My mom was making an effort to understand Ubuntu just before she died…

FUD sells…

Oh no, I get why the interference happens, it’s more the content of the interference that surprises me. With analog video, a white screen is basically a 15 kHZ full amplitude square wave, but HDMI is encoded so regardless of the balance of 0s and 1s in the original content, the data stream should be just noise either way.

That narrows you down to one of what, five states?

I was a bit late - I remember trying so hard to find it when I was 16-17, but failing, then eventually hearing that it had been written by the FBI so that inexperienced troublemakers would blow themselves up before becoming a danger to anyone else… Then I found out about ammonium nitrate and how easy it was to come by, and started experimenting with it… But then Oklahoma City happened when I was about 18 or 19 and was kind of a wake up call.

Also late 40s, my grandparents had a party line when I was young, they were in a very small town.

It’s not the same…

If it works, it’s not dumb…

If they were in the same city, you only needed 7…

plastic

I remember when they were metal… Get off my lawn.

AM radio and shortwave could go far beyond line-of-sight by skipping off the ionosphere, which was primarily a nighttime thing, but that wasn’t really a thing with vhf (or higher) - unless it was just because there was less interference than during the day…

Not as problematic as you might think…

That really shouldn’t happen… I’ve owned a few microwave ovens, and a few wifi routers, and I’ve never had that problem…

Those are still in common use, though I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s mostly old people that use them… I can count on one hand the number of times I have to physically go to anything resembling a bank per year…

You could probably fit the entire game library of your favorite console back in the day on a thumb drive nowadays.

No probably about it- my wife just bought one of these handheld systems, it runs on Linux and has a bunch of emulators, and it has literally thousands of games for everything from the Atari 2600, NES, SNES, Gameboy, PSP, PS1, various Sega systems (including Dreamcast), several arcade systems, and a bunch of other stuff I’ve never heard of, all on a 64g micro SD card.

Lol I had one like that - I made a copy for a friend, but it wasn’t just one code word, it could be any one of about a hundred - but he was dedicated, he figured it out somehow over the course of a few weeks.

Nope, before that. In the early days, CD drives came with a caddy to load the disc into. I’m not sure why, maybe it made for a simpler mechanism.

I had a friend that had a rotator, the control dial was marked (with scotch tape and sharpie) for the more common channels.

Didn’t need that if all you had was A:…

I remember playing a port of centipede that used text mode graphics - on the original 8086 it was playable, but on my dad’s 386, you’d start the game and immediately lose because the centipede had already reached the bottom in like 1/10th second.

“Text mode graphics” would probably confuse a lot of the younger folks all by itself…