• danTaylor08 (unregistered) in reply to mjk340

    WTF!?

    couldn't you do this (perl)?

    if (input =~ /no/i) { //do stuff smarter }

  • ambrosen (unregistered) in reply to CDarklock
    CDarklock:
    The disk drives attached to everything in his house were part of his home automation project, where he could sit on the couch and use his universal remote to make coffee.

    Which involved the dishwasher. Honestly, you don't want to know.

    I think I do want to know, actually. I don't suppose you could submit a story to Alex?

  • Me (unregistered) in reply to Anonymously Yours
    Anonymously Yours:
    Me:
    I wouldn't call any of the ads a WTF, so it might be jumping the shark a little bit, but they are still interesting and entertaining to read.
    Then you must have missed the specs on the Apple II, setting their standard of overpriced but less useful machines early on. Besides, this is in the "Featured Articles" category.

    Featured Articles still typically contain a "WTF". Is this not where the site gets its name?

    All in all, I meant no complaint. I enjoyed looking at the old ads.

  • Chris (unregistered)

    Holy non-loading images Batman!

  • (cs) in reply to Tuesday
    Tuesday:
    The story you're about to see is a fib, but it's short. The names are made up but the problems are real.

    MathNet or The Daily WTF? YOU DECIDE!

  • Nick (unregistered)

    More Computer Adds From MAS*H... I actually own this pamphlet

    http://www.angelfire.com/tv2/mashtvguide/IBMSITE/IBM.html

  • Anon (unregistered)

    Your keyboard only comes with upper-case letters, now what?

  • Anonymous Coward (unregistered) in reply to kennytm
    kennytm:
    Robert Hanson:
    The ads don't show up in firefox.
    Turn off AdBlock.

    Editors please use some URLs not containing the substring "/ads/"? :)

    Or even better just make the page generate a totally random local url for each ad image placement. Then have the webserver return a random ad image for anything thats otherwise 404....

  • (cs)

    What's amusing is that the Commodore ad lies. The IBM PC clearly had a real-time clock. DOS, since at least 2.0, prompted you to set it. Unless the PET had a battery to maintain the time when turned off (I doubt it, because the later VIC, C64, and C128 didn't), its clock was no better than IBM's. In fact, those VIC chip home computers didn't even store a proper date; just the number of seconds (and tenths) since power-on, if I recall correctly.

  • Dan (unregistered)

    160K drive on the PC? I had the original IBM PC (with a whole 256K RAM!), and it came with a double-sided, double-density floppy drive. Sure it could READ single-sided, single-density disks, but that's still WTF advertising if I ever saw it. Heck, I still have an original PC floppy drive in my closet.

    And how can they get away with saying they have up to 500K storage when the DSDD only offers 360K? Maybe with compression.

  • BK (unregistered)

    TI-59 - arguably, this is the first device I started writing programs for. My dad had one, I almost forgot it. Kinda feels sentimental.

  • Izzy (unregistered) in reply to Zylon
    Zylon:
    Bob:
    More like

    IF UCASE$(INPUT = "NO") THEN ... do stuff END IF if its BASIC, toupper if its C, etc.

    You FAIL at sarcasm.
    IF sarcasm$ = "FAIL" or sarcasm$ = "Fail" or.... 'yes, it is broken
  • (cs)

    Heh, Captain Kirk might have gone for the Commodore, but Scotty used a Mac Plus when they came back in time!

    I'm not sure about Cosby being able to use a TI-59 ... but damn, that calculator was really good! Too bad my dad's TI-59 died somewhere around 1991 ... I really liked it, and it looked very cool compared to the cheapo trash I had to use later. (Though I did get a TI-89 for college.)

    I miss those magnetic strips for storing programs...

  • Clayton (unregistered) in reply to Phantom Watson
    Phantom Watson:
    Is that TI-59 to scale?

