Archive for the ‘Retromodo’ Category

You’re Never Too Old to Tweet [Retromodo]

This Commodore VIC-20 is running software from a cassette tape, has only 5 KB of RAM, and a processor that runs at 1 MHz. Yeah, it’s vintage. But it’s also the first VIC-20 to tweet.

Using software called TweetVER (short for Tweeting from a Vintage ComputER), the folks at the PC Museum will be accessing Twitter from this VIC-20. You can read the first tweet on Saturday February 20th at 11am EST by following the museum’s Twitter account. (There appear to be some test tweets from a modern computer on the page, so disregard those.)

While we don’t think much about accessing Twitter from any one of our desktops, it should be kept in mind that the average computer today runs on about “3000 MHz and contains 2,097,152 KB.” This translates to about “419,430 times the memory power and 3000 times the speed” of a VIC-20. And despite all that, grandpa VIC-20 is still ready to tweet. [PC Museum]

Beeper Code: The Caveman Days of Text Messaging [Y2k10]

In 1999, 45 million Americans had pagers. They were an equal-opportunity technology, owned by drug dealers, whores, doctors and CEOs—and new college students whose parents couldn’t drop the leash. At least there was the code.

Saddled as I was with my beeper, I did what I could to avoid actually picking up the phone. For Christmas my mom gave me a few rolls of quarters: a reminder that when she paged me, I was supposed to call her back. Most of my paging, however, was sending numerical messages to my friend Sarah.

My pager was green! Hers was pink! We were so very cool. This number-to-word conversion we became addicted to will probably go down as only a very minor footnote in turn-of-this-century communication, but, for kids who’d never known from text messaging and hardly used email, the idea that I could send her any kind of message and she’d get it instantly—that was pretty darn huge.

Some of our codes were super private so I can’t share them, but others were standard: 411 for information, 911 for emergency, 143 to symbolized the number of letters in each word of the phrase “I love you.”

There was also an accepted system of sending numbers so that, when written together, looked vaguely like letters. We’d grown up getting adults to spell “BOOBLESS” on calculators by typing in the elements of a story about Dolly Parton and then holding the calculator upside down. (Her bra size was 69 and that was 2, 2, 2 big. So, she took 51 diet pills and went to see Dr. X eight times. Now she’s… 55378008.) From there, it was an easy jump to many other words. Hello was 07734. That was one of the easiest one. We said “Hello” a lot. Bitch? Why that was 81764, naturally. There were so many, it became necessary to have beeper-code dictionaries, or at least, a basic decoder.

Now, Sara and I text using actual words written using actual letters. Boring.

Anna Jane Grossman will be with us for the next few weeks, documenting life in the early aughts, and how it differs from today. The author of Obsolete: An Encyclopedia of Once-Common Things Passing Us By (Abrams Image) and the creator of ObsoleteTheBook.com, she has also written for dozens of publications, including the New York Times, Salon.com, the Associated Press, Elle and the Huffington Post, as well as Gizmodo. She has a complicated relationship with technology, but she does have an eponymous website: AnnaJane.net. Follow her on Twitter at @AnnaJane.

Photographic Proof of the Apple Tablet…From 20 Years Ago [Retromodo]

I know, I know, that headline’s a dirty trick. But this is still pretty cool: TechCrunch got ahold of a shot of the Apple Pen Mac, a stylus-driven tablet concept circa 1990 that eventually collapsed in favor of the Newton.

The Pen Mac was an inch thick, used the same screen as the Mac Portable, and didn’t merely exist in a lab—this is a real working model pictured here, not just a pretty (for the time) case. Unfortunately, the powers that were wanted a handheld rather than a full-sized tablet, and so the Pen Mac was discarded in favor of the Newton, which in turn didn’t have such a hot life itself.

The project was dug up for a sequel, called the PenLite, but it too was cancelled, and the mythical Apple tablet has gained stature ever since. Something interesting to think about: The Pen Mac was cancelled because it was replaced by a handheld, lower-power computer—sound familiar? Maybe the iPod Touch and iPhone are, in that very specific way, the Newton of today, and we’ll never see a full-sized Apple tablet. I know you guys hate to think about such a thing, but we all know that the past repeats itself. I learned it from Battlestar Galactica, so it has to be true. [TechCrunch]

Kids Guide to the Internet is Educational, NSFW [Retromodo]

This video, a vintage “introduction to the internet” from the early 90s or thereabouts, features the line “What’s a webpage? Something ducks walk on?” If that doesn’t convince you to watch this hilarious, mysteriously-filled-with-pixelated-porno masterpiece, I don’t know what will.

I have preserved the lyrics of the opening song for posterity’s sake:

On your mark, get set!
We’re riding on the internet!
Cyberspace, set free, hello virtual reality!
Interact with appetite! Searchin’ for a website!
A window to the world, got to get online!
Take a spin, now you’re in with the techno-set!
You’re goin’ surfin’ on the internet!

Elmore Leonard once said that a writer only gets ten exclamation points to use in his life, so he’d better use them wisely. I just used eight and I am 100% confident that it was the right decision. I love this video more than Steve Jobs loves turtlenecks. I love it more than a night of drinking and installing. Hell, I love it more than Jesus Diaz loves and sexually harasses the women of Sweden. The world is a sunnier and happier place with this video in it. Enjoy your night. [Videogum]

Computopia: A Future Where Computers Teach, Then Beat, Then Heal Japanese Kids [Retromodo]

Welcome to Computopia—a 40-year old Japanese vision of how robots might become a part our everyday lives. Complied by Shōnen Sunday magazine, these illustrations depict robots performing surgeries, teaching in a classroom and beating kids for their insolence.

Interestingly enough, there are several technologies depicted in the series that have actually come to fruition (although they are heavily cloaked in a LSD meets The Jetsons meets Lost in Space kind of style). See if you can pick them out of the gallery posted at Pink Tentacle. [Pink Tentacle]

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