37 posts tagged “retro”
Only the second time I've seen one in my predominantly paperless office.
It's hard to believe that, ten years ago, we were making preparations for the Y2K cut-over. As an IT professional, this was something we had to plan for, prepare for, and test.
We spent lots of money on remediation. I know that more than a few companies chose to replace the systems outright. At the time, my office specialized in implementing such systems. After Y2K, everyone had a shiny new system--it took a while before things picked up again.
As this article notes, the use of off-shore people started with Y2K. Once companies realized the benefit, they realized they could continue to send work overseas.
At the end of the day, was disaster averted, or was it a waste? Overall, I think that the remediation effort served its key aim of preventing lots of annoying little problems from causing not a global collapse, but months and years of lost productivity after the fact, sorting it out piecemeal.
Y2K came at an odd time in the world of computing. It was at the heels of the first internet wave, when such technology became a key part of day-to-day life. Over the course of the nineties, what was something that tended to be part of big business was being pushed to smaller and smaller organizations. Y2K, I think, was the capstone event for this shift, leading to a few years until the next phase.
In 1952, he was, in effect, tried for being gay--unreliable in the face of espionage. This set off a chain of events that culminated in his suicide.
The Gordon Brown, the prime minister of the United Kingdom, has apologized for this, and has honored him as the hero he is.
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One of the "clients" of my office happens to be our internal e-mail system. Today, in a fit of frustration, I went to the account manager for that group with a 1 GB USB flash drive.
"Can we plug this into the mail server, and increase my mail quota?"
Set the WABAC machine to 1992. Micro Center hand just opened, and the lost leader of the day was a box of 10 3.5", 1.44 MB floppy disks for $1. that was a crazy low price.* I took one, walked up to one of the SysAdmins at Miami, and asked, "Can we stick this in the VAX and increase my quota?"
Oddly, the increase (a quadrupling) was about the same in both cases.
*Putting this in today's terms: a 2GB flash drive runs $7 at Microcenter, or $0.003/MB (3/10 of a cent). My box of disks would run a bit over two cents.
Ahhhh....kids today. As an experiment, a 13-year-old tries a vintage Walkman for a week. It's amazing to hear his experience, such as having to learn to flip the cassette. He alludes to a "limited amount of music." I have seen similar experiences with my daughter. At four-years-old, she has a hard time understanding that, if I leave my iPod at home, I simply don't have every song I own with me.
My favorite quote:
Personally, I'm relieved I live in the digital age, with bigger choice, more functions and smaller devices. I'm relieved that the majority of technological advancement happened before I was born, as I can't imagine having to use such basic equipment every day.
Get off of my lawn!
Surprisingly, retro computing comes out not-too-bad.
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BREADBOX64 is a twitter client for the C64/128 which allows you to tweet from a real C64 and show your friends timeline. It uses Contiki, a very nice embedded OS, and the MMC Replay cartridge with the RR-Net add on for the physical connection to the net.
VisiCalc was the first spreadsheet application for a computer. It was originally on the Apple II, but was eventually ported to many of the common computers available at the time (Commodore PET, TRS-80, Atari 800, and IBM PC to name a few).
Prior to VisiCalc, personal computers were mostly used by hobbyists. People would build them for fun, and see what neat things they could do with them. They might write a program to have it play music, or a game.
By and large, however, these folks were the first to hear one of the most common questions in computing. It was heard when people first started buying these machinese, connecting them to the internet, or typing 140-character statements: "Why would you want to do that?"
VisiCalc was one of the first answers to this question. It was something that made the computer useful for something, and not as and end to itself. Businesses would buy personal computers in order to run VisiCalc.
In other words, VisiCalc was the First Killer App.
Dan Brickman, one of its creators, has posted a detailed history on his web site. Even cooler, you can download a copy of the IBM version to try it for yourself. Windows users should be able to run it out of the box; others might need to do some virtualization (as well as a DOS operating system).
This seems to be "old thing" day. I have two still-in-shrink-wrap copies of NT 4.0 on my desk. They have been here at least five, and probably seven or eight years. I have no recollection why I have them. I do remember who was the primary lead on the project.
NT 4.0 is significant to me personally. Aside from being one of the best versions of the Windows operating system, it was the one I worked with the most. I got certified in it. Ultimately, it is what got me with my current company.
The text in the yellow circle is a nice little time capsule. For those keeping score, Year 2000 (Y2K) was a big deal ten years ago (maybe this was on my desk longer than I thought). Ultimately, NT 4.0 got up to Service Pack 6.
TV Squad did a post about stars in commercials before they were stars. This one was to highlight Kevin Costner in an Apple commercial. This one advertised the Lisa, the first computer with a GUI to hit the market.*
Two things strike me about the commercial. When it came out in 1983, a computer on an executive's desk was inconceivable. There might have been a dumb terminal on a desk in specific situations, but not something that we would recognize as a modern computer. But the image is quite familiar here in the twenty-first century. Going into the office (on a bike no less!), and working on a personal computer on your own desk.
The second thing? It's freakin' huge! compare the big box/small screen of this thing to a MacBook. Wow. I know things improve, but it is still quite amazing.