    Yes. It's just that the man is very small. It's relativity advertising--Put your product next to something smaller then it usually is and your product will seem big and powerful by comparison.

  • Clayton (unregistered) in reply to Nick
    Nick:
    More Computer Adds From M*A*S*H... I actually own this pamphlet

    http://www.angelfire.com/tv2/mashtvguide/IBMSITE/IBM.html

    Oh my god those are hilarious! It's like after the war they all went and got a job at the same office. It sounds like some kind of horrible horrible spin off. Potter is the boss, Frank is in middle management, Hawkeye is often late but is the only one who knows how to do certain things...

    This could go on for hours!

  • HuntersBar (unregistered) in reply to Mr B

    dntgtmstrtd.mndsntvnhvvwls

  • Wouter (unregistered) in reply to Mr B

    rofl

  • Admiral Michael (unregistered)

    Enjoy!

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PUEI7mm8M7Q

  • Vicz (unregistered)

    In Star Trek 2, I believe a commodore was seen in the background in Kirk's appartment.

  • (cs)
  • Harold (unregistered)

    10 PRINT "HELLO WORLD!" 10 GOTO 10

  • Daedalus (unregistered) in reply to Mr B
    Mr B:
    youluckybastardsminedoesntevencomewithaspacebar
    y shld b gld y hv vwls cptch ngnm
  • (cs) in reply to JamesQMurphy
    JamesQMurphy:
    Harrow:
    Phantom Watson:
    Is that TI-59 to scale?
    Yes, it is. But remember, Dr. Cosby is only sixteen inches tall.

    -Harrow.

    I like how the tassel is draped over the calculator but Dr. Cosby is under the calculator.
    From my perspective, and given the amount of Diet Pepsi I have consumed this morning, it would appear that Bill Cosby is being viciously attacked by a TI-59.
  • (cs) in reply to Clayton
    Clayton:
    Nick:
    More Computer Adds From M*A*S*H... I actually own this pamphlet

    http://www.angelfire.com/tv2/mashtvguide/IBMSITE/IBM.html

    Oh my god those are hilarious! It's like after the war they all went and got a job at the same office. It sounds like some kind of horrible horrible spin off. Potter is the boss, Frank is in middle management, Hawkeye is often late but is the only one who knows how to do certain things...

    This could go on for hours!

    Looks around

    Where's Radar?

  • KonAitor (unregistered) in reply to operagost
    operagost:
    What's amusing is that the Commodore ad lies. The IBM PC clearly had a real-time clock. DOS, since at least 2.0, prompted you to set it. Unless the PET had a battery to maintain the time when turned off (I doubt it, because the later VIC, C64, and C128 didn't), its clock was no better than IBM's. In fact, those VIC chip home computers didn't even store a proper date; just the number of seconds (and tenths) since power-on, if I recall correctly.

    Good job on proving that you have no life.

  • (cs) in reply to ambrosen
    ambrosen:
    CDarklock:
    The disk drives attached to everything in his house were part of his home automation project, where he could sit on the couch and use his universal remote to make coffee.

    Which involved the dishwasher. Honestly, you don't want to know.

    I think I do want to know, actually. I don't suppose you could submit a story to Alex?
    I second this motion. I am also curious. Maybe not a WTF when you get to the reason behind it, but it still seems there's a good story here.

  • Lyle (unregistered) in reply to Foo

    Lucky bastard, mine only came with one key, which I had to use to morse-code my text in.

    Foo:
    All of the article's images are in subdirectory called ads. It took me few seconds to understand AdBlock was blocking them... so if you don't see any images, turn off AdBlock.
    Exactly what he wants. People block the ads because they're annoying, hm, let's force them to unblock them! Problem solved! Or I could just extract the URLs from the source...
  • Bob (unregistered) in reply to Harold
    Harold:
    10 PRINT "HELLO WORLD!" 10 GOTO 10
    If that's GW-Basic, you made a one-line infinite loop and overwrote your Hello world line.

