Here's what I did. Initially, it was a matter of wiring up two PCs and the cable modem, so I got an old 486 (an IBM PC330 compact model no less) with two NICs and ran NAT routing. One NIC went to the hub, another to the modem. From the hub I plugged in my PC and my sister's.
Since our PCs were in two different rooms, we had to pull some cable. Your first trip is to the local surplus store to buy Cat5 in bulk. If you're only doing two stations, then you might want to buy premade cable, but it's a hell of a lot easier to pull Cat5 without the connectors or having to guess distances. If you don't want to buy a roll (wire your friends and family up!) you can buy a segment, but buy 15% more than you think you need. You can use the rest for smaller cables. In fact, you might even consider looking in dumpsters for cable ends of professional installers doing Cat5 installs. Sometimes they leave long lengths that are perfectly fine.
Going through drywall was relatively easy: I took an old Amiga 2000 chassis tensioning rod and duct taped the end of Cat5 onto it, brought out the drill with a 1/4" bit and drilled holes on each side of the wall. Stuck in the bar as a guide, and pulled the cable through.
The next thing you need is RJ45 connectors and a crimper. Buy at least two more than you need, because you'll screw them up. Borrow a crimper if you can, or buy one, they come in handy for other projects. Two hints: You want to minimize the untwisting of copper pairs. The pairs are in to combat RFI noise and you don't want NEXT, Near End Crosstalk, so really try hard to unwind and pin with the least amount of wire. Another hint is to make sure the plastic sheath (the blue or grey part) is grabbed by the plastic tooth when you punch down. This builds good cables that don't unravel! Crimp appropriately for station to hub, and plug in your PCs. You can get a pinout guide online. If you have one, run a wiring check with a continuity tester or even a DMM. Or run a TDR on it.:)
It gets a little more complicated if you want something MORE than blue cable dangling out of a hole, which is the mode of operation for most dorm rooms. While this was acceptable in some rooms, we wanted to put in jack plates for laptops in other rooms. So I bought a set of screw terminal jack plates with RJ45 (8 pin) connectors. This is a lot easier than modular wiring systems which would require custom tools. Instead of a crimp on RJ45, I wired up to the screw terminals. Again, you'll want to minimize the amount of loose pairs on the end.
Pulling cable up and down from floor to floor is also tricky. The big purchase in this case, is a fishtape. Home Depot has them for around $30CAD. It is a VERY VERY VERY useful tool. If you can't fishtape or see your way through a wall or floor, you often will need to cut out little windows in your drywall, and tape and paint over later. This, unfortunately is the price of wiring your own cable.
Speaking of doing it yourself, while an electrician put in new wiring for an airconditioner, I got the crazy idea to ask him to run Cat5 while he was pulling the AC line. This is a BAD IDEA, due to RFI/EMI considerations.
With DHCP on the NAT box, I can plug in without really worrying about settings and all, so people bringing over machines can easily get configured and out on the LAN. You can even use PDAs this way (like a Newton!).
What more can you do with this? If you were really creative, you could use a BIX block (66 block) and punch down each jack. However, that would mean you want a hub with a Telco connector input. Otherwise, the flexibility afforded by a modular wiring system is really unjustified.
Wiring up your home is a fun weekend project, and is highly recommended to learn a little more about physical wiring. It opens up a lot more options for where you can work (like on a sofa with your laptop) and is very cheap-about $50-100 for the materials and tools. While wireless is elegant and trendy, you can't beat $5 ethernet cards and loads of bulk cable. Or the fun of sawing drywall open:)
Calum
If you really wanted to follow it, Video Toaster had the video market and will probably have it for some time to come.
The Toaster hasn't had ANY market since 1996. NewTek lost out the minute Commodore folded. They kept flogging the same old NTSC, composite only, Toaster/Flyer combo, crippled by the Amiga's underpowered CPU and bus. They also didn't pick up the revolution in nonlinear editing, as the Toaster was primarily sold to SVHS offline suites for A/B roll. The Flyer was a cute hack, but inherently tied to the Toaster board. In the Toaster market (industrial video: educational, corporate, and wedding etc) it's been PC based NLE edit cards powered by Adobe Premiere (since 1996), then DV/Firewire edit cards (starting 1998-1999). Only recently has the Macintosh regained interest due to DV indie filmmakers and FinalCutPro (and Win98's poor implementation of Firewire support).
