The collected works of scottE - Page 1

RageX wrote: Yeah don't trust the seller, he doesn't know anything. It would appear to have 1 IR2 pipe and 1 node board, I'd assume low spec, which would mean 2GB or less memory and an MSCSI card, plus what looks to be all the cables and a big scuff on the upper skin.

At this point ($130 bid) it would make sense to bid on the government auction instead of eBay.

Also like to add that there are 3 more Onyx systems on that government auction site:

http://cgi.govliquidation.com/auction/view?id=749102

For anyone near Alabama these could be quite a find ...

Right.

Also, I received this notice from the seller on eBay:

unfortunately this item has become unavailable and therefore will not be sold. Please do not bid

Very odd.

thegoldbug wrote: Thanks for the heads-up. I never got any email replys from seller but then maybe they haven't checked their email today.

It's all yours. I haven't bid and won't.

thegoldbug

Doubtful. I only emailed after you posted. Very odd.

If I want the use V8 gfx with 12-bits per component in mind, which CRT display would be best? (Also, any recommendations for a good place to buy it?)

(I don't see LCD displays being as viable (as in cost and colorspace), but I'm open to all options, really).

Well, after all that (which I will copy for future reference), I wound up acquiring a Dell(Trinitron) Ultrascan P991 CRT in excellent condition.

For free! (Thereby allowing me to invest in some fiber channel stuff).

So yeah. 1900x1200 is pretty spiff, and no flicker issues (as the V8s are wont to have).

mapesdhs wrote: Loads. Hours and hours. I intend to capture & digitise all of them eventually. Quick check... must have about 35 vids
overall, from SGI & AliasWavefront demos through to system installation & training videos for Challenge/Onyx/Origin/etc.

Ian.

! Say, you wouldn't happen to have an Alias|Wavefront promotional video for A|W's product line (includes PowerAnimator--7? 8? Can't remember) which includes interviews with Richard Edlund (Boss Film Studios), folk from DreamQuest and VIFX, would you? My copy is long gone, and I mourn that loss quite a bit.

It was a pretty distinctive tape. Had some mariachi music set to some wind-up Godzilla toys near the end, as well as the obligatory clips from vfx films scattered throughout (Casper, Species, and pretty much everything made up to that point).

mapesdhs wrote: I have their later demo videos aswell.

Ian.

Thank god for archivists.

ClassicHasClass: Did you ever acquire cabling for your Indy presenter? I have two if you'd like them (and a presenter board and a presenter itself, though I recall it may have an issue with weird striping running vertically). But if you just need the cables, that's ok.

Hm. All I get is a 404.

vishnu wrote: You can still get it here: http://davy.nyacom.net/oct/

Keen! Thanks. I was able to download it, and am now working on trying to get it to work. (For some reason, just putting the file with the rest of the screensavers doesn't actually work in Mountain Lion.)

So, it seems there's an at least an occasional issue with using an Octane compression board on a system with more than a certain amount a RAM (one GB?); the system it's installed in currently has 2 GB. (Though sometimes it works, sometimes it just stops everything.)

Since it's not possible to just turn off banks o' DIMMs (per viewtopic.php?f=3&t=16728287 ), is it possible to constrain how much ram is available to a command (dmrecord &c.) invoked from the shell? Or does this just not matter?

(Why not just physically remove the RAM? It's a pain. And I really have nowhere safe to put it. And I think I really need to squeeze all of the toys into one single physical box, simplify my life into that, and call it good. Right now, I've got capabilities spread between basically two boxes, and I'd like to consolidate. If possible.)

I'd nearly to completely forgotten about that thread (and I was a participant! awkward); I'll have to check both boxes when I get back. It really would be nice to get back to dubbing laserdiscs again, even if it is a pain to have to replace a bunch of RAM. (Also on the list of hardware needs: a player. The old one died a while back.)

I suppose if push comes to shove, I could just rely on the O2 ( Pholidosaur ) for dub work.

guardian452 wrote: What? No love at all?

http://www.apple.com/30-years/

My favourites: Theodore Gray and Tinker Hatfield.

Sorry. I was busy. Migraine. Better now.

My faves: those Myst guys. Love that game (and the 1997 sequel).

I'm kind of a latecomer to the Mac. I didn't really start using one until 1989. And I didn't actually really start actually enjoying 'em until 1991. It's a platform with its ups and downs, but I still maintained at least one Macintosh in use since then. Except maybe between 2000 and 2002.

Coool. And that's the ideal interface (or near enough): minimal without confusing icons.

hamei wrote:

nekonoko wrote: (and IR3 blew the doors off of V12).