    If that's QuickBASIC, you made a program that does not compile because of a duplicate label error.

  • The Fake WTF (unregistered)

    At least it's not as bad as that news coverage of the Morris worm where they had anchors asking whether computer viruses could be transmitted to humans!

    I wish I had the YouTube clip, because that's almost surreal when you look back...

  • Not Wtf (unregistered)

    Pants.

  • (cs) in reply to Me
    Me:
    Featured Articles still typically contain a "WTF". Is this not where the site gets its name?

    All in all, I meant no complaint. I enjoyed looking at the old ads.

    That's what I thought until halfway through the C.Itoh - an 80 character terminal "that performs like a 132"? So, how many columns does it have? In what other way would it perform "like a 132"?

  • (cs) in reply to operagost
    operagost:
    What's amusing is that the Commodore ad lies. The IBM PC clearly had a real-time clock. DOS, since at least 2.0, prompted you to set it. Unless the PET had a battery to maintain the time when turned off (I doubt it, because the later VIC, C64, and C128 didn't), its clock was no better than IBM's. In fact, those VIC chip home computers didn't even store a proper date; just the number of seconds (and tenths) since power-on, if I recall correctly.
    I don't think that's right. My XT-compatible had a RTC but I remember vendors were still making a fuss about that fact. There was still such thing as an RTC add-on board for PCs. DOS prompted you for the time and date (at least if you had a default autoexec.bat) but then maintained the time in software via interrupt handler on IRQ 8.
  • (cs) in reply to Dan
    Dan:
    And how can they get away with saying they have up to 500K storage when the DSDD only offers 360K? Maybe with compression.
    Maybe with shorter headers, less redundancy, and shorter sync fields before each block? Or maybe they were quoting "unformatted" capacity :-) There were some brands putting more blocks on the outer tracks than the inner ones (e.g. Apple), while others had a fixed number of sectors.
  • OldSchoolGeek (unregistered) in reply to ayla
    ayla:
    How much does it cost to add lower case to the Apple II? :D What character set were they using?

    A soldering iron, a friend with an EEPROM burner, and a wire from the chargen PROM to a pin on the game port input.

    And then you looked 1773 on your 300-baud modem.

    Captcha: GoodGodYou'reFreakinOLD!!! No, not really.

  • leon (unregistered) in reply to mjk340

    or like : if (input == tolower('no')) { //something with no }

  • vulputate (unregistered) in reply to Lyle

    Or just create exception rules for those 3 images and still not have to see whatever else might be lurking on the site

  • A. Peon (unregistered)

    For all of you interested in the early days* of the PC industry, try to find the video of the Computer History Museum's C64 25th Anniversary event, where Jack Tramiel, Steve Wozniak, Bill Lowe (behind the IBM PC) and Adam Chowaniec** (a little-known VP at Commodore involved in bringing the Amiga to market). Sit through the whole thing, it's worth it -- especially since this was the first time all those guys were in a room together.

    Video @ http://www.computerhistory.org/events/index.php?id=1193702785

    This YouTube link may be an alternative mirror, I haven't actually checked: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NBvbsPNBIyk

    Of note is the support Apple received from MOS and Commodore in bringing their hardware to market in the first place, and the difference in approach when it comes to pricing: Tramiel was always, for better or worse, about reaching the lowest price points to reach the most customers and scare off competition, while Apple has pretty much always charged a generous markup, as Woz laughingly acknowledges.

    Also check out the On the Edge book; as any student of Commodore knows, the company had a rich history of WTFs -- as did the whole industry. Did you know Apple needed to call in support from MOS/Commodore when designing the II?

    In the interview, Lowe also hints at where the "guy getting stock quotes on the beach/at the poolside" motif that continues to dog advertising came from... though I don't think that anyone in the room caught the strange and wonderful accident of the ALOHANet work contributing to the ARPANet and getting us there.

