Taking a break from the nomad posts to insert a little tech into the mix…
A week or so ago I was buzzed over Skype by my friend Ewan Spence, an award-winning podcaster, Cthulhu tamer, and kilt wearing international man of mystery.
Ewan asked me if I’d like to be his guinea pig first interview for a new podcast concept he was trying out – “Room 404“.
The format of “Room 404” is that in each episode, a notable geek will present five bits of technology that used to be awesome, but which have since become lost to history and mostly forgotten. The name comes from the “404 error” that you get when visiting a web page that no longer exists.
To make a game of it, the goal is to convince the host which old tech is cool enough to be brought back from obscurity and out of Room 404.
Here is what I presented:
- The Commodore Amiga – My first digital love. I still have my dear sweet Amiga 1000 stored away in its original box. Never before or since has there been a single computer that was as groundbreaking in so many ways.
- wuarchive.wustl.edu – In the early 90’s Wuarchive was rumored to generate 10% of the traffic on the entire Internet. And I had the entire archive literally at my fingertips with faster access to it than anyone else on earth.
- Ricochet Wireless Modem – Listen to the podcast for the story of how I used a Ricochet to constructed a VAN (Van Area Network) to get my puzzle hunt team online from a moving vehicle. Nowadays we all have Google in on the phones in our pocket, but back in 1999 this was like magic. We barely even had Google back then!
- The Tapwave Zodiac – The most awesome handheld gaming system on earth, until the Sony Playstation and Nintendo DS squashed it from both sides at once.
- Fossil’s Wrist PDA – A Palm-Powered watch, and it was geeky stylish too!
It was a LOT of fun to dredge up some of the favorite tech from my past, and it is always a blast to chat with Ewan.
You can listen to the premier episode of “Room 404” here. *grin*
What bits of old tech would you want to retrieve from the mythical room 404???
Awesome idea. You guys are out dating me on most of those gadgets.
Neat post.
Since LOGO came up in the comments I recommend Mindstorms by Seymour Pappert as a good read. Warning: LOGO might then make more sense than you can stand, especially given how far ahead of his time Seymour was and where we have landed since then; much good but missed opportunities too.
Check out Bruce Sterling’s Dead Media project from the mid-90’s. Appropriately the link is dead. So you have to go to web archives.
Haven’t listened to it yet, but I totally agree with all of those.
I actually sold my two Tapwave Zodiacs just a few months ago. Amazing little devices! Apparently there’s still an active and dedicated user base, but with fewer than 200k sold, it was the third worst selling handheld console device in history (Gizmondo #1 and R-Zone #2). Why don’t more portable devices have aluminum cases instead of plastic?! Cost, I guess, but it just makes a device feel so solid in your hand.
Aluminum is expensive, and it blocks radio waves too. But it sure feels nice in the hand!
Gawd I feel young. 😉
Heh… and we feel old 🙂
Was the Amiga the one that had the turtle language, or am I confusing that with Commodore64?
The “Turtle Language” was LOGO, and it was available for lots of early computers. I first played with LOGO on the Apple II at school when I was in third grade. But there were versions of of it for the Commodore 64 and Amiga too.
The C64 was our first home computer, and the first computer I did a lot of programming on. I even ran a BBS on my C64 before moving up to an Amiga.
Dad is a programmer, so we had a TRS-80 and Ataris for play. Friends had a BBS running off an Apple II with 2 floppy drives (and there was stuff to download!! LOL)
I only ever used LOGO in school when they tried to teach that for some reason.