The Macintosh held onto higher end markets because of Media100/Data Translation and Avid using NuBus and PCI based Macs as their platform of choice. But that's changed significantly, with Symphony and other products being released on NT.
NewTek is now selling a PC/NT based Toaster, but I don't believe it's done particularily well in comparison to Pinnacle and Matrox's (DigiSuite)products. You're completely right that BeOS has no real market: Unless you have a market ruling application (Premiere, FCP) or a industry dominating vendor (Avid), your OS isn't going to do well in the video market.
Here's a question I always wanted to ask: Who are these "power sellers" on ebay? I mean, sometimes I see stuff for sale by people who have done THOUSANDS of transactions.
I've sold a Lego set or two on the Internet (via Usenet) before. I might even have hit a hundred transactions over the eight or so years I've been on Usenet. But a thousand is incredible!
Do these people just sit around all day and sell crap online? Is it a business? Or are these folks just bored soccer moms? Are they dealers? New age pawn shops?
It really amazes me that there is a "community" of auctioneers. I mean, we all participate in all sorts of unusual hobbies (Lego is mine) but the kind of time these people must put into this is really amazing. Is this their job? (ie, do they do nothing but run auctions?)
The other thing I always wanted to ask was: Is it me, or are a lot of these things being bought and sold again, and bought and sold again, over and over again? ie, are people making money by rehashing the same auction items repeatedly?
Am I the only one who thinks the ban was really rigged by Sony to keep profiteers from moving grey market PS2's out of Japan so as not to ruin the North American rollout hype?
It's also the kind of press videogame crazed teenagers would think would be a cool reason for buying a PS2.
I hate it whenever people talk about why Betamax should have won. Having owned an Amiga, I believe in good technology as much as anyone else, but most people forget two VERY important features Betamax did not have over VHS:
a) VHS was an open standard. Multiple vendors built VHS decks because JVC licensed their format. Sony was stupid enough not to let other vendors in on their game.
b) JVC engineers and marketers recognized that people would want to tape movies and sports events that were 2 hours long. Not everyone cares about how many MHz of luma bandwidth etc that Beta has over JVC and that's a lesson all designers, engineers and developers should learn: The users needs are paramount!
And before anyone suggests it, while the Betamax format shares SOME commality with BetaCam, the latter is VERY different from the consumer format.
It's popularity has little to do with it's technical merits-it was largely because Sony turned around and realized how important it was to support their broadcast customers well (a lesson Panasonic did not learn with their technically better M and MII formats)
Calum
I've seen similar mice installed in shopping malls for ad driven free Internet kiosks. Half of them are ripped apart by stupid people who scrap at them with keys.
It's my belief that NOTHING can stand the craziness of the public.:)
. The answer for MD fans is that audio MD's have far too many bit errors to be usable for audio
Thought DATheads might agree with this, I meant to say usable for data. )
One thing I forgot to mention is that DV cameras have compression. That's going to modify whatever you send it, as DV codecs often are slightly different...in video it might appear as codec artifacting. In data, it could be mean much worse!
This question comes up quite a lot on the MiniDisc newsgroup too. The answer for MD fans is that audio MD's have far too many bit errors to be usable for audio. The compression/error correction covers these errors up. MDData discs are built to better specs. As a result, you'll notice all the multitrack MD professional audio recorders require MDData discs.
As anyone who has used DV will tell you, consumer video tape isn't any better-it has plenty of dropouts etc. That's not to say anyone hasn't backed up data to digital video tape before, IIRC a oil company had modified D1 recorders (professional studio decks) to store geological data gathered from seismic and satellite surveys. But D1 decks are built again to much better specs.
A while ago, as someone else noted, there was an Amiga product that backed up onto VHS tapes. The way it worked was to record an NTSC pattern (since the Amiga had NTSC out) to tape, which was read in with a simple video digitizer attached to parallel port. It apparently worked relatively well. But that's not really digital recording, it's an analog form of a digital recording.
Of course, that much money (just the money they're paying to take care of uncertain licenses) could probably also buy CD burners and enough blanks to create no-license-hassles copies of Linux or Free / Open / NetBSD for every computer the city owns.
