Santa has little respect for floppy disks, shoving them in there without sleeves.
Discussion Topic of the Week: When's the last time you used an Atari ST series computer? What did you run on it?
It's that time of year again: the Yuletide. Instead of writing something new and fresh for the season, I thought I'd dredge through the VC&G archives for Christmas material and collect it all in one place.
Below you will find a list of everything Yule-flavored from this site and my freelance work. There are a couple slideshow gems in there that you don't want to miss, so check those out if you haven't already.
I have a soft spot for Christmas, having been raised with the tradition, so this list is for me as much as it is for everyone else. After going through these things again, it's amazing to see how much Christmas stuff I've posted over the years. I hope you enjoy it.
When you're done reading that Computer Space piece I wrote, feel free to mosey on over to PCMag and check out this slideshow of 10 game consoles that could transform into PCs. (The title they gave it is kinda confusing, but the content still stands.)
Most of the console conversions featured in the piece are from the 1980s, but there's one more recent example in there that might surprise you. Or maybe it won't, because you guys tend to know a lot more than the average bear. Either way, I hope you enjoy it.
Two teen girls compare notes on vampires that attend their high school.
Ah, the dedicated electronic pocket organizer — an ever-present, seemingly useful device for want of a market.
Since the early 1980s, electronics manufacturers have produced pocket-sized computer gadgets that store databases of phone numbers, addresses, calendar appointments, and not much else. These electronic organizers reached their peak (in terms of number of devices in the market) in the mid-1990s. At that time, the technology involved became cheap enough to market to kids.
Despite manufacturers' best efforts, such devices have continuously failed to gain widespread use for a simple reason: none have demonstrably improved upon the paper address book. Not even the socially-hungry teen girl market, as targeted by Sharp in this 1995 ad for the Pocket Locker, could push them into the mainstream.
It was only when manufacturers rolled electronic organizer functionality into a more general-purpose device (think palmtop computer, PalmPilot) that the idea of electronically maintaining personal contact records in a mobile setting took off. Address books, calendars, and phone databases became separate programs that lived in a larger ecosystem of applications that could be run on the device.
Most palmtop computer-style PDAs offered significant advantages over the paper organizer. They synchronized with PCs to back up information, and they could use the stored data in conjunction with other programs for more useful effect — for example, you could actually email someone directly from a record stored in your digital address book.
Contrast that experience to the dedicated pocket organizer model, where the the information you entered became trapped in a tiny plastic box with a crummy display and a kludgy interface that would lose its memory if its batteries ran out.
Today, the organizer-as-software clearly won over dedicated units, and anyone with a mobile phone now carries an organizer software suite in their pocket. It's only one of many functions that cellphones have absorbed on their quest to become the ultimate multipurpose pocket device.
Discussion Topic of the Week: Have you ever used a dedicated electronic pocket organizer device? Tell us about it.
Just a little while ago on Twitter, I started spouting out some one liners, Jeff Foxworthy style, about how you know if a website is old. I love coming across old websites, so it's fun to spit these out.
I can't guarantee that they're funny, but I think they're at least amusing. People liked them enough that I decided to post my lines here and ask you guys to continue the list. I may add more to it over time.
Now it's your turn. Add your one-liners in the comments below.
The cover of the first issue of "Family Computing" magazine, September 1983.
Discussion Topic of the Week: What's your favorite food to eat for Thanksgiving? Favorite video game to play?
Forty years ago today, Intel announced the 4004. It was the first single-chip microprocessor in the world — an entire central processing unit (CPU) rendered as in integrated circuit on a single chip of silicon.
Up to that point CPUs were typically constructed of many ICs and discrete components soldered onto multiple circuit boards that, when combined, would have trouble fitting in a cigar box. The 4004 compressed similar functionality into a silicon chip 1/8 inch wide by 1/6 inch long.
The story of the 4004 began in in 1970, when Japanese manufacturer Busicom commissioned Intel to help create a chipset for a desktop calculator. Intel rejected the initial Busicom-designed chipset and countered with its own simplified design, which included the 4004 and three other supporting chips. Those chips, when used together, could form the heart of a complete microcomputer.
While the 4004 first appeared in the Busicom 141-PF calculator (seen above) during mid-1971, a contract renegotiation later in the year left Intel free to sell the microprocessor and its supporting chipset to others. It announced the 4004 to the general market using a carefully placed advertisement in the November 15, 1971 issue of Electronic News, an important trade newspaper for the emerging semiconductor industry.
Once available to the general market, the Intel 4004 appeared in only a handful of 1970s commercial products before more powerful microprocessors, like the 8008, made the 4-bit CPU thoroughly obsolete.
Those early 4004-bearing products are quite hard to find today, making them generally unknown to computer history. That's why I created a slideshow over at Technologizer that explores little-known applications of 4004. Some of the applications — like arcade games and electronic voting machines — might surprise you.
I hope you enjoy it.
That spot in the upper left is actually mold that grew on the paper.
When is a text adventure game not a text adventure game? When it's Beyond Zork: The Coconut of Quendor.
Infocom's fourth entry in the Zork series (actually the 8th if you count the related Enchanter series and Wishbringer) combined interactive fiction with light RPG elements such as equipment, stat sheets, an on-screen map, and character leveling to create a unique game that may be best compared to a single player MUD (a SUD?).
Beyond Zork sports procedurally generated maps in some areas, so replay value is theoretically infinite. But randomness is a double-edged sword in this case: its magic items move around between saves and loads, and that can frustratingly break the suspension of disbelief (i.e. you see it, you die, you come back, and it's gone). Still, Beyond Zork is an amazing game that deserves more attention than it usually gets.
Discussion Topic of the Week: What's your favorite entry in the Zork series? Every Zork-related game counts.
Stranded in a jungle with only a desk, a cup of coffee, and an Atari 800.
I've always enjoyed the illustration style found on the earliest Atari 400/800 instruction manuals, such as the one here for the Basic Reference Manual. I've included an extra large scan this time so you can enjoy the detail up close.
Does anybody know the name of the artist who did them? I'll admit I haven't looked very hard.
By the way, this manual was written by River Raid creator Carol Shaw.
Discussion Topic of the Week: Have you ever programmed with your dad? Tell us about it.
Text in bloom.
Here's an interesting piece of obsolete technology — a plastic Lanier daisy wheel for a daisy wheel printer. Its actual size is about three inches in diameter.
There was a time when having a "letter quality" impact printer meant that the machine printed text using pre-formed, typewriter-like type elements. Some printers held these elements in the shape of a cylinder or a sphere, but in the case of the daisy wheel printer, the character forms projected from a central wheel in a shape that resembled a daisy flower.
Daisy wheel printers produced text by rotating the wheel to the proper character spoke and striking the back of it against an ink ribbon, which would leave a mark on the underlying paper.
Each daisy wheel rendered a different font (or type size), and thus fonts could be changed as easily as replacing one wheel with another. In this case, you're looking at a wheel for the font called "Prestige Elite 12," but printer makers sold dozens of other font wheels, such as those for Courier 10 or Cubic 15.
The daisy wheel method reproduced fonts using a dramatically different technique than, say, dot-matrix printers, which used a single matrix of metal pins to form various characters.
Laser and inkjet printers, which produce much less noise and use software-based fonts, made impact printers thoroughly obsolete for every-day PC use by the late 1980s (though stragglers used dot-matrix printers well into the mid-1990s due to lower prices). Even so, impact printers still reign supreme in specialized applications that require physical force, such as document reproduction via carbon copy paper.
Discussion Topic of the Week: Have you ever used a daisy wheel printer? Tell us about it.
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