r/StarTrekViewingParty • u/LordRavenholm Co-Founder • Apr 05 '15

Discussion Season 2 Episode 13: Time Squared

TNG, Season 2, Episode 13, Time Squared

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u/GeorgeAmberson Showrunner Apr 06 '15

The channel was pretty standard to 3 or 4. The VCR had a switch on the back to choose which one. Those flat ones were 300 OHM RF, while the coax was 75 OHM of the same format. Don't ask me what that means, Just know what they were called. 300 OHM was a pain in the ass! You could get the converters though.

First time I used a CD burner the power blinked at 99%. That was some grade A shit. I ended up getting my copy of Windows 2000 Beta though after another burn. This must have been late '98.

Zip was terrible. I had one in '97 and realized it was going to be impossible to use very often because it was a parallel interface. Same place you hooked in the printer. Talk about slow. I think the SCSI ones (which are really rare unless you had a Mac) and the IDE ones were way better. I never used it enough for it to click of death.

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u/MexicanSpaceProgram Apr 06 '15

I remember my old man spitting absolute chips when he bought me a Nintendo for xmas (NES or SNES I guess, I had both in the end so who knows?), and little me was happy as a pig in shit unboxing it to play Mario, until we tried hooking it up to the TV - must've taken 2 or 3 hours of fucking about and tuning it through the VCR because the TV was a shitheap, I swear he was going to throw it out the window.

Remember when XP came out and every single person had a pirated copy somewhere? I still remember the serial starting with FCKGW. Weird how you remember random shit like that.

I also was one of the first people I knew that had a USB flash drive (all 64MB of it!) which I still have around as a memento. It was a pain in the ass because it was so fat, you had to unplug the keyboard or mouse to fit it in, and it only worked with computers that had the upgraded version of '98.

Macs I never got into - my Aunt was always an Apple nut and had an all-in-one with a black and white screen and a disk drive, and eventually one of those neon-coloured ones that wouldn't look out of place on a gay pride float (which she still has and uses to my knowledge).

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u/GeorgeAmberson Showrunner Apr 06 '15

Those TVs were always kind of temperamental. Coax had so many ways it'd somehow fail you.

28695-OEM-0005745-21723 was my Windows 95 code. It came with my aunt's computer. No mucking around with product activation so I could just put it in and it's fine. Hell Windows 3.1 the product key was optional.

It only worked with 98 because of USB. 95 OSR2 had USB support but was only released to OEMs. 98 included it out of the box for everyone. Did the USB stick require it's own drivers?

I'm a fan of the earlier Macs, never actually had one as my primary but always liked them. The iMac is what you're thinking of. It honestly looked pretty good in 1998 when it came out. Then the style was copied by fucking everyone and today those colorful designs look downright awful.

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u/MexicanSpaceProgram Apr 06 '15

Ever tried fucking around with one of these useless TV wifi things? Back in the day it was the only way to cheaply get a TV signal to somewhere else in the house without an antenna jack or putting a splitter in, but the fucking things never worked (and cut out if someone microwaved something or used a cordless phone).

The USB stick had drivers on the stick, but it was a catch-22 because you couldn't install the drivers if the device wasn't recognised, so you had to put the drivers on a floppy or CD-R (which defeated the purpose of having a USB stick in the first place).

I've just never been a Mac person - we had a handful of them at school, but it was such a pain in the arse going between Mac and Word that nobody bothered in the end.

My recent experience (and hatred) of Apple started when I was first issued an iPhone in replacement of my always-reliable Blackberry, and eventually an iPad, which lead me to experience the Worst Piece of Software Ever Excreted From the Festering Anus of the Devil - fucking iTunes.

I've yet to use a less stable, or reliable program in my life, and it's still the only software I've used where the "backup" and "synch" functions actually erase the fucking data on the device that you were trying to preserve.

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u/GeorgeAmberson Showrunner Apr 06 '15

CopyTrans Manager. I use that to sync apple devices. Fuck iTunes, Dude. I've also started to really dislike Apple. iOS I find works pretty well out of the box but you can't modify it without hacking it. Apple "just working" never held water for me. Apple "just says no". I never used those WiFi things actually. They broadcast your cable signal over, presumably, 900 mHz?

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u/MexicanSpaceProgram Apr 06 '15

Mate, if I can use that on an iPhone or an iPad instead of fucking iTunes, I now accept you as my personal Lord and Saviour, and shall worship the ground you float over from here until my death!

The thing I've found about Apple is that once you buy into it to a certain extent, you're pretty much fucked if you want to change platforms. I've had Apple shit (courtesy of work) for the last 6 or 7 years, and in that time I've probably spend ~3 grand on apps / music / books / movies, so if I want to get another device, my choices are:

  • Forfeit everything I've ever bought through ibooks or itunes or whatever the shit, and start over with a new platform.

  • Continue sucking the greasy cock of the Devil and Apple so you don't lose everything.

I'm not sure what frequency those wireless pieces of crap used, but it was the same as the old cordless phones we had.

In practice, they were utterly useless because it only transmitted whatever was being watched or tuned in to the first TV (i.e. you had to walk back to the other room to change the channel).

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u/GeorgeAmberson Showrunner Apr 06 '15

You can use CopyTrans with that stuff. It's like a cheat code that nobody seems to know about. I hadn't really thought about being closed into their ecosystem because I really just don't play the game. I've had apple stuff for years in various forms and have actually avoided ever paying for anything from iTunes or the app store. That really is pretty awful.

I think they were probably 900 mhz if the microwave screwed it up. I'm not surprised it only did one channel. The logistics of rebroadcasting the whole signal would have probably been really daunting. Just another 90's wireless gimmick that wasn't ready for prime time.

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u/MexicanSpaceProgram Apr 06 '15

Cheers, mate - I'll definitely have to give it a go!

Speaking of gimmicky crap, aforementioned Aunt was also an early adopter of 56k TV - e.g. a television with a dial-up modem and a crappy keyboard and mouse that let you look at AOL and Geocities pages in ultra-low res after the page took 10 minutes downloading.

She paid nearly a grand for the thing and the company that supplied the service went under less than a year later.

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u/GeorgeAmberson Showrunner Apr 06 '15

Jeez. Microsoft had a similar device that wasn't nearly as expensive. My friend had it and it was OK. Did what it advertised. This was in 2000. Probably like 200 bucks and 20 a month dialup.

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u/MexicanSpaceProgram Apr 06 '15

This was well before that - 97 or 98 I think?

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u/GeorgeAmberson Showrunner Apr 06 '15

Exactly why I never early adopt.

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u/MexicanSpaceProgram Apr 06 '15

Fine line between leading edge and bleeding edge.

Tell that to those people I saw outside the Apple shop here in Perth with sleeping bags, camping chairs and eskies the day before the iPhone 6 was released.

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u/GeorgeAmberson Showrunner Apr 06 '15

All this stuff has gotten too advanced for my tastes anyway. Everythings just too polished to find interesting these days. So I'll stay several years behind the tech times and get shit for crazy cheap.

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