Party Like It's 1996

Here's the 30 second beer ad commercial for this monitor.

I can plug in every single machine I own and switch between them all with a remote. In basically two days I built a full isolation network mini-rack build right into the monitor chassis to allow seamless administration of an untusted network with Windows 95 and RedHat 5.2, NeXT, Mac all wanting file sharing service, name services, software and driver repos. That's all done. I can just grab drivers on my workstation, drop them right into a file share and pick them up on a Windows 95 machine. And I have loose VGA connections ready to go to configure servers and stuff that have VGA out. All that VGA video is going through two, passive $25 VGA switchboxes. Looks super sharp, and I was the guy with the 17" and 21" Sonys (as pictured below!). My big Trinitrons also just had tons of this switchbox stuff going on and never looked this good. I mean, chalk it up to better cables I guess, but I very purposely bought the "Standard '90s Beige Switcher" with the big chunky knob and yeah it just looks perfect.

Not only all that, but you can capture the screen through the crystal clear HDMI output.

I'm pretty sure streaming is a main intended feature of this monitor, but even for me, where that's not my primary use for this thing, it's so convenient. I can sit here in a Secure As I Can Make It VNC connection to a Windows 95 machine and capturing what's on the screen across the room in OBS. I find myself instinctively just watching progress on the display in OBS rather than turn all the way around just to see if my 57MB has copied over its 10Mb Ethernet yet.

Neat Indeed.

And yeah that modem is "10BASE-T" explicitly. The manual specifies Category 3, 4 or 5 UTP for 10BASE-T). This DOS only program really is how you set things like the duplex in the manual.(Not speed/duplex, multiple speeds didn't exist)

I could probably have left it at 10/Half and been just fine. I should get some 100Mb cards though. There's not gonna be a whole lot of bidirectional traffic on this thing. I mean I worked on plenty of office networks running 10BASE2 back in the mid '90s. Occasionally someone would have Novell and some twisted pair.

I thankfully got in toward the tail end of "new" 10BASE2 installs though I did my share of fishing that shit in several-hundred-year-old buildings.

SCSI also. I have like 2 bins of SCSI stuff plus enclosures I really want to build. That SCSI gear was Above My Pay Grade in 1997 when I was 22 and burning all the candles at once with a blowtorch. The Packard Bell I'm working on now is identical to the one I first played Doom on in 1994. Mine was an SX-33 that I upgraded to a Cyrix 80Mhz. This one is an Intel 50Mhz, so it's a "2052" rather than the "2033" I had. The P120 is also very age appropriate. This whole thing is basically an upscaled version of my 22-ish year-old setup.

The file modified datestamp on this photo is 9/9/1999 at 10:57PM. I think that game is Obsidian, which I did pay for and did own which came out in 1997, so I'd have been between 22 and 24 there.

I'm wrong, that's Starship Titanic, which was my other guess, which came out in April 1998, and I did buy it it's on my desk there!

*(Really, that's really what was in my playlist)