I was in college in the mid-late 90s. There was this brief period where all of a sudden it became painfully aware how much Mac OS was crashing. I was regularly using SGI, Sun, and IBM Unix workstations and Linux had just become available. I don't think I ever saw any commercial unix workstation "crash" and Linux the crashes were usually my fault.
If you were only using Windows you barely noticed, but if you used much Unix Mac OS got pretty painful. I mostly remember this from taking a digital music/video class and that was basically the only thing I used Macs for at that time. You never really got through an hour or two editing video or audio without a crash or two. We had Avid workstations where they controlled this by tightly controlling the software on the Macs, but I never actually got permission to use them.
There were also behavior patterns. If you only used Mac you were in a behavior pattern where you'd crash the machine less. If you were using Unix workstations a lot your behavior subtly changed and you tried to do more stuff at the same time. If you then went back over to the Mac and overloaded the Mac the same way it was a bad time.
I can't remember which of these it was but one of these actually "bricked" my Mac Pro on the OS upgrade, at least from the casual Apple fan perspective or the Genius bar perspective.
I took it into the Genius bar and they had nothing other than "we will wipe it and get it working."
It turned out I was able to boot to single user unix console mode and clean up the issue in an old school style. I have no idea if that is even possible anymore, but in any case I have never had another issue with OSX as severe as that one.
Modern Mac OS got really quite high quality at some point but it's easy for people to forget it had a lot of growing pains between 1999-2008 or so.
I agree. About a year into the Intel transition, around 2007, it was incredibly stable.
I was doing hardcore computation 24/7 on a MacBook, including model checking real-time systems, and I vividly remember the exact day I experienced one kernel panic.
The rest of the time, everything was rock solid. It's sad both quality and aesthetics degraded during the 2010s, where the system somewhat converged to iOS UI patterns and lost skeuomorphism.
Apple did skeuomorphism really well, which is hard. No idea why they moved to flat designs, which are easy to copy by competitors.
Where are they at with power supply? All these videos are now showing the robots untethered (and they have been for a while), but how long can they operate untethered?
Are they just running on Lithium Ion batteries? And the new electric joint motors are more efficient than powering hydraulics?
Part of this was that sales for networking gear actually did tank because there were so many companies going under all at once that suddenly weren't buying any more gear.
There were so many companies going under lots of people I knew ended up with racks in their house with servers from work that they got for free.
I graduated in 1999 and probably should have stayed for grad school. I had good enough grades my Alma Mater was basically sending me letters my senior year "Hey you're just about guaranteed to get in if you apply!" It's hard to say as if I'd just gotten a master's I would have been getting out in the middle of the crash (bad) but if I'd stayed through getting a Phd I would have had a very different traectory.
But the whole .com boom was way too exciting. I knew lots of people who dropped out. I started out working at Cisco but then left to go to a networking startup and got there just in time for stuff to start blowing up. When I left Cisco the assigned Financial Advisor I had a Morgan Stanley recommended I take a loan for something like $200k to take my options with me or something. I was like 24 and had almost no savings, there was no way I was going to do that. Cisco ended up tanking from 200+ down to the 10-20 range months after I left IIRC. I remember telling a co-worker who got laid off at the same time that I felt stupid as I had spent a lot of my earnings paying off my car I had bought brand new and I also had a motorcycle. He remarked he had kept driving his 20 year old Honda Accord but had no more money than me because he'd lost everything in the stock market crash.
As others have said 9/11 was some kind of weird marker for a lot of us that it was all over. The company I worked for made it about another year after that but I have vivid memories of everyone doom watching the news in the kitchen at work before the CEO came and told us to go home for the day on 9/11. I went home and went out and rode my bicycle all afternoon where I had no way to get any news, it made me feel better.
When I got laid off it was like every single one of my friends was laid off too. All of us at once, and it wasn't layoffs, it was companies completely going under.
There was a lot of malfeasance too. I knew people who had jobs where there was almost zero work as the company was a borderline scam. People were either playing video games at their desk all day waiting for management to figure out what they were going to work on or they were studying for their next job.
I was super lucky. Both my roommate and I got laid off at the same time, we ended up breaking our lease and going separate ways. I lived with my parents for a while, but I only actually was laid off about 6 weeks before finding a contract job. Neither my finances nor my career really took much of a hit, but my confidence took a major hit that realistically took 5-6 years to really come out of.
The percentage change in resolution you ran the games at was also absolutely mind blowing too.
