Tag: obsolete technology
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Calculator K-Hole
Something I sometimes do when I don’t have time to waste but still want to lock into some useless pursuit that will eat up hours is to try and find various things I owned as a kid. The other day, I started thinking about old calculators, and went on an endless search to find some…
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The Cult of Keyboards
As I approach the end of my 40th year, my body is falling apart. Okay, that may be an over-exaggeration, but every morning, it feels like another piece has been overextended or abused or mutilated, from the various discs in my back to the muscles and joints in my shoulders or arms or knees or…
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Dot Matrix and Word Processors
I was writing about something completely different the other day, and went on this side diversion about dot-matrix printers, and thought about how a giant subset of the population (like everyone born after about 1985) never had to deal with them, while I spent far too many hours fighting them in computer labs, pulling apart…
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On Mix-tapes, floppy disks, and gopher
When we were out for dinner last night, I was talking about the AT&T “you will” ad campaign. It seems like this happened ten minutes ago, but it was twenty years ago. I don’t entirely know why I remember these ads, since I didn’t have a TV at the time, and downloading a ten-second 320×200…
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It has been a decade since I’ve seen a sector not found error
Someone recently posted a sort of call-to-arms for people to dig up their old floppy disks and back them up immediately, because it would only be a matter of moments before the magnetic media would flake away and vanish forever. I remember hearing scare stories way back when, that after some huge amount of time…
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Strange Nostalgia for Lost Electronics
I get a lot of shit for the “museum of obsolete technology” I have in our storage locker right now, the electronic toys I’m paying $30 a month to not see. But I’ve pared down almost all of that inventory now, and it’s down to a single C-64 and 1541 drive, and a Sony Magic…
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What’s old is old
So this guy built a scale model of a Cray 1 computer, and not just a bunch of model railroad plastic and some Testor’s spray paint, but a WORKING model. The original Cray took 72 printed circuit boards covered back to back with chips; this guy was able to use a single Field-Programmable Gate Array,…
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A cautionary tale of incompatible formats
In 1998, I got a new credit card in the mail and after thinking about how many photocopies I could make for $1500 or if that was enough to buy like one sixtyfourth of an acre in some deserted forest, enough to build some kind of treehouse-esque unabomber shack, I suddenly realized that I had…
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Tweaking CSS, analog imports, hard drives
Yes, I am screwing with the look of the journal. There are a lot of minor changes piled on top of each other, mostly CSS junk. My big worry is that it doesn’t look right in other browsers, so if it freaks yours out, let me know. (A screenshot would be great.) The rounded corner…
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10,000 songs
I’m starting to suddenly remember all of the pain-in-the-ass issues with cassette tapes, as I try importing some of them to my computer. First, I have a shoebox of Sony C-90s with no labels at all, and I have no idea what’s on them, short of listening to the whole thing. Also, many are not…