Ha ! Should have kept your mouth shut, now I'm going to bother you !

In what way ? This is not just an intellectual exercise : I can go with 4 V12's or try to get IR shovelled into 4 dvi connectors. Both methods have advantages / disadvantages. But the thing you can't tell without real-world experience is, how do IR and VPro graphics compare in use ?

I am very interested in this product and/or service as well. (Though in my case, it is purely intellectual.)

guardian452 wrote: You're a latecomer? I was only born in 1988! And my first would have been a performa 6400 that I bought at a yardsale for $50 in 2002 or so.


Believe it or not, I've never played Myst. It's now high on my to-do list

Yep. I'm old.

Myst: made entirely on the Mac (and made with Hypercard in-house at Cyan). Riven: made with both Macs with all the graphics being done on the SGI (Softimage, MentalRay, and some custom shader stuff for MR [I think lume.com might still be active for examples]). Some of the puzzles are more basic (and less in the vein of logical obstacles and more "Hey look! A puzzle!") than Riven, but it was pretty eye-opening for me at the time. Riven remains my favorite of the sequels. I have to admit I never got around to playing Uru or 4 or 5, though. Myst and Riven are also available for iOS.

duck wrote: No, I'm pretty sure it was modeled and programmed on macs, hence the quicktime dependency. ISTR they built their own software to model the entire first island in one go which was a big deal at the time, presumably given the memory constraints.

Strata Studio for Macintosh, actually. Myst's needs were comparatively more modest than Riven's (which had something like 3-hour load times for some of the islands). Still, pretty impressive.

Yet another edit: On Myst, they also used Macromodel for Mac, which eventually became Extreme3D.

I might be slightly obsessed with those games. They also may have sort of helped me get through a rough patch of my life back in the day.

Escapism! Enabling me to deal with reality since mumble day or other.

duck wrote: scottE: I stand corrected

I am filled with the power of exasperating pedantry.

ClassicHasClass wrote: The first Mac I ever touched was a Mac Plus with a 30MB SCSI external hard disk. Our house still had a Commodore 64 and 128 at home, so the Mac at my friend's house was a revelation. We did a lot of HyperCard and games on it.

The first Mac I ever owned was a IIsi in my first year of medical school which I got from a school surplus lot. It also came with some IIgses and an SE/30 which acted as a boot server. From there I rapidly upgraded to (briefly) a 7200 and then a 7300, both cast-offs from my consulting job. I still have that original 7300; it eventually was repurposed to run NetBSD and is now a Mac OS 9 workstation again, in a new case. I also still have the IIsi and SE/30, but they both need recap jobs.

I should probably confess I was an original owner of a Mac IIvx: Trilobite (sans CD-ROM). Not an auspicious start, but I was only writing at the time, it felt like an immense leap from the Smith-Corona manual typewriter. I customized all the icons I could with SuperPaint and ResEdit, and I can't even remember what happened to it after that. (Before that, I had to use Macs on campus.)

Other machines, possibly in order:

• Mac IIsi ( Eurypterid , later given away)
• PowerMac 8500 ( Ammonite +WACOM 12" tablet; with savings earned from the job I quit school for)
• SE/30 (+extra gfx board, used as a server)
• Somehow an LC, then a Quadra700. (Most of these machines went to people I knew, including the 8500, which I sort of miss, even though that thing was a nightmare to upgrade RAM for)
• Numerous other machines followed, mostly as BeOS machines (the desktops, anyway), and a managed a some PPC clones (one of which I still have and should probably send off somewhere else).
• I also managed to inherit a G3 desktop (like the 7500-style cases) somewhere along the line.
• Mac Classic (still have)
• Mac Color Classic—I wish I had this, but it was tossed, even though it worked (I wasn't consulted about the sudden need to un-store it)

Laptops: I had one of the Duos (the later, PPC-based one, forget the details UPDATE: it was the Duo 2300, with the dock), and then a PowerBook 1400 ( Dunkleosteus ) into which I crammed 64MB RAM and a G3 processor upgrade. Still have it, but it's spent no small amount of time in its box in -30° C storage, and the power pod for it frayed from some seriously heavy use. I've probably used that machine more than any other. I've ordered a replacement power cord, so I guess I'll see if it still works once it arrives.

I'd probably still be using the G4 PowerBook ( harryhausen ) had I not dropped it onto asphalt in England in 2009. But mamoru-oshii hasn't been too bad.

I wasn't much of an ipod/iphone person. Consumer electronics aren't really much of a fascination for me, except for the Newton 2100 and eMate300 (which made a nice Vt100 term for the IRIX machines). I've owned one iPod—the video one ( wakazashi ; long since stolen, unlamented), and two iPhones (a 3GS katana , IPhone5S katana2 ; both still in use).

