Sullivan also missed a VERY important point here - she said that to provide fair use it was possible to record the DVD to an analog recorder and use that, but in most cases that's not true because of Macrovision. This same law has also made circumventing Macrovision illegal, as evidenced by the fact that Go Video had to specifically add hardware to their dual-deck recorders to make them honor Macrovision.
I actually logged into the system mentioned in this article, presumably right before it was unplugged, since it was in the 87-88 timeframe.
Anyone remember SIMTEL20, which you can still find references to quite a few places on the net? That was a DECSYSTEM 20 at the White Sands Missile Range, and the home of many seriously cool archives.
My only personal experience with hardware of this era (actually older that that) was the DEC PDP-8e that we had for some time at our high school in Omaha. It had, I believe, 2K of core memory, quite a few DECtape units (mentioned in this article), and a 512K drum drive that was the size of a refrigerator and spun at an insanely high rate. We were told you didn't want to be in the room if the bearings ever went out.
The very cool thing about that system was power recovery. If the power ever failed (or someone pulled the plug, which we did once) the system could see it coming and quickly dump all the registers into core memory. Since core is non-volatile, things would pick up right where they left off when the power was restored. The ultimate UPS!
After that, I went on to work as an operator on a VAX 11/780 and 8650, doing standalone backups on the weekend graveyard shift, among other things. It was always fun to see what I could get out of students who only needed a few more minutes of CPU time to finish their assignments before I shut the system down. I got quite a few good takeout meals out of that deal.
Still and all, although it was a great time, I have to say that I'll take my nice portable laptop with Linux on it over any iron that big any day of the week. It's/mine mine mine/, not some university's!
Macrovision has always been a total joke anyway - just run the signal through a timebase corrector and it's gone, and you get better-quality dubs to boot!
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Sullivan also missed a VERY important point here - she said that to provide fair use it was possible to record the DVD to an analog recorder and use that, but in most cases that's not true because of Macrovision. This same law has also made circumventing Macrovision illegal, as evidenced by the fact that Go Video had to specifically add hardware to their dual-deck recorders to make them honor Macrovision.
Wowzo, I'd forgotten that little tidbit - I actually /do/ remember those days - download the latest host table every week, what's DNS?
.ARC file you downloaded is corrupted? You probably used binary and not tenex!
Oh, that
Thanks for the trip back.
I actually logged into the system mentioned in this article, presumably right before it was unplugged, since it was in the 87-88 timeframe.
/mine mine mine/, not some university's!
Anyone remember SIMTEL20, which you can still find references to quite a few places on the net? That was a DECSYSTEM 20 at the White Sands Missile Range, and the home of many seriously cool archives.
My only personal experience with hardware of this era (actually older that that) was the DEC PDP-8e that we had for some time at our high school in Omaha. It had, I believe, 2K of core memory, quite a few DECtape units (mentioned in this article), and a 512K drum drive that was the size of a refrigerator and spun at an insanely high rate. We were told you didn't want to be in the room if the bearings ever went out.
The very cool thing about that system was power recovery. If the power ever failed (or someone pulled the plug, which we did once) the system could see it coming and quickly dump all the registers into core memory. Since core is non-volatile, things would pick up right where they left off when the power was restored. The ultimate UPS!
After that, I went on to work as an operator on a VAX 11/780 and 8650, doing standalone backups on the weekend graveyard shift, among other things. It was always fun to see what I could get out of students who only needed a few more minutes of CPU time to finish their assignments before I shut the system down. I got quite a few good takeout meals out of that deal.
Still and all, although it was a great time, I have to say that I'll take my nice portable laptop with Linux on it over any iron that big any day of the week. It's
Macrovision has always been a total joke anyway - just run the signal through a timebase corrector and it's gone, and you get better-quality dubs to boot!
Has anyone noticed that, since this thing plugs into your keyboard port, by definition, the driver it uses is capturing all of your keystrokes?
Hmm, maybe that should be looked into...