That's pretty darn naive to think $129K USD could cover the cost of switching operating systems. As much as you all think TCO is a a silly PHB term, even with administration aside, there's a very real cost of logistics (desktop technicians reinstalling OSes, reconfiguration of everyone's PC) and training (sending everyone out to retake courses in their applications). Just go and find out how much a Office training course costs-then multiply by those 6000 users. Not to mention the porting costs and project management requirements to migrate front end software like custom VB applications to UNIX.
How much the OS costs (even $129,000) is a very small component of the total IS budget.
And now it's on here? Don't mod me down, but this article seems to be more of a "Check THIS ebay auction out!" post, or worse yet, an advertisement.
rec.toys.lego is similar. RTL used to be a great newsgroup full of neat posts on stuff people built. Then the Ebayers came. And now it's nothing but what appears to be relatively slimy dealers mangling my favourite hobby. Bastards.
Only when the machine or parts are not repairable should they be taken down into raw materials.
I doubt the problem is finding someone to take it, the problem is getting it there. Tons and tons of produce are left to rot because shipping it would just be too expensive.
you know what really rocks? The IBM M2. Lightweight without all the crap around the M1, yet with the firm click. Came with Canadian PS/1's (2123's) Unless you need the weight of the bulletproof steel armor to hurt someone with the M1.
Calum
I agree. It's unlikely it'll fit a wide enough audience/percentage of the population if it was just done with clay and molded to match the original designer's grip.
Worse than that, looking at the photos it might even promote the a bad hand/wrist posture for RSI. The best designs allow for flexibility in where you place your hands to give them a break.
I know a lot of you are going to suggest to use FTP or NetFloppy or whatever network filesharing. I'm just going to say version control and accidental loss of network connectivity are prime suspects in that solution.
One year, I had a 80 page document I had printed out for proofreading on the subway at 1AM on the way home from the University which I lost the soft copy of due to uploading the wrong version, overwriting the file on our SGI. Doh. I spent five hours retyping the sucker and didn't sleep.
In my fourth year, I had written an excellent paper and left it up on our NT box to retrieve from home to finish. Needless to say, when I got home, our @home connectivity was down till 4AM.
I suppose this is largely due to the fact people tend to be unsympathetic to me saying "My computer broke" having run a research lab's systems for three years.
Why were the old 8-bit computers such a hive of creativity? The things people did with them back then seem to be much more way-out than the thing people do today - it must be the challenge of owning such a limited machine.
I don't think of it like that. I think the market matured and people realized they were more interested in doing productive stuff vs screwing around programming the machine to do weird things. The home PC market just grew up, and the user base opened up to nontechnical users.
That's not to say there isn't a segment of the population which likes this sort of thing-that's why the Amiga was popular long after it's death, and why Linux has such a nut following. I mean, every piece of oddball hardware and every crazy kludge is supported under Linux and the Amiga had some really incredible technology developed for it-Videotoaster is the most common example, but the LaserFantasy LFI professional lasershow control boards are another...simply because Amiga users were hobbyists and technically oriented.
Thirdly, it is not *just* an embedded OS, its most prominant use (atleast to Ontario and Quebec elemenrtary and secondary school students some 10 years ago) was on the PC powering that evil Unisys companies line of diskless 80186 based network computers called the Icon of which our schools had ungodly amounts of. QNX is also used quite extensively in the Canadian Armed Forces and can be used as a desktop OS.
The original ICON was built by a firm called CEMCORP, Canadian Educational Microprocessors (or Microcomputers, but I think it was the former) specifically for the Canadian educational market. IIRC they were 8086's with about 512K or 640K of RAM, and CGA graphics but done in an unusual configuration, not PC standard. They were the large square chassis built with military grade steel and had an integrated keyboard with a trackball on the right, with an "Action" key for the mouse button. They were ridiculously overbuilt. The ICON's were workstations running over Arcnet (ICONNET) IIRC, into a fileserver called the Lexicon, which carried a 30MByte hard disk interfaced via ESDI or ST506 MFM.
The next-gen ICON was the ICON2, built by Unisys using an 80186, in the grey single piece monitor/CPU and the detachable keyboard/trackball unit. Some ICON2's integrated SCSI IIRC to host an LMSI single speed CDRom reader. Apparently there was an ICON3 which was a 80386, but IIRC it was a basic Unisys clone PC. The Unisys icons eventually allowed for emulation of MSDOS but it was painfully slow.
