As fast as technology moves, it’s always amazing when you reflect that the main medium hasn’t changed much. We started with IRC and Usenet and have come all the way to Twitter and SMS, and our primary means of communication is still sending each other little strings of text. Well, games can be played in [...]
There seems to be a trope floating around out there that New Media Is Evil. Every generation has its moral panic, over literature, radio, comic books, TV, the Internet, and now, video games. Just to name a few, video games are being blamed for: – Social isolation – Increasing violence – Addictiveness – Lowering moral [...]
For our American friends across the ditch, as well as various other parts of the world, Halloween is coming up. So what better time to examine the spooky remains of former technology greats, whose limbs are still twitching when we thought we’d shotgunned them to the ground? Here’s a list of technologies that we could [...]
Have you noticed how flaky the classic Star Trek looks these days? Now that we really have computers everywhere, it makes their squawky, monotone talking computer seem almost steampunk. Not to mention that McCoy’s tricorder is bigger than our palmtops, and Kirk always had to sign this big clipboard thing that the ensign brought by [...]
Around the office, we call it “low-budget entertainment”. Relieving the mind-mulching tedium of office work by playing with something. It can be low-tech, too. You can make a rubber-band and paper-clip boxing ring on top of an empty ink-cartridge box, fold two orgami men from notepad paper, and set them up inside the ring for [...]
Once upon a time, when cavemen squatted in caves roasting haunches of wallaby and dinosaurs roamed the earth, computers were these big, boxy things that sat on desks and weighed something like 50 pounds. They needed a monitor the size of a refrigerator, and the only thing they could do was display text and draw [...]
It was the the first flash of the Information Age. And we were there. We were the first kids to run up to the Tandy terminals on display at the mall and type in a little BASIC screen hack and run away laughing with security guards chasing us. We were the first kids [...]
There are actually a number of different individuals for whom retro-computing – the modern usage of vintage technology – is attractive. · Hobbyists – Anybody older than 40 probably has fond memories of their first steps with an early model, be it for games or work. Especially there is a booming market in “classic” [...]
