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Items tagged with: RetroTech

Brrr... new introduction time cause my old one is already outdated lol.

I am Sinclair-Speccy, your local resident computer nerd that can’t actually do a lot of tech stuff like people think. My primary interests are #Linux, #OldTech, and #OStan. You’ll usually find me boosting retro tech content and occasionally posting it myself, mostly retro tech ads.

My interest in emulation all started when I managed to run Yggdrasil Linux from the '90s (I know, so interesting /s). Despite having used XP as my first OS other older OSes (mostly Linux ones) interest me more if you look at the media I've posted on my account besides the tech ads.

I’ve moved around a bit online as I started on .art as my friend was there, then bitbang.social and now oldbytes.space.

One of my favourite niche fandoms is OS-tans which is turning operating systems and hardware into anime characters, though I tend to call them tech gijinkas. I even have my own tech gijinkas universe that is hosted on my site.

As for some other stuff I enjoy #mythology, #transformers, #cats, #fantasy, #nature such as #flowers and #plants and #animals, #steampunk, #starwars, #photography, #art, #space, #cyberpunk and #scifi... there is more but I'm not writing them all.

You can check out my website here: sinclair-speccy.github.io/The-… and I hope to expand it into a tech journalism platform or something, though motivation and its static nature kind of stop me...

Unlike in the past I'm not active as I used to be, sadly.

#RetroTech #Retro #RetroTechnology #RetroComputing #VintageComputers #Introduction

#linux #art #cats #introduction #photography #scifi #cyberpunk #nature #fantasy #starwars #retrocomputing #animals #space #retro #steampunk #mythology #retrotech #plants #flowers #oldtech #ostan #transformers #retrotechnology #vintagecomputers

It's almost past the holiday season and I hope you've had one that you were dreaming of all year. I realized, I haven't ever repeated my advent calendar event which many of you seemed to have liked. That does not mean I have stopped researching good practice examples of accessibility implementations around the world. As a way of making up for it, I wanted to share a story that I digged up by following a thread of references from a podcast I was listening to, through somebody's personal website like it was done 30 years ago, through an anonymous FTP to the main site of the Braillnet project. I found the story really inspiring. It's 1993 in then Czechoslovakia. and the Internet is slowly becoming a thing alongside some, often locally produced, ways of making DOS and Windows 95 PC’s talk, at least with the most common software. It is apparent to the employees of the local blindness organization that the net will be a game-changer in access to information for blind and partially sighted users, some of whom own notetakers like the Eureka or even PCs. By cooperating with the IT centre of a university they set up a BBS under a phone number in Prague and offer, for the first time, access to digitalized books and magazines, an e-mail account, a Telnet and FTP client. Public transport schedules might have been a thing too but I'm not 100% sure about that. The network develops but the limitations are apparent: access mostly to internal information and only through a number in one city. Four years later, an idea is born to give all persons with disabilities access to regular, dial-up internet with prominence of locally sourced material but not excluding the entire world wide web. They manage to secure state funds and support of local ISP's and set up numbers for all major numerical zones in already then Czech Republic, giving unlimited access to the Internet to any person with a disability for the fixed price of around 4 USD per month. #Accessibility #RetroTech #Blind
#Accessibility #blind #retrotech

#blind #retrotech

Todays #RetroTech

Scotch 3M Magnetic Tape Viewer

These are rare beasts, a useful tool for Audio Archiving. It rests on the Tape, showing the Magnetic Pattern

Ensures you get the right Head Configuration first time

Here’s - Quarter Track, Half Track & 8 Track

Before anyone asks, no, it doesn’t work on Helical Video as the Tracks are too fine. But it does show Edge Track Audio & Sync Pulse

@obsoletemediauk

#retrotech @Museum of Obsolete Media

For any enthusiasts of legacy assistive tech, it seems the first source code of the Talks Screen Reader for Nokia 9110 Communicator has been published by one of the original devs. Unbelievable to think that it all started off as a bunch of prerecorded messages supplemented by the ability to spell anything it doesn't have ready letter by letter and plugging in external synthesizers and Braille displays via the serial port:
github.com/mgroeber9110/talx91…
#Accessibility #Blind #RetroTech #ScreenReader

GitHub - mgroeber9110/talx9110: TALX screen reader for the Nokia 9110 smartphone

TALX screen reader for the Nokia 9110 smartphone. Contribute to mgroeber9110/talx9110 development by creating an account on GitHub.
GitHub
#Accessibility #blind #screenreader #retrotech

If like me, you were a child of the '90s, you might remember "ReBoot" – a pioneering 3D animated kids series created by Vancouver's own Mainframe Entertainment.

These documentarians have gotten a hold of the original, uncompressed digital masters. The problem is, they're in the D-1 format.

If anyone in the #retrotech community has access to a Bosch BTS D1, or a comparable D1 player/decoder, I urge you to reach out to @ReBootReWind (on Twitter) to help preserve #ReBoot!

globalnews.ca/news/10194517/re…


B.C. documentarians secure original ‘ReBoot’ master tapes, but need help to play them

A pioneering work for its time, Vancouver-produced 'ReBoot' was the first full-length 3D animated TV series. A pair of documentarians have now secured the show's digital masters.
Simon Little (Global News)
#retrotech #reboot

#virtualreality #retrotech #TomorrowsWorld

Since some time I have been drawn to research Minitel, a French Videotex-based system for accessing information that predates the Internet. It was a revolution in terms of digitalization which made activities such as buying train and plane tickets, signing up for classes and reading newspapers digitalized as early as the 80's. You can read more about it in the following Wikipedia article:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minitel
There were many devices invented to make Minitel accessible to the blind, although the system itself wasn't designed with this target group in mind. Mostly, they were external speech synthesizers like in the case of Lectel:
lemonde.fr/archives/article/19…
or the Valentine text-to-speech card for the Apple II:
blog.atalan.fr/valentine-carte…
The history of the Eurobraille company, the makers of the popular Esys, Esytime and B.Note Braille displays, starts also with a speech synthesizer for the Minitel terminals.
eurobraille.fr/notre-histoire/
As I found out, however, most of France's blind community at that time did not have access to this kind of technology and Minitel only became accessible on a global scale in the 90's when regular PC's did but then it was almost the time of the Internet so it never gained the same momentum as it did with the society at large. Pity as this could have been an opportunity to push the inclusion of blind and partially sighted people to whole new levels.
Always design with accessibility from the start!
#Accessibility #Blind #AdventCalendar #France #Internet #Minitel #Videotex #RetroTech

Les ordinateurs ont la parole

Un Salon vient d'être consacré aux machines parlantes et aux innovations techniques destinées aux aveugles. Le matériel existe, pas encore le marché !
CHRISTIAN TORTEL (Le Monde)
#Accessibility #blind #france #Internet #adventcalendar #minitel #videotex #retrotech

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