The ICON system ran QNX on both the ICON and LEXICON in a full multiuser configuration. There was a graphical layer, called Ambience, and a number of nifty programs (I really like the paint package, it made me buy an Amiga later on) mostly written by the Ontario government and University of Waterloo.
The machines were ridiculously slow-because of the reliance on the LEXICON and the slow 2MBps network. If the Lexicon crashed (and it did regularily) the entire system needed to rebooted, which took 15 minutes plus. Needless to say this wasn't popular with teachers with only 30 minute class periods. The hardware, at least mechanically, was extremely well designed. The machines were obviously designed for the classroom, and I can't remember a machine being damaged physically-they knew the target market well-the keyboards had oversized areas to get to the trackball, they were relatively indestructable, and they had headphone jacks up front for quiet use.
ICONS were very far ahead in concept (each student was suppsoed to have their own workspace, true multiuser, each teacher could look at each student) but poorly implemented (poor training, not enough time to set everything up properly). Improper administrator (usually the school librarian or a really bright kid) and/or teacher training made it even worse. I remember learning all about it when the school VP let me (at age 12) read all the QNX manuals.
Researchers here have been dealing with the lag and discontinuity involved in remote operation and immersion. They're applying technology to realworld situations that require visual data augmentation (hybrid, overlay displays) plus virtual control of robotics.
Big iron is six 9 uptime. Big iron is fault tolerance and redundancy. Big iron is support. It has nothing to do with how much RAM or how big the disk is, those are secondary concerns.
Really what mainframes provide is stability to the business, in areas where "tee hee, we need a reboot" isn't an option.
He's using a fairly cheap Sony "Handycam" to do his filming, the model he names is the TR-101 hi8. Having problems finding that specific model online, so it may be discontinued.
Yes. It is now discontinued, at least for several years. The CCD-TR101 is a Hi8 single CCD camcorder which was considered the best single chip (short of industrial) Hi8 camera ever made. They're great little cameras with excellent picture quality.
Give your old systems (complete, and working) to a local school which needs it. Most schools, both public and private, lack funds to provide sufficient computer technology for kids. Even an old 486 with a decent modem would be enough for a school library to help kids get information off the WWW, or a box with a CD-ROM that can run "Reader Rabbit" or simple math games.
Though this is a GREAT idea and one everyone should try, I've found you'll run into two problems:
One, a lot of schools can't afford a tech to come in and take care of machines. Perhaps a better donation would be your time to help sysadmin some of the school's systems or to help teach students some useful skills to take care of their school's hardwares.
Two, a lot of school boards have 'standard' configurations which are often contracted through a third party service provider. The techs from that provider aren't mandated by the contract to support those machines. There may also be a standard platform for software mandated across the board-which is likely to be the latest and greatest even though it might not be required.
One area you might want to try would be to nursey schools, daycares and preschools. Their software base is simpler, they're often nonprofits and run out of church basements etc.
...just wanted to post out that I really enjoyed this. It was quite enjoyable on my Viper550 RivaTNT and the audio wasn't bad off my nonlinear editing card.
It was quite a refreshing change, even soothing with the nice music tracks. Nicely done! Does anyone know how the trackmaps are done?
