just had to teach Orbiter and Shuttle systems to kids for almost 3 years, and enough of them ask technical questions that I picked up a lot about it.
I've also worked with some simulators. Most of my software knowledge is on a purely practical/know-how-to-use it level though.
[Edit] What I mean is, I could tell you about the glitches they experianced and the troubleshooting process and what came of it, but I don't know anything at all about the guidance computers on the ISS[/edit]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jgT8279DVGQ
Well, back in the day that was the friggin' tip top high level consumer-grade tech.
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And, at the time, high res graphics.
Holy shit, Steve Jobs was young?
EDIT: to be fair, this was recored in Jan '84, which was before I was born.
I played the shit out of that weirdly-shaped Ninja Turtles handheld: http://www.retrogames.co.uk/stock/assets/images/HH_-_Teenage_mutant_ninja_turtles.jpg
They were good for kids who didn't have a Game Boy/Gear.
Yes!
That, folks, is a Commodore SX-64, which was the world's first portable computer. And that's a cartridge sticking out on the top.
Nothing's forgotten, nothing is ever forgotten
I used to think pinball would last forever. They were my favourite machines at arcades. And now... now they're so hard to find.
I... I don't want to talk about it!
...is that a Simon's Basic cartridge?
Nothing's forgotten, nothing is ever forgotten
I still do not own a C64 disk drive to this day.
Cassettes? You mean like cassette tapes, the things that came before CDs?
j/k :P
Newsflash: Most people today see the PlayStation 3 as a toy.
Edit: If I had paid more attention, I would've realized this was from a PC, not a game console.
Still, it's a stupid remark to make. This was state of the art consumer technology for the time.
Hell, I think it outperforms the first computer my family owned (which was a no-name IBM-PC XT compatible with an 8088 processor, 640KB of RAM and a 32MB hard disk).
I remember my parents being so impressed with it that we had a speaker upstairs wired to the basement computer to play those awful pre-midi tunes on loops during the holidays. I have never regretted writing a program as much as that in my life.
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Quite. They were supposedly hell on earth to use.
Still, I would kill for access to one, just for the nostalgia factor.
Friend of mine had both cassette and cartridge drives for his C64.
Anyone else remember Donald Duck's playground? I used to play that game for HOURS.
I miss Sierra. So many wonderful companies of years past gone, never to return.
I had a cassette drive for my Atari 1200 XL (OMG), and it wasn't so bad. I don't know about the C64 issues that there might have been, but the one real complaint I had was how damned long it would take a game to load. The funny thing is though, I was in like 2nd grade and was interested in interviewing someone for a game program article I was writing for a school magazine thing my class was making. The funny as hell thing is that all the games I had for the thing had the name, address and phone number of the game maker printed in the manual. I must have just drove the poor guy nuts seeing as how I was like 7. What a very damned different time in gaming
Sierra is still around. :P
No. No they aren't.
The Gameline Modem, for the Atari 2600. Also known as:
From wikipedia:
They're making Spyro games now. :P
?
I believe the implication is that the Sierra we all knew and loved was brutally murdered some time ago, and what you see now is a horrible brain eating zombie Sierra that produces mostly crap.