    *I feel like I've got to acknowledge that this was the second wave of PCs; the first wave of 'personal' CP/M-type machines had been trickling out through the '70s and priming the business market, lest we forget... the Apple/Commodore/IBM/Coleco/... wave was what took them onto every desk and into every home.

    **re: Chowaniec, nobody had ever heard of this guy before, and the community was in a tizzy over him showing up at the event and seeming to take some credit for everything Amiga. If you look around the Internet, he does seem like he enjoys attention, but the fact is that Jay Miner is dead and Chowaniec was obviously in the business trenches (including the chip manufacturing, apparently) while the Amiga community has only ever heard from the engineers... so he seems to deserve an appropriate amount of credit for being in the right place at the right time and giving the go-ahead. Amiga fans might be nuts, but if you look at it historically, it was obviously the machine that took us from the first home PCs (monochrome or 16 color, single-tasking, type-a-letter) to the next ("full-color", multitasking, video and entertainment)... Even if its short life meant it primed demand for those features from its competitors.

  • LeftNut (unregistered) in reply to Dan

    The original IBM PC Model A did come with a single 160KB single-sided drive. The motherboards on the PCAs supported up to 64K of RAM in four banks of 16 KB DIP packages. The 256 KB motherboards came later, on the PC Model B, along with the upgrade to 180 K SS and 360 KB DS floppy drives. I was a co-op student with IBM at the time, and I plugged a metric crapton of 16 KB DIP DRAM packages into those motherboards. :-)

  • Dave (unregistered) in reply to operagost
    operagost:
    What's amusing is that the Commodore ad lies. The IBM PC clearly had a real-time clock. DOS, since at least 2.0, prompted you to set it. Unless the PET had a battery to maintain the time when turned off (I doubt it, because the later VIC, C64, and C128 didn't), its clock was no better than IBM's. In fact, those VIC chip home computers didn't even store a proper date; just the number of seconds (and tenths) since power-on, if I recall correctly.
    It prompted you to set it each time you booted precisely because it didn't have a clock. If it had a clock, you'd only have to set it once. In any case, no, the IBM PC did not have a real-time clock, although you'd often get one on the multi-I/O card that also had your floppy disk, serial, and parallel ports.

    And the PET was a different line of computers than the VIC-20/C64/C128. You shouldn't assume that the C128 had everything the PET had, just because it's newer. For example, the C128 didn't have a built-in monitor, but the 4016 obviously did. That said, I have no idea whether the 4016 had a battery-backed RTC or not.

  • iMalc (unregistered) in reply to Marc B

    Call that lucky? Mine doens't even come with a deelete key so efvery time I mike a mistake I jsut habe to keep tping and hope nobosy notices.!

  • spellingnazi (unregistered)

    Heh. Ad blocking hides the images. Because they're "ads". Sort of funny, maybe a tiny bit. Not unlike the ads themselves. :)

    I like this ad: http://media.funmansion.com/content/multiimage/vintage_ad9.jpg

    They were going for the mindless zombie demographic, apparently

  • pfunk (unregistered)

    this is garbage... if you want to advertise on your site, do it in an obvious not insidious mattter... fuck this shit

  • A. Peon (unregistered) in reply to Dave
    Dave:
    And the PET was a different line of computers than the VIC-20/C64/C128. You shouldn't assume that the C128 had everything the PET had, just because it's newer. For example, the C128 didn't have a built-in monitor, but the 4016 obviously did. That said, I have no idea whether the 4016 had a battery-backed RTC or not.

    It's true that CBM had many disparate machines and that features were not common across them. Of course, it's equally true that (before they differentiated with the Amiga and IBM-compatibles) the machines that went to market were often similar components jumbled in different ways -- take a 6502-class chip, add RAM, display, and I/O subject to costs, then add the latest display controller (VIC, TED ...) and maybe a sound chip (SID). Even the 128 (probably the most conceptually complex 8-bit they shipped) had those humble beginnings, but things got complicated when they started adding CP/M and 64-mode support!

