{"id":423,"date":"2008-02-08T14:25:19","date_gmt":"2008-02-08T19:25:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.vintagecomputing.com\/?p=423"},"modified":"2008-02-08T16:19:30","modified_gmt":"2008-02-08T21:19:30","slug":"goodwill-goods-pokemon-and-japan-ai-books","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.vintagecomputing.com\/index.php\/archives\/423\/goodwill-goods-pokemon-and-japan-ai-books","title":{"rendered":"Goodwill Goods: Pokémon, God’s Y2K, and Japanese AI"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"ThreeYesterday afternoon, I drove to a local Goodwill<\/a> store in search of more random junk to clutter up my house. As always when the electronics pickings are slim, I spent most of my visit perusing their used books section. Among the mountains of Danielle Steele and self help guides, one can usually find a number of interesting obsolete computer and video-game related books there. Yesterday was no exception, as I picked up three interesting printed techno-artifacts from the past. Care to take a look? To the Bookmobile!<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

<\/div>\n
\n

How to Become a Pokémon Master (1999)<\/h4>\n

Author: Hank Schlesinger
\nPublisher: St. Martin’s Paperbacks<\/em><\/p>\n

\"How<\/a><\/p>\n

Among other, more obvious things, this book teaches its readers in a 14-point font that schoolwork is always more important than video games. Sheah right! I smell intellectualist propaganda.<\/p>\n

But seriously, this book was written with an eight year-old mind in mind and thus, my mind — however much it might resemble an eight year-old’s (according to my wife) — has trouble tolerating even a mere glance at the text without grimacing. Even ten years on, it’s hard to deflect the publisher’s soul-piercing dollar sign-gaze as you labor to read this utter turd of an attempt to capitalize on the then fever-pitch Pokémon-gasm.<\/p>\n

That being said, I’m proud that I’ve added it to my historical library.\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/div>\n

\n

The Fifth Generation (1983)<\/h4>\n

Authors: Edward A. Feigenbaum and Pamela McCorduck
\nPublisher: Addison Wesley<\/em><\/p>\n

\"The<\/a><\/p>\n

\nEconomic fear of Japan seems strange to us these days, but in the early 1980s, when Japan was eating America’s domestic auto and electronics industries for breakfast, it was par for the course. Simultaneously, a popular fad among computer pundits of the early 1980s held that computer AI would soon (and I mean soon, i.e. 1990) become the prevailing software paradigm.<\/p>\n

Fittingly, the premise of this 1983 scaremonger’s delight is that, by 1993, Japan will develop “artificially intelligent machines that can reason, draw conclusions, make judgments, and even understand the written and spoken word” thus throwing the balance of world power favorably in Japan’s direction. Be warned, my friends, for 1993 will soon be here. America best counter this threat, or we’ll all be doomed to lick East Asia’s robotic bootheel…forever!\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/div>\n

\n

Y2K: The Millennium Bug (1998)<\/h4>\n

Author: Shaunti Christine Feldhahn
\nPublisher: Multnomah Publishers<\/em><\/p>\n

\"Y2K<\/a><\/p>\n

\nTo see why this book is unique, please note the book’s subtitle above (you’ll find it just under the golden beetle). Far be it from me to criticize a “Christian response” to anything (heck, just criticizing a certain aspect of the sacred Commodore 64<\/a> brought me enough faithful wrath as it is), but this book is straight-up hilarious for a secular Y2K fanatic like myself. A quotation on the back cover reads:<\/p>\n

“This moment is creating the occasion for God’s people to seriously question whether the Y2K computer glitch may be a judgement of God. Is God using this to drive His people and the nation back to Himself?” — Henry Blackaby, author of Experiencing God<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Ho ho…not so fast, Henry. Far more likely is the reality that the Y2K bug was the work of Bill Gates, who wished to bring the whole world to his knees and give birth to a new nation of cyborg zombies<\/a> that only run Microsoft Windows. And by a quick visual survey of those unfortunate souls BSODing around me, I’d say his plan worked.<\/p>\n

The book itself looks a little rough, as if it had weathered a worldwide civilization collapse. Ironically, the only collapse it survived was that of a giant stack of these remaindered hardbacks sitting in a warehouse somewhere in Montana.<\/p><\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Yesterday afternoon, I drove to a local Goodwill store in search of more random junk to clutter up my house. As always when the electronics pickings are slim, I spent most of my visit perusing their used books section. Among the mountains of Danielle Steele and self help guides, one can usually find a number […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,13,24,18,9,10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-423","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-computer-info-and-history","category-video-game-info-and-history","category-humor","category-recent-finds","category-retrogaming","category-computers"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vintagecomputing.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/423","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vintagecomputing.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vintagecomputing.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vintagecomputing.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vintagecomputing.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=423"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.vintagecomputing.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/423\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vintagecomputing.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=423"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vintagecomputing.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=423"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vintagecomputing.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=423"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}