At the beginning of our MA in Science