Apple's had an interesting career for the Mac. Here's to 30 more.

josehill wrote: This was neat: a short story, with photos, discussing the discovery and resurrection of two early 5.25" floppy Mac prototypes, aka "Twiggy" Macs. http://www.cultofmac.com/239280/twiggy- ... macintosh/

That is seriously cool. I'd read that the prototype used 5.25 disks, but have never seen photos.

josehill wrote:

ClassicHasClass wrote: The only PPC Duo was the 2300. Those are nice little machines, very collectable.

I am also a huge devotee of the PowerBook 1400.

I have a Duo 270c and a Duo 2300, along with a DuoDock II. When they were new, the Duos drew a lot of attention. There was nothing else on the market nearly as sleek and portable at the time. At our old shop, they found second lives as serial terminal replacements in our data center. Their compact size made them ideal for placement directly in racks.

I also have a PB 1400 - the first laptop I ever purchased. Over the years, I maxed out the RAM, upgraded the hard drive, and added a video card and a Dayna dual coax-RJ ethernet PCMCIA card. Still runs great, dual booting into either MacOS 8.6 or 9.1.

I walked into my freshman year of college carrying an electric typewriter with correctable ribbon and no interest in computers, while my roommate walked in with a brand-new 128k Mac. Later that week, I was publishing our dorm newsletter from our room. By my senior year, I had saved up enough money to buy my first computer, a brand new SE/30 for $3,600. (Some years later, I gave the SE/30 to a friend who wanted a computer for his kid to play with. A few years later, that SE/30 came back to me, upgraded with an Micron Xceed color video card and gray scale adapter and an Apple RGB display. Thanks to a kind Nekochanner, the SE/30 now has 128 MB and has run everything from System 6 to 7.5, and a little A/UX, in between.

Nice! I still have to respect anyone who who laid out newsletters with a typewriter, but there's just something about even dot-matrix printed pages that looks better.

I spent the weekend doing a bit of fiddling with the 1400c; the adaptor arrived, and while the battery is certainly no good anymore, the rest of it seems pretty okay. Screen is nice and bright, too. I put in a 60GB HD that previously lived in someone else's iBook, and it now has an absurd amount of disk space for a 1997-era laptop. I divided the drive into 8 partitions, so I can do what José's done: have an install for 7.6.1, and, if I can find a replacement OS8 cd, set one up for booting into 8.1. I did find a backup CD I made in the late-90s, but copying everything over appears to not make for a very happy OS8 experience. I can only get to the desktop if I hold down the shift key. No doubt something is corrupted. The G3 upgrade inside appears to be 250MHz, according to benchmarking software I found on an old MacAddict CD.

Still! It works. I'm really amazed Classic's 1400 has a working battery. Mine is pretty well toast on ice, with odds of finding a working one about as thin (the extant one is a replacement as it is—I was pretty hard on my stuff, turns out). I now dimly remember that solar array for the 1400. I recall thinking that was pretty neat, but never purchased one myself.

I haven't had the most productive of weekends. I completely pulled apart the contents of the walk-in closet I've got the SGI stuff in; still a disaster, but it looks a bit better now (and I'm considerably more sore). I also set up the aforementioned G3 desktop.

pentium wrote: So a preview for a movie trailer (this is already raising flags for me) came out . It's about 10 seconds long. Most of the scenes were okay, then there's THIS.

imfeelingkindablue.PNG

Yeah, sure, MovieOS is the future and everything has to feel high-tech and stuff but COME ON. At least show a little realism. Even the old one looks a bit more realistic than monkeys using touchscreens in a blue themed.....eugh.

It appears the producers care as much about the computers in the background as they do about the dinosaurs in the foreground.

I don't know if it will flop, but I'll probably wait for the Rifftrax before seeing it. Maybe it's a fine movie, but I'd like to see giraffe-sized azhdarchids stalking around, instead of pterosaurs flying off with humans who weigh more than twice as they. I guess they finally fixed the hands on the raptors, but they still don't have feathers?

Jurassic World has all the innovation of Jurassic Park in 1993, only 22 years late.

This is the sort of thing that seems like it would be historically significant (even if it's just a DIY assembly clone), but I don't know how many were made or if clones like these are necessarily that significant.

Most of the computer museums didn't seem interested in giving me shipping for the thing (which, to be fair, might be high considering its size and weight in box coming from Alaska—just as well, as I now find myself in need of selling some stuff to make rent anyway).

It comes with its box, a manual, and seems complete. Don't know if it works, or if it needs work to work.

