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Comment by buffoon | Hacker News Reader

Memories...

Good soundtrack, even if the film did make me cringe. When it came out I was knee deep in oodles of Perl on a shit-hot upgraded SPARCstation 10 machine (not camo painted I will add). Whacked the soundtrack in my external caddied CD drive and plugged my headphones in, then spent 2 hours of frigging #defines trying to get the fucking thing to compile a CD player that worked on SunOS 4 OpenView that I'd downloaded off Usenet via a 14.4k Hayes SmartModem (which I still own)

And that piece of crap cost more than my car at the time...

Edit: I just realised one piece of tech I still use daily survived from back then; a lowly TI-85 calculator.

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I have very few anecdotes past that; very soon after that, I bought a Compaq pentium pro, a thinkpad and a volvo, used NT and became a boring enterprise monkey.

I bought a massive fully stacked Sun Enterprise 1000E and storage array in 2001 in a crazy nostalgia trip. £500,000 of kit and I got it off yahoo auctions for £350 and it was only 5 years old. That's depreciation for you. It was noisy, made the lights dim when you booted it up and wouldn't run anything other than old Solaris releases so it was used as a seat for a bit then sold.

I think I'm out of anecdotes now :)

I'm guessing your CD player was workman.

Oh wow, I remember workman now. At least I had university Internet, even if the whole country's net was taken down once when someone tried a video chat.

It must have been a year or two later that I wired a doorbell between DTR (I think) and CTS on a Sparc workstation, with a program that broadcast a UDP packet to a Tcl/Tk program running on multiple lab machines whenever tcdrain() unblocked.

It wasn't unfortunately. The SPARC 10 had no built in CD drive like the newer 5 and 20 models so that couldn't control the audio interface and it didn't issue the right incantations to the CD drive I had. I was cheap so it was a non-Sun drive. There were no standards back then past things like MCI which only worked on PCs running DOS and windows 3.1.

There's a whole thread on Usenet somewhere with me complaining about this. I tried to find it but couldn't now unfortunately as it would be funny :)

Excuse me while I fire up the old Quadra and run my copy of MacBugs.

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