I mainly meant “to the general public” this (windows 98) was cutting edge.
Almost no one even at the time knew what SGI was. In the late 90’s and early 2000’s even apples share was tiny.
It just blew my mind then how horrible the experience of using windows was compared to Unix and that windows won.
I had a job in 2001 running a bunch of computers: 1/3 windows, 1/3 Unix and 1/3 Mac - os9 mostly. The Unix and Mac just worked.
The windows computers broke so often I set them all up to use SMB shares for user file storage. Since they were all the exact same dell systems and all had the same software on them anytime one broke I’d just boot a Linux CD and use “nc” and “dd” to rewrite a functioning disk image to the system in question and bring it right back up to usable. Then it was just a matter of logging in the right SMB shares and the user just thought I’d fixed their computer.
I once had a magical collection of chips from old Unix workstations - dec alphas and vax, dig and sun. I was responsible for cleaning out a large storage room of computers from the 70s-90s and I pulled all the processors I could because they were amazing objects to look at.
I remember throwing out handfuls of ram chips measured in the KB and thinking how much each handful originally cost.
I was like 19 when I did this and everything got lost to time in the end.
It sure was a fun time as a Unix geek playing with all this old hardware. We had a dec box running netbsd that had an absurd uptime - like 12 years or something. Labs of Sunrays running off of 8 processor mainframes. SGI’s around the edges.
But even then I was slowly replacing this stuff with Linux. There was just no competition and as much as I loved the legacy Unix stuff it wasn’t as nice or as easy to run as open source alternatives.
These things were so awesome back in the 90s. I got to use quite a few of them and even owned a couple in the early 2000s as they were being thrown away.
It always blew my mind that systems like SGI and SUN existed and yet somehow windows was allegedly cutting edge.
Heat buildup cause a lot of noise to appear in the image.
New cameras are overcoming this with fans. Look at the just realeased Sony fx30 or the Panasonic S5ii. Both have built in fans to aid in cooling getting them unlimited record times.
I shoot with a sigma FP that has no recording limit and no fan. It is designed as basically a giant heat sink. It also has some of the lowest amounts of noise of any camera.
I’m sure the eu thing comes into play in hitting that 30 minute mark but it’s probably a convenient choice of time limit when solving the heat buildup issue.
FWIW I’ve followed film cameras closely for years and have never heard of this EU law while all reviews etc talk about heat buildup because it is so detrimental to image quality.