So. Ebay? Is there an ideal forum that I should approach collectors? What do you think?

Edited to add this: https://archive.org/stream/byte-magazine-1982-08/1982_08_BYTE_07-08_Logo#page/n321/mode/2up This is basically it.

I'm trying to reacquaint myself with this forum (been away for a bit) and figure out if I can fix an Apple IIGS color monitor.

Also, I appear to have discovered YouTube videos. I like those "My Drunk Kitchen" shows, and some of the retro gaming/computing channels.

Ok. But that raises issues of pricing. What would be fair? I guess I should probably post more images. I'll try to do that later, since I've got a migraine at the moment, and that makes it hard to concentrate.

I literally cannot find any solid information for Pineapples . Near as I can tell, this thing is a ghost.

If it is, it's got a pretty nice badge on the chassis.

Since I can't be a member of the Crimson club any more, I'd certainly join the fans of clones club. In lieu of dues I could design the logo!

Have you considered just mounting the Unitron board onto plexiglass or something and hang it on the wall? It's a cool piece of history; it should be displayed. Obviously not a solution I can really explore with the Pineapple, since it weighs kind of a lot and is huge.

The only non-Mac Apple II I have ever actually used was the Apple IIGS (currently with a busted CRT—going to try to get it fixed), and I only started messing it with it last year. Neat machine, but I'm probably going to have to part with it and all of it's nifty 16-bit goodness, too. I have two villains I'm currently fighting with: a lack of space, and a serious lack of funds. So I need to unload a few of my old things.

Someone else out there has the resources to properly care for these things, even get use out of them.

Anyway, I'll post a few more photos tomorrow.

Here are a few more of the photos I took before putting it back in the box. The exterior of the box is in rough shape (it was mailed out), but the styrofoam insets are good.

Hero (I should have put a scale bar in there, but I didn't have a meter stick handy):


Papered work :


Box (bit tattered on the outside, but inside, she's got it where it counts):


Badge and Logo detail :


Some innards :

This is incredible this is even partially a thing.

Raion-Fox wrote: I understand the Windows 10 apprehension, I feel the same way about post-Snow Leopard OS X! I'm glad you have positive experiences with Apple.

Oh, I'm not apprehensive . I just dislike it, which pretty much extends to every Windows release. Well, not Windows 2.0, because that was relatively easy to remove. The tool availability might be comparable, but the garage still stinks and that's not ever going to change.

Raion-Fox wrote: I usually park my computer in a docking station and only charge it when not in use so I never have had a particular use for it but I can tell it's a smart idea. Kinda like how Xbox did the inline release trick for their controllers, a modern CD based console would not take well to being yanked out. An N64, man those things are tanks but the Gamecube, Wii and Wii U are glass cannons. You have to be super careful with those.

I assume that's why they made the Wavebird (and later, the Wiimotes). The durability is less of an issue for wireless controllers. But I've also noticed a more "adult" affordance with such devices, which used to be the provenance of much younger hands.

Me too!

Unfortunately, I'm probably not going to be too picky about where it ends up. We need the space/cash pretty badly.

vishnu wrote: Holy freakin' wow, socketed ICs!

Yep! It was apparently a kit.

SiliconClassics wrote: Probably because Autodesk kind of got it backwards with this one - render nodes should be cheap, common machines bought en masse and networked into an inexpensive farm. That's what studios were doing in the late '90s: the actual 3D modeling & animation was created on expensive SGI workstations with fast 3D hardware, then they farmed out the rendering to cheap beige x86 boxes with little to no graphics capability.

Mostly this was true, but it wasn't always the case for smaller studios. I know Cyan, Inc. (makers of Myst/Riven &c.) used an R10k-based SGI Challenge to do rendering on for Riven.

I think it's a matter of if you have it anyway, may as well use what you've got.

So I've managed to bork X windows on my Indy, possibly by following these instructions here , but probably not to the letter.

So when I rebooted Helicoprion , I get the usual screens on startup, and then an unhelpful black frame once it logs into the user account.

I've been … away, so it's hard to remember what I can/should do at this point. So I tried fiddling with sash from the PROM Monitor. But I can't for the life of my figure out how to copy over the edited Xservers file with my backup, made just before I fiddled with stuff.

This would be easier if I could put it on a network, but I cannot in this case. I also do not have access to anything that could function as a dumb terminal (one of the things I was actually trying to do was get the Indy to have cu installed to fulfill that function, but I was distracted before I could get that to work).

So from the stand alone shell it's not:



Or any variation thereof, and help in sash is really useless.

Anyone know how I can fix this?