Slashdot Mirror
Here's what I did. Initially, it was a matter of wiring up two PCs and the cable modem, so I got an old 486 (an IBM PC330 compact model no less) with two NICs and ran NAT routing. One NIC went to the hub, another to the modem. From the hub I plugged in my PC and my sister's. Since our PCs were in two different rooms, we had to pull some cable. Your first trip is to the local surplus store to buy Cat5 in bulk. If you're only doing two stations, then you might want to buy premade cable, but it's a hell of a lot easier to pull Cat5 without the connectors or having to guess distances. If you don't want to buy a roll (wire your friends and family up!) you can buy a segment, but buy 15% more than you think you need. You can use the rest for smaller cables. In fact, you might even consider looking in dumpsters for cable ends of professional installers doing Cat5 installs. Sometimes they leave long lengths that are perfectly fine. Going through drywall was relatively easy: I took an old Amiga 2000 chassis tensioning rod and duct taped the end of Cat5 onto it, brought out the drill with a 1/4" bit and drilled holes on each side of the wall. Stuck in the bar as a guide, and pulled the cable through. The next thing you need is RJ45 connectors and a crimper. Buy at least two more than you need, because you'll screw them up. Borrow a crimper if you can, or buy one, they come in handy for other projects. Two hints: You want to minimize the untwisting of copper pairs. The pairs are in to combat RFI noise and you don't want NEXT, Near End Crosstalk, so really try hard to unwind and pin with the least amount of wire. Another hint is to make sure the plastic sheath (the blue or grey part) is grabbed by the plastic tooth when you punch down. This builds good cables that don't unravel! Crimp appropriately for station to hub, and plug in your PCs. You can get a pinout guide online. If you have one, run a wiring check with a continuity tester or even a DMM. Or run a TDR on it. :)
It gets a little more complicated if you want something MORE than blue cable dangling out of a hole, which is the mode of operation for most dorm rooms. While this was acceptable in some rooms, we wanted to put in jack plates for laptops in other rooms. So I bought a set of screw terminal jack plates with RJ45 (8 pin) connectors. This is a lot easier than modular wiring systems which would require custom tools. Instead of a crimp on RJ45, I wired up to the screw terminals. Again, you'll want to minimize the amount of loose pairs on the end.
Pulling cable up and down from floor to floor is also tricky. The big purchase in this case, is a fishtape. Home Depot has them for around $30CAD. It is a VERY VERY VERY useful tool. If you can't fishtape or see your way through a wall or floor, you often will need to cut out little windows in your drywall, and tape and paint over later. This, unfortunately is the price of wiring your own cable.
Speaking of doing it yourself, while an electrician put in new wiring for an airconditioner, I got the crazy idea to ask him to run Cat5 while he was pulling the AC line. This is a BAD IDEA, due to RFI/EMI considerations.
With DHCP on the NAT box, I can plug in without really worrying about settings and all, so people bringing over machines can easily get configured and out on the LAN. You can even use PDAs this way (like a Newton!).
What more can you do with this? If you were really creative, you could use a BIX block (66 block) and punch down each jack. However, that would mean you want a hub with a Telco connector input. Otherwise, the flexibility afforded by a modular wiring system is really unjustified.
Wiring up your home is a fun weekend project, and is highly recommended to learn a little more about physical wiring. It opens up a lot more options for where you can work (like on a sofa with your laptop) and is very cheap-about $50-100 for the materials and tools. While wireless is elegant and trendy, you can't beat $5 ethernet cards and loads of bulk cable. Or the fun of sawing drywall open :)
Calum
The Toaster hasn't had ANY market since 1996. NewTek lost out the minute Commodore folded. They kept flogging the same old NTSC, composite only, Toaster/Flyer combo, crippled by the Amiga's underpowered CPU and bus. They also didn't pick up the revolution in nonlinear editing, as the Toaster was primarily sold to SVHS offline suites for A/B roll. The Flyer was a cute hack, but inherently tied to the Toaster board. In the Toaster market (industrial video: educational, corporate, and wedding etc) it's been PC based NLE edit cards powered by Adobe Premiere (since 1996), then DV/Firewire edit cards (starting 1998-1999). Only recently has the Macintosh regained interest due to DV indie filmmakers and FinalCutPro (and Win98's poor implementation of Firewire support).
The Macintosh held onto higher end markets because of Media100/Data Translation and Avid using NuBus and PCI based Macs as their platform of choice. But that's changed significantly, with Symphony and other products being released on NT.
NewTek is now selling a PC/NT based Toaster, but I don't believe it's done particularily well in comparison to Pinnacle and Matrox's (DigiSuite)products. You're completely right that BeOS has no real market: Unless you have a market ruling application (Premiere, FCP) or a industry dominating vendor (Avid), your OS isn't going to do well in the video market.
Calum
I've sold a Lego set or two on the Internet (via Usenet) before. I might even have hit a hundred transactions over the eight or so years I've been on Usenet. But a thousand is incredible!
Do these people just sit around all day and sell crap online? Is it a business? Or are these folks just bored soccer moms? Are they dealers? New age pawn shops?
It really amazes me that there is a "community" of auctioneers. I mean, we all participate in all sorts of unusual hobbies (Lego is mine) but the kind of time these people must put into this is really amazing. Is this their job? (ie, do they do nothing but run auctions?)
