141–150 of 169 posts
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I miss those good times when developers were given freedom to do things like these.
Life-insurance mainframes never had easter-eggs, did they? This is just a measure of how seriously people rely on software.
My dad worked for a rather large insurance company. One of the hacks printed the user's name, marched it around the border of the terminal (thin client to the mainframe) and then deleted itself before giving the user their prompt back.
Ah, the many eras of corporate music. Canyon.mid exemplifies the late 80s / early 90s aesthetic - gets me fired up to optimize my multimedia strategy. The current era is mostly inspiring 4 chord repetitions with muted guitar and piano, with B-roll of cinematic nature footage and racially diverse businesspeople shaking hands. Also jaunty ukulele riffs with dance claps and some kind of "oh oh ayy-oh" vocal hook. What c…
Canyon is good, but Passport.mid is the superior Windows midi file... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cV9BtuPpW9w
I first heard that in an english-course CD-rom and always thought it belonged to that course and was thus lost forever!
Thank you for letting me re-discover this thing!!!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Life-insurance mainframes never had easter-eggs, did they? This is just a measure of how seriously people rely on software.
Wrong. :) My dad worked for a rather large insurance company. One of the hacks printed the user's name, marched it around the border of the terminal (thin client to the mainframe) and then deleted itself before giving the user their prompt back.
Since we're all reminiscing here, let me throw in Michael Walthius's Echoes from 1994 which totally dragged me deep into the MIDI collecting world: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CQyhRd0Wsew
There was an easter egg in Windows 95 for clouds.mid.[1] You had to create a folder and rename it a few times, and then it would play the song[2]. Even hearing it now takes me back to a simpler time... [1] https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/69883/musical-easter-egg... [2] https://soundcloud.com/brianorr/clouds
I miss those good times when developers were given freedom to do things like these.
I had an Iomega Zip drive, too! So cool, but the higher capacities were too expensive and the parallel adapter didn't work everywhere. I forget if there were compatible discs, not made by Iomega, that were cheaper?
I don’t know about cheaper, but Fuji, HP and photography related companies made disks. Completely unrelated, but the SCSI versions made them pretty much plug and play with tons of hardware. There is an old Roland sampler I have made in ‘88 that uses one, and Zip disks leave floppies completely in the dust. It’s truly night and day on every level.
Right after I graduated, they found the budget to upgrade to blueberry iMacs. The superintendent/principal was also the only person I ever saw using a G4 Cube in the wild; that Apple salesperson must have done a hell of a job. One of the office secretaries had one of the education-market-only beige all-in-one Power Mac G3s too.
I believe sometime in the mid-2000s, they moved on to a contract with Dell like everybody else. I guess the iPad era has seen Apple regain some education market share, but they used to absolutely dominate schools.
If I ever start my own company with a real phone system, I’m putting canyon.mid as the on hold music. How cool would that be?
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I miss those good times when developers were given freedom to do things like these.
Except that it increases software complexity, possibly bugs as well as security vulnerabilities. I definitely don’t won’t this kind of “features” in software I use.