I am watching Jumping Jack Flash (1986), look at the old computers.

[texanwitch]

Didn't have color monitors even.

I love this movie.

[MrMickeysMom]

1. Loved that movie, too.

Sort of campy but the story was great with her in that role.

[texanwitch]

2. I am glad this movie is on, I need a laugh.

This movie was made for her, she is great in it.

It is on Encore Action.

[MrMickeysMom]

3. No wonder I couldn't find it...

Don't get that channel...

Hang in there, texanwitch... We live in interesting times. I find that local news is really so bizarre that IT, by ITSELF, causes me to laugh over the insanity.

That's twisted, but sometimes you need a local version of how fucked up it can get to deal with how you deal with it.

[hrmjustin]

4. When i was a kid i used to love that movie. She is a great actress.

[Art_from_Ark]

5. The first PC I ever used

had MS-DOS as its operating system, a black-and-white monitor and big 5-inch floppy disks that had maybe a few hundred kilobytes of memory and were always developing bad "sectors". Interestingly, that was the same year that JJF came out.

[texanwitch]

23. My first computer had the Dos system.

No hard disk drive, just slip in the floppy to get started.

It was Tandy something.

[HopeHoops]

6. Well, we did have color monitors a few years before that (Apple II, C=64 for example),

and I've got several computers that pre-date 1986 (and still work).

I think my favorite "spew beer all over the TV" moment involving computers was from the movie "War Games". The hero of the movie is a "whiz kid" who seems to have no problem accessing military super computers (minor detail, I know), but the funny part is when he's explaining how a modem works. He was using an acoustic coupler (where you put the handset in a cradle) and while he's explaining, he picks up the handset to demonstrate and puts it back on the cradle WITHOUT LOSING THE CONNECTION! Anyone who's ever used one of those will understand the humor immediately, but if you lose the carrier signal, you lose the connection.

[Orrex]

7. Well, he didn't pick it up **far**

I'm sure that the coupler could still hear it.

[HopeHoops]

8. Ever use one of those bastards? A burp could disrupt it. And half-duplex sucked on a 120b modem.

Type a character, wait for echo, type a character, wait for echo. Shit. I thought it was amazing even to be able to do THAT! Things have changed a wee bit.

[Orrex]

9. Good grief! How in the world did you download your porn?

My C64 had one of those 300b modulator/demodulator machines. I didn't know that it was possible to run at a slower speed!

[HopeHoops]

11. Actually, I didn't at all until I got my Amiga 500 (Hold-And-Modify is a wonderful thing).

If you aren't familiar with Hold-And-Modify, it basically means that pixel to adjacent pixel you could hold two colors and alter the third. Each pixel was two bytes, four sets of four bits. The lower three were R, G, and B and the upper one was the control nibble. If it was zero, the RGB value stayed the same. If it was non-zero, it indicated which two colors to hold and which to modify. This produced a palette that was pretty much full-range, but with the restriction of adjacency. It worked best with pictures that only changed subtly between pixels - hence, the birth of high-quality porn. No other machine on the market could touch it. It also worked well for rendering Mandelbrot sets. I made some beautiful images of those.

[Liberal Veteran]

14. The Amiga was a wonderful machine.

I loved mine. I also got an Amiga 1200 with the AGA chipset and it was great. Those were the days when a 40 mb hard drive would set you back 500 dollars, but felt worth every penny.

[HopeHoops]

16. Yeah, I think mine (side mount on the 500) was a 40mb (with 2mb of memory).

It was more than enough at the time. I had multiple boot floppies for different configurations. From there, the hard drive took over. I'm still amazed that you could run a true multi-tasking operating system off of a 720k single-sided floppy.

[Liberal Veteran]

20. That 2mb of memory made all the difference on the 500.

Although in a sense, upgrading the OS was more interesting since kickstart was on disk, but the rest was on chip, so to upgrade workbench you had to replace a chip.

Good days.

And the games were outstanding.....Populous and Civilization wasted more hours than I really had.

[HopeHoops]

25. My favorite game on it was Globulus. It was cross between Pac Man and Marble Madness.

And yes, that 2mb made a SHITLOAD of a difference, but only for development (I used Modula-2 for everything). I never bothered with upgrades to the OS - it ran fine as it was (and still does - yes, the Amiga still boots).

[hunter]

24. Some systems were set up to be generous with noise and dropouts on the line.

I used to work in a place where smacking the handset with the edge of a metal ruler or dialing one (yes dialing!) would get everything back in sync when a connection stalled. Sometimes I'd dial two, and when that didn't work, five. The most I ever succeeded at was a few ruler taps and dialing eight.

The contract I signed in blood doesn't allow me to talk about other stuff.



I've got an eight inch floppy drive stashed away in my garage because I used to do data conversions for people, but now I'm afraid to turn it on because I've had so many bad experiences with electrolytic capacitors popping off like firecrackers and releasing their magic blue smoke.

My favorite computer of all time was the Atari 800. It makes me happy I can run it from my desktop any time I want to.

[HopeHoops]

26. Yeah, remember using a rotary dial phone with a 120b coupler? The youngins don't understand that.

I've pulled out old rotary phones and totally freaked out kids with them. As soon as I find it, I'm going to put the rotary wall phone back up in our kitchen. It's one of those big black ones, but it is modular. My grandmother's phone was hardwired (as in SERIOUSLY hardwired - no junction box) with a screaming long line cord.

Then there was going into Radio Shack and entering:

10 PRINT "TRS-80 SUCKS "
20 GOTO 10
RUN

A quick exit from the store was generally a good idea.

[avebury]

10. I love that movie. You wonder, as you watch it, will you ever

see what Jack looks like and Jonathan Price has a great voice. The first time I saw it I realized that I had seen him in the initial cast of Miss Saigon in London. The last time I went to London I went on a walking tour that went right by his house.

[texanwitch]

15. The movie changes with the answering machine.

Terry hears Jack voice for the first time.

I love Terry's apartment.

[avebury]

18. I so agree with that.

Towards the end when it looks like Jack has stood Terry I was like damn are we ever going to see what Jack looks like?

I may have to watch it this weekend. I have it to watch on my Ipod.

[Yavin4]

12. Watch "All The President's Men" and See How Low Tech Life Was In 1972!

There's a scene where Redford is looking for the name of the MN Chairman of the Republican party, and he's literally going through multiple telephone books to the find the name.

Unreal.

[hamsterjill]

13. I love that movie, too!

"I might as well pin a $100 dollar bill to my ass and yell, "Victim here'! Victim here!"

[csziggy]

17. Try the computer in "Desk Set" with Katharine Hepburn

No monitor - it was advanced and had a teletype!

[texanwitch]

19. I have seen the Desk Set.

A big wall of a computer with flashing lights.

Hepburn and Tracy were great together.

[csziggy]

21. I wanted to grow up to BE Hepburn's character in Desk Set!

I would have been a great reference librarian - aside from the fact that I can't deal with stupid people. I'm terrific at looking stuff up, have a very retentive memory, and can dredge up facts easily.

I love that movie and nearly all movies with Hepburn and Tracy together.

[texanwitch]

22. Even has a little kid I could see that they had a attraction for each other.

Last edited Fri Oct 26, 2012, 05:24 PM - Edit history (1)

To bad they could never marry.

I don't know if Kate would have been happy married.

She did have a affair with Howard Hugh according the movie about him.

Kate was great in any movie.