The other thing I always wanted to ask was: Is it me, or are a lot of these things being bought and sold again, and bought and sold again, over and over again? ie, are people making money by rehashing the same auction items repeatedly?
Calum
It's also the kind of press videogame crazed teenagers would think would be a cool reason for buying a PS2.
Calum
I hate it whenever people talk about why Betamax should have won. Having owned an Amiga, I believe in good technology as much as anyone else, but most people forget two VERY important features Betamax did not have over VHS: a) VHS was an open standard. Multiple vendors built VHS decks because JVC licensed their format. Sony was stupid enough not to let other vendors in on their game. b) JVC engineers and marketers recognized that people would want to tape movies and sports events that were 2 hours long. Not everyone cares about how many MHz of luma bandwidth etc that Beta has over JVC and that's a lesson all designers, engineers and developers should learn: The users needs are paramount! And before anyone suggests it, while the Betamax format shares SOME commality with BetaCam, the latter is VERY different from the consumer format. It's popularity has little to do with it's technical merits-it was largely because Sony turned around and realized how important it was to support their broadcast customers well (a lesson Panasonic did not learn with their technically better M and MII formats) Calum
It's my belief that NOTHING can stand the craziness of the public. :)
Calum
Thought DATheads might agree with this, I meant to say usable for data. )
One thing I forgot to mention is that DV cameras have compression. That's going to modify whatever you send it, as DV codecs often are slightly different...in video it might appear as codec artifacting. In data, it could be mean much worse!
Calum
As anyone who has used DV will tell you, consumer video tape isn't any better-it has plenty of dropouts etc. That's not to say anyone hasn't backed up data to digital video tape before, IIRC a oil company had modified D1 recorders (professional studio decks) to store geological data gathered from seismic and satellite surveys. But D1 decks are built again to much better specs.
A while ago, as someone else noted, there was an Amiga product that backed up onto VHS tapes. The way it worked was to record an NTSC pattern (since the Amiga had NTSC out) to tape, which was read in with a simple video digitizer attached to parallel port. It apparently worked relatively well. But that's not really digital recording, it's an analog form of a digital recording.
Calum
Calum
Calum
I think that's a L39 Albatross trainer on the second link.
Calum
That's not the point-they're already running Windows. The issue is the cost of changing over.
Calum
That's pretty darn naive to think $129K USD could cover the cost of switching operating systems. As much as you all think TCO is a a silly PHB term, even with administration aside, there's a very real cost of logistics (desktop technicians reinstalling OSes, reconfiguration of everyone's PC) and training (sending everyone out to retake courses in their applications). Just go and find out how much a Office training course costs-then multiply by those 6000 users. Not to mention the porting costs and project management requirements to migrate front end software like custom VB applications to UNIX.
How much the OS costs (even $129,000) is a very small component of the total IS budget.
Calum
rec.toys.lego is similar. RTL used to be a great newsgroup full of neat posts on stuff people built. Then the Ebayers came. And now it's nothing but what appears to be relatively slimy dealers mangling my favourite hobby. Bastards.
Thank lord for Lugnet.
Calum
I doubt the problem is finding someone to take it, the problem is getting it there. Tons and tons of produce are left to rot because shipping it would just be too expensive.
Calum
you know what really rocks? The IBM M2. Lightweight without all the crap around the M1, yet with the firm click. Came with Canadian PS/1's (2123's) Unless you need the weight of the bulletproof steel armor to hurt someone with the M1. Calum
Worse than that, looking at the photos it might even promote the a bad hand/wrist posture for RSI. The best designs allow for flexibility in where you place your hands to give them a break.
Calum
One year, I had a 80 page document I had printed out for proofreading on the subway at 1AM on the way home from the University which I lost the soft copy of due to uploading the wrong version, overwriting the file on our SGI. Doh. I spent five hours retyping the sucker and didn't sleep.
In my fourth year, I had written an excellent paper and left it up on our NT box to retrieve from home to finish. Needless to say, when I got home, our @home connectivity was down till 4AM.
I suppose this is largely due to the fact people tend to be unsympathetic to me saying "My computer broke" having run a research lab's systems for three years.
