Announcement

Collapse
No announcement yet.

Friday night on the #9 Bus

Collapse
X
 
  • Filter
  • Time
  • Show
Clear All
new posts

  • Friday night on the #9 Bus

    Was riding home on the #9 bus, it was one of those new buses that has the orange marque signs on the outside front, as well as a marque sign on the inside that displays the time of day and the current location of the bus.

    When it got to Ala Moana Shopping Center the bus had some problems so the driver attempted to restart the bus. The vehicle went dark and the inside marque displayed this line:

    32K RAM

    and then:

    Serial address = 01

    After about a few more tries, the driver said that the bus can't go into gear. Luckly for me it was within walking distance to home. I suppose that 32K RAM was the amount of memory for the marque text.

  • #2
    Re: Friday night on the #9 Bus

    Back a few years ago, I remember Oceanic Cable's systems would occasionally glitch and instead of the rolling program listings on channel 12, you'd see a command prompt blinking at you. Does anyone remember which operating system it was?

    Comment


    • #3
      Re: Friday night on the #9 Bus

      I remember that! Can't remember the OS for the life of me, though.

      Ah, "simple" technology put before the public... gone wrong. It's like when you see an informational kiosk at the mall or in a hotel lobby that has a big sign on it that says, "Find Information Here!" Then when you walk up, the screen is black and reads, "Non-system disk read error. Press any key to continue."

      And, of course, there's no key to press, 'cause the keyboard was disconnected in the expectation that the big fancy touch-screen would be all the interface you'd need!

      Another real-world example? We use closed captioning on TV in our household. And every so often, right in the middle of someone's soliloquy, it'll go NO CARRIER. Heh.

      Comment


      • #4
        Re: Friday night on the #9 Bus

        While I used to tune in to channel 12 when I had nothing to watch, I never saw the command prompt. Any idea what it was?

        Comment


        • #5
          Re: Friday night on the #9 Bus

          Maybe not a few years ago....but, I did see a Windows 95 boot screen.

          Comment


          • #6
            Re: Friday night on the #9 Bus

            That command prompt (looks like this: c:\>) is DOS. It's used to boot up into Windows 95.

            I remembered someone post this on the old Hawaii radio/tv guide board.
            How'd I get so white and nerdy?

            Comment


            • #7
              Re: Friday night on the #9 Bus

              "Ah, "simple" technology put before the public... gone wrong."

              Like those auto-flush toilets at Ala Moana Center, some of which flush and flush while you're sitting on them and when you finish, get ready to leave, they do nothing.

              Now they have auto-towel-dispensing units. You wave your hand in front of the thing and it spits out a few inches of paper towel.

              Comment


              • #8
                Re: Friday night on the #9 Bus

                Once, at some airport, I saw auto-soap dispensers. You'd put your hand under the nozzle, and the thing would spit a dollop of liquid soap into your hand. It was a little creepy.

                Comment


                • #9
                  Re: Friday night on the #9 Bus

                  Can't remember which daily paper carried the article last week but some people are not happy with the new buses. While it's has a nice ride while you sit down it's a pain if you have to stand up since the hand rails are higher and the aisle is narrower.

                  Comment


                  • #10
                    Re: Friday night on the #9 Bus

                    Originally posted by Glen Miyashiro
                    Back a few years ago, I remember Oceanic Cable's systems would occasionally glitch and instead of the rolling program listings on channel 12, you'd see a command prompt blinking at you. Does anyone remember which operating system it was?
                    Not sure if it's the same "command prompt" you are referring to, but for the longest time, Oceanic's "Channel channel" (which is what i like to call the channel that shows the TV listings) used the Amiga Operating System. There wer many times when you'd tune into the channel and see a "Guru Meditation" crash screen (the Amiga equivalent of a Windows "Blue Screen of Death"), which was a completely surreal and funny experience to Amiga users like like myself. If you waited long enough, you could watch the operator typing in commands and moving the mouse around, trying to get the system back on line.

                    Comment


                    • #11
                      Re: Friday night on the #9 Bus

                      Originally posted by Glen Miyashiro
                      Once, at some airport, I saw auto-soap dispensers. You'd put your hand under the nozzle, and the thing would spit a dollop of liquid soap into your hand. It was a little creepy.
                      That aint soap....

                      Comment


                      • #12
                        Re: Friday night on the #9 Bus

                        Originally posted by melorama
                        Not sure if it's the same "command prompt" you are referring to, but for the longest time, Oceanic's "Channel channel" (which is what i like to call the channel that shows the TV listings) used the Amiga Operating System. There wer many times when you'd tune into the channel and see a "Guru Meditation" crash screen (the Amiga equivalent of a Windows "Blue Screen of Death"), which was a completely surreal and funny experience to Amiga users like like myself. If you waited long enough, you could watch the operator typing in commands and moving the mouse around, trying to get the system back on line.
                        Amiga, huh? I never used that OS, but it sounds like you would know. Yeah, that's the channel I meant. It was pretty funny to watch them fix the system real-time.

                        Comment


                        • #13
                          Re: Friday night on the #9 Bus

                          Originally posted by adri1456
                          That command prompt (looks like this: c:\>) is DOS. It's used to boot up into Windows 95.

                          I remembered someone post this on the old Hawaii radio/tv guide board.

                          That was me
                          Life is what you make of it...so please read the instructions carefully.

                          Comment


                          • #14
                            Re: Friday night on the #9 Bus

                            Originally posted by Glen Miyashiro
                            Amiga, huh? I never used that OS, but it sounds like you would know. Yeah, that's the channel I meant. It was pretty funny to watch them fix the system real-time.
                            The Amiga was one of those platforms that was WAY ahead of it's time. It was the dominant personal computer platform for desktop video production in the mid-80's to mid-90's (it was the platform that ran the revolutionary "Video Toaster" desktop video system, which was not only used on the first few years of the Leno-era "Tonight Show", but was used to produce and render the animation/fx in "Babylon 5" and "Seaquest DSV" ) . They were superior in almost all ways to PCs and Macs back in the day, but Commodore, the company that made the Amiga, was terribly mismanaged (some would say mismanaged to an Enron-esque level), and never marketed the platform effectively...and then when it was too late, PC's and Macs finally caught up with (and surpassed) the Amiga's technical excellence, and basically hammered the final nail into the Amiga's coffin.

                            Even though the platform has been effectively dead for at least 5-6 years, tens of thousands of Amigas are still in use in community access TV stations and video companies worldwide.
                            Last edited by melorama; September 30, 2004, 05:46 PM.

                            Comment

                            Working...
                            X