    Now... Note that the ad is comparing prices as of September 1981, so we are definitely talking the earliest available PC and the original Apple II still in production. I don't know if the first IBM Cassette BASIC (in ROM!) had timing commands, but perhaps it didn't; Apple's early BASIC could be equally sparse. As far as I know, all of the CBM 8-bits, however, did have a system "jiffy timer" and access to it through BASIC:

    (thanks to http://www.portcommodore.com/petbasic.php for the following:)

      TIME

  TYPE: Numeric Function
  FORMAT: TI

    Action: The TI function reads the interval Timer. This type of 
"clock" is called a "jiffy clock." The "jiffy clock" value is set at 
zero (initialized) when you power-up the system. This 1/60 second 
interval timer is turned off during tape I/O.

  EXAMPLE of TI Function:

  10 PRINT TI/60 "SECONDS SINCE POWER UP"



  TIME$

  TYPE: String Function
  FORMAT: TI$

    Action: The TI$ timer looks and works like a real clock as long 
as your system is powered-on. The hardware interval timer (or jiffy 
clock) is read and used to update the value of TI$, which will give 
you a TIme $tring of six characters in hours, minutes and seconds. 
The TI$ timer can also be assigned an arbitrary starting point 
similar to the way you set your wristwatch. The value of TI$ is not 
accurate after tape I/O.

  EXAMPLE of TI$ Function:

    1 TI$ = "000000": FOR J=1 TO 10000: NEXT: PRINT TI$

    000011

    Now maybe you can see why they made the claim. No, it wasn't battery-backed on the original PET (or C64 or 128), and no, it wouldn't even be accurate as a wall clock after tape I/O, but if you were a BASIC programmer trying to get something done, you could time an interval without resorting to POKEing your own timer routine or trying to calibrate a FOR loop.

    On The Edge reports that the PET was really intended to meet demand from engineers for something they could quickly and interactively run BASIC on -- sort of like how I, years later, used to program a fancy TI calculator to take the drudge work out of math class. Having the feature in BASIC would allow an engineer or scientist to automate some timed task without having to become a computer "expert." (Just don't run the tape drive!)

    HP had some desktop devices expressly for this, however, note the price at the time -- above $3,000 for the HP, versus $995 for the late-model PET in the Shatner ad: http://www.series80.org/ByteArticle/index.html

    Plus, you'd have to know the HP product existed, and Engadget and thousands of twittering Slashdot readers didn't exist back then.

  • Tony P (unregistered) in reply to mjk340

    Err... In fact it's more like:

    if(input.ToLower() == "no") { //do stuff }

  • AntiQuercus (unregistered) in reply to Nick
    Nick:
    It has been far too long since I've had my hands on a VT-100.

    Those were the days.

    Relive those heady days by colouring your xterms in vt100 scheme, green on black. For vt220 nostalgia, i use amber on black.

    Captcha = genitus? Prove that you're not a robot. Show me your "genitus".

  • Mikel Ward (unregistered)

    The Commodore brochure says "5.5 inch" floppy. Is that correct? I thought they were 5.25 inch.

  • (cs)

    The more you look at the expression on Isaac Asimov's face, the more you can see the lack of mirth in that forced smile that says "I'm a whore and no amount of scrubbing will ever make me clean again".

    You know when they gave him that thing he was thinking "WTF is this POS?"

  • Nelle (unregistered) in reply to Anonymous Coward
    Or even better just make the page generate a totally random local url for each ad image placement. Then have the webserver return a random ad image for anything thats otherwise 404....

    how about returning a random irish girl photo for every 404 ...

  • Anonymous (unregistered)

    Battle the enemy pickles with your feet! Beg, borrow or save up for...

    [image]
  • Anonymous (unregistered)

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