I was just troubleshooting a test stand at work which runs motor controller configuration software dating to about 1992. DOS 6.22 command line. The computer has a Zip drive and CD-ROM drive, but no DOS device drivers for those are active, and I don't remember how to set those up, so the 3.5" floppy drive is it. Not that I've tested that yet.

Forget about USB drives. I don't think those worked on anything prior to Windows 98.

Now if I can find any floppy disks that work, I could actually do a backup of this computer - it would easily fit on one (probably) or two (maybe) of them. I'm not sure what I'd do with it though. None of our main computers have floppy drives anymore, so I'd have to find a working USB floppy drive, and IIRC those all suck.

Surely you at least knew people who wrote scripts to do that.

There were computers at college which were set up to scan alt.binaries.* and collect megabytes (!) worth of porno.

rec.arts.startrek{.*}: Be an authority on something that doesn't exist. Argue with the experts about technologies not yet invented.

A lot of those are on YouTube now - one of its useful features. I recently found on my computer a save of the original "Spam!" sketch. Back from when there was a decent chance of being able to save videos from YouTube.

The year September never ended. But I thought it was was 1992, and I don't think it was just AOL.

My only extended experience with heat pumps was an all-electric apartment in Tustin, CA. I found it worked fine for heating, but that it was *more* expensive doing heat during winter than it was doing air-conditioning during summer, and I'd generally characterize inland Orange County as a lot hotter in summer than it is cold in winter.

The only other times I've dealt with heat pumps was a hotel room in Oregon and an apartment in Arizona, and I didn't deal with them enough to know how well they worked.

Most other places have used some form of natural gas heat (forced air furnace, passive wall furnace, or hydronic) and sometimes forced air conditioning. A couple mountain places I stayed: One used electric resistive baseboard heat, and another had both electric resistive baseboard heat and a forced air furnace.

Are you sure you're not talking about Skype? I haven't used it in a long time, but it seemed like every time I used it it demanded an update. Oh, and it took a lot longer than 10 minutes.

That's very different than my one experience. I went to the local T-Mobile store first thing Saturday morning to research their 5G home internet offering, and it was so crowded I left immediately.

Verizon, across the street, was much more approachable and has a nearly identical offering.

I was with Sprint in the past, but I never had to go into a store after T-Mobile assimilated them. It looks like the Sprint store I last went to is gone, but that's just based on what Google Maps shows me.

I think this is dead reckoning: projecting location from 2-dimentional speed and direction. Cars have good speed information. Direction is probably from a magnetic compass, though it might be a directional gyro (calibrated when GPS is working). Match such information to known road locations and it should be good enough to fill gaps.

Something like this?
Naked Gun: The Sound of Relief
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Depending on exactly which scanning program I use, I've found that scanning the same document with the same settings (e.g., letter size [8.5" x 11"], 300 dpi, black-and-white) can produce PDFs varying in size by a factor of *50*! And every Internet site has different rules on what uploaded file sizes and types are acceptable, and they require countless usernames and passwords to juggle, each with different rules on acceptable usernames and passwords. I waste hours, and hours, and hours, and hours on such crap.

It is so much easier, slow as it is, to print, sign, and snail-mail documents to recipients, when they can still be bothered to accept them that way.

Actual POTS 14400 bps faxes, while that got me through college and trading technical documents and papers and problems, and it was cool in the 1990s, I don't miss at all. 2 words: thermal (printer) paper.

I was about to post the same thing. I noticed that one of the training videos I had to watch at work recently (December I think) was in Flash, and had noticed that about some others in the past.

It's probably a lithium primary battery rather than a rechargable Li-Ion battery, but our newest smoke alarm, which has a sealed-in lithium battery, has a "permanently deactivate" feature which is meant to be used after 10 years, when it will start beeping an end-of-life warning. Among other things, it discharges the battery.

And from what I've read, that blimp wouldn't have to have hydrogen or helium. Simple nitrogen or nitrogen+oxygen would be buoyant enough in the surrounding CO2.

Indeed, Hardware Wars, a Star Wars spoof "trailer" film from 1978, had the line "You'll laugh! You'll Cry! You'll kiss 3 bucks goodbye!"

For a long time, afternoon movies were $4.50, which I specifically remember because the cinema I frequented assumed most people paid with $5 bills, and gave out 50 cent coins as change.

What amazes me about all these Zoom articles is that people are getting it to work at all, never mind security!

I volunteer for a non-profit that does performing arts classes at several local private schools. Obviously we've been reduced to doing everything online, with mixed success. Some teachers are reportedly dealing with it well, but what I've seen personally with one weekly class and with administrative conferences, we get it to work about half the time if we're lucky. (I'm overhearing one such failed attempt right now - hope I have enough bandwidth to post this.) Often we resort to phone calls on multiple phones and putting everyone on speakerphone!

And no, Skype hasn't worked any better, even though we use it all the time at $very-big-company-employer with few problems. (Though now they're pushing us into MS Teams.) Maybe the Skype version for us peons is no good for anything but one-on-one calls.