For the most part we went from running the game at 320x200 or 320x240 to 640x480 in that first round of acceleration. I think in terms of % change it is a bigger leap than anything we've really had since, or certainly after 1920x1080.
So you suddenly had super smooth graphics, much better looking translucency and effects, and the # of pixels quadupled or more and you could just see everything so much more clearly.
Yeah that's true. Software rendering at low resolution is not a good sight to look at.
I remember back in 1997, when Quake 2 was just out, I sit in a net bar (where you pay to use a computer) and played an hour of Quake 2 in software rendering. The game was interesting, but I felt a bit sick, half due to the resolution, half due to the almost infinite brownish colour. A girl behind me murmured, "This is not as half fun as Duke Nukem", and yeah I completely agreed with her.
I think I still agree with her somewhat. Quake 2 is a great game, but Duke3d is a fun one.
Where Quake2 really shined was in multiplayer, especially mods like q2ctf.
Quake2 was released at just the right moment to take advantage of both 3D acceleration and broadband Internet access. Playing a game of q2ctf, in 3D-accelerated 800x600 mode, with 60 ms ping was just fucking amazing.
My brother worked at Nissan back when the R35 was new and exciting.
It sounded like the ownership experience (at least in the US) was not good. Reliability and maintenance were bad. Word got out that it wasn't a fun car to own and then they got very hard to sell so the salesforce didn't even like them. Dealers didn't want to put them on the lot, etc..
And then it did the standard Japanese sports car thing where it languished without updates and got old and outdated compared to other brands' sports cars.
There was already relatively deep penetration of this stuff in the corporate world and universities way back in the early 1990s.
Where I want to school we had AFS. You could sit down at any Unix workstation and login and it looked like your personal machine. Your entire desktop & file environment was there and the environment automatically pointed all your paths at the correct binaries for that machine. (While we were there I remember using Sun, IBM, and SGI workstations in this environment.)
When Windows came on campus it felt like the stone ages as none of this stuff worked and SMB was horrible in comparison.
These days it feels like distributed file systems are used less and less in lieu of having to upload everything to various web based cloud systems.
In some ways it feels like everything has become less and less friendly with the loss of desktop apps in favor of everything in the browser.
I guess I do use OneDrive, but it doesn't seem particularly good, even compared to 1990s options.
I was using HP Apollo systems with the Aegis OS in the early 90s, and they basically shared one filesystem across their token-ring network. Plug in two or more systems, login to one of them, and each other system's files would be under //othersystem.
I don't recall whether there were any security-minded limits you could put on what was shared, but for a team that was meant to share everything, it was pretty handy.
I miss those days often. I have more than once computer, why it it such a big deal to share my filesystem. But many things don't work if you try (firefox for example doesn't like sharing settings that way). The web is great for some things, but local applications are often much more powerful and faster.
With Windows, a lot of this is down to software using AppData\(Remote|Local|LocalLow) correctly. Named differently in NT but conceptually it was there all along. The problem back then was that, since 9x didn't have this separation, relatively few apps bothered to do it right.
I can generally see the Magic Eye pictures very well.. these are way harder.
The tiny thumbnails at the bottom of the page work, but the larger images I can't cross my eyes enough.
I think it depends greatly on getting the screen/image size just the right size and also getting the viewing distance right. On large monitors it seems harder to see.
> You can do this by holding your finger substantially in front of the image, and focusing solely on the finger with your eyes, while turning your mind’s attention to the image behind it while keeping your eyes still.
This tip in the article helped me a lot, it's much easier to cross your eyes further with something to actually focus on
It's helpful if you can smoothly zoom in on the images. Start zoomed out far enough that you can easily see the effect, and then slowly enlarge the images. Your brain will work to keep them in focus.
This seems unlikely just because the SR-71 never got hit with a missile.
They might have been afraid of the XB-70 getting hit but it likely never would have just because it turned out to be so hard to hit things at 70,000+ feet traveling at Mach 3+.
If you were only using Windows you barely noticed, but if you used much Unix Mac OS got pretty painful. I mostly remember this from taking a digital music/video class and that was basically the only thing I used Macs for at that time. You never really got through an hour or two editing video or audio without a crash or two. We had Avid workstations where they controlled this by tightly controlling the software on the Macs, but I never actually got permission to use them.
There were also behavior patterns. If you only used Mac you were in a behavior pattern where you'd crash the machine less. If you were using Unix workstations a lot your behavior subtly changed and you tried to do more stuff at the same time. If you then went back over to the Mac and overloaded the Mac the same way it was a bad time.