The games are usually more danceable than pocsag, but less so than radiofax. I just need to remember to not execute any of the code while I am listening.
I’ve made harsher music than that on purpose
For Voice of America to beam into Eastern Europe, pre 1990?
I’ve been meaning to post this for a little while, but I keep forgetting.
Everyone should immediately go here:
He has the best self-made video documentaries on older personal computers.
He is informative and not annoying. A rare combination on YouTube.
Here’s a good one to start you off:
I remember playing some very primitive CP/M game on my brother-in-law’s Osborne. Man, that screen was painfully tiny.
And they used to call them “portable.” Then the word “luggable” came along; by reviewers probably.
I was eleven or twelve at the time, and quite scrawny. I couldn’t pick it up with one hand.
I guess it’s a different outlook, but when I think “tech”, I often think of social structures. So to me many kinds of government, religion, family, currency also qualify as retro-tech.
For example: advertising! The search engine and ubiquitous networking made the concept and need for ads completely superfluous, since now anybody can find anything they actually need. It might be moribund, or a lurching headless zombie, but I think ads are (kicking and screaming) joining the buggy-whip in obsolescence.
Remember adverts? (yes, I am old)
Didn’t The Steve himself say three and a half inches was big enough?
My first computer was a hand-me-down Osborne. Did you know you could use a key combination to shift the screen left and right?
I remember writing my own text adventures in BASIC. The only game I remember having was Snake.
The search engine is a form of advertising, exactly like the Yellow Pages.
Because we were buying their microprocessors at the time* I got a really good deal on an early NEC laptop. 80 by 25 B/W with a 2 hour battery life. BUT
I could go to a meeting in London, take notes plugged into mains, edit them on the train back and have the minutes faxed through to the other attendees before most of them had reached their offices. Even when we met in the Midlands and I drove, I could be done by 5p.m.
Fourteen pounds of utter one-upmanship.
*So we get the period into place, these were the first CMOS 8086 clones, the V40. Running at 8MHz with two instruction cycles per microsecond.
I’m sure he did, but what did he say about screen size?
That too.*
It is amazing how recently both Apple and Google were defending sub-4-inch screen phones as being the optimum for human use, right up till Samsung and LG started to make bigger and bigger screens.
i think Steve was right. even with my aging eyes, i HATE the ginormous phablets that are so popular now.
It can be implemented as such, but that is no way innate to the tech conceptually. The tech still obviates the purpose of advertising. The difference is analogous to that between the net and television, the internet is fundamentally decentralized, while advertising is a centralized, broadcast, top-down form. The fact that some companies are trying to stay relevant by making the internet resemble television or the yellow pages does not change the fact that those tech and practices have been superseded.
Actually, I had the desktop model:
Considering how difficult it was to locate an image of this, I’m a bit sorry I passed it on to my nieces years ago - it must have been fairly rare compared to the portable.
The screen was definitely bigger than the Osborne.