Calum
I don't think of it like that. I think the market matured and people realized they were more interested in doing productive stuff vs screwing around programming the machine to do weird things. The home PC market just grew up, and the user base opened up to nontechnical users.
That's not to say there isn't a segment of the population which likes this sort of thing-that's why the Amiga was popular long after it's death, and why Linux has such a nut following. I mean, every piece of oddball hardware and every crazy kludge is supported under Linux and the Amiga had some really incredible technology developed for it-Videotoaster is the most common example, but the LaserFantasy LFI professional lasershow control boards are another...simply because Amiga users were hobbyists and technically oriented.
Calum
The original ICON was built by a firm called CEMCORP, Canadian Educational Microprocessors (or Microcomputers, but I think it was the former) specifically for the Canadian educational market. IIRC they were 8086's with about 512K or 640K of RAM, and CGA graphics but done in an unusual configuration, not PC standard. They were the large square chassis built with military grade steel and had an integrated keyboard with a trackball on the right, with an "Action" key for the mouse button. They were ridiculously overbuilt. The ICON's were workstations running over Arcnet (ICONNET) IIRC, into a fileserver called the Lexicon, which carried a 30MByte hard disk interfaced via ESDI or ST506 MFM.
The next-gen ICON was the ICON2, built by Unisys using an 80186, in the grey single piece monitor/CPU and the detachable keyboard/trackball unit. Some ICON2's integrated SCSI IIRC to host an LMSI single speed CDRom reader. Apparently there was an ICON3 which was a 80386, but IIRC it was a basic Unisys clone PC. The Unisys icons eventually allowed for emulation of MSDOS but it was painfully slow.
The ICON system ran QNX on both the ICON and LEXICON in a full multiuser configuration. There was a graphical layer, called Ambience, and a number of nifty programs (I really like the paint package, it made me buy an Amiga later on) mostly written by the Ontario government and University of Waterloo.
The machines were ridiculously slow-because of the reliance on the LEXICON and the slow 2MBps network. If the Lexicon crashed (and it did regularily) the entire system needed to rebooted, which took 15 minutes plus. Needless to say this wasn't popular with teachers with only 30 minute class periods. The hardware, at least mechanically, was extremely well designed. The machines were obviously designed for the classroom, and I can't remember a machine being damaged physically-they knew the target market well-the keyboards had oversized areas to get to the trackball, they were relatively indestructable, and they had headphone jacks up front for quiet use.
ICONS were very far ahead in concept (each student was suppsoed to have their own workspace, true multiuser, each teacher could look at each student) but poorly implemented (poor training, not enough time to set everything up properly). Improper administrator (usually the school librarian or a really bright kid) and/or teacher training made it even worse. I remember learning all about it when the school VP let me (at age 12) read all the QNX manuals.
Calum The ICON's were
http://etclab.mie.utoronto.ca/
Researchers here have been dealing with the lag and discontinuity involved in remote operation and immersion. They're applying technology to realworld situations that require visual data augmentation (hybrid, overlay displays) plus virtual control of robotics.
Calum
Big iron is six 9 uptime. Big iron is fault tolerance and redundancy. Big iron is support. It has nothing to do with how much RAM or how big the disk is, those are secondary concerns.
Really what mainframes provide is stability to the business, in areas where "tee hee, we need a reboot" isn't an option.
Calum
Yes. It is now discontinued, at least for several years. The CCD-TR101 is a Hi8 single CCD camcorder which was considered the best single chip (short of industrial) Hi8 camera ever made. They're great little cameras with excellent picture quality.
Calum
Though this is a GREAT idea and one everyone should try, I've found you'll run into two problems:
One, a lot of schools can't afford a tech to come in and take care of machines. Perhaps a better donation would be your time to help sysadmin some of the school's systems or to help teach students some useful skills to take care of their school's hardwares.
Two, a lot of school boards have 'standard' configurations which are often contracted through a third party service provider. The techs from that provider aren't mandated by the contract to support those machines. There may also be a standard platform for software mandated across the board-which is likely to be the latest and greatest even though it might not be required.
One area you might want to try would be to nursey schools, daycares and preschools. Their software base is simpler, they're often nonprofits and run out of church basements etc.
Calum PS-still a good idea nonetheless!
It was quite a refreshing change, even soothing with the nice music tracks. Nicely done! Does anyone know how the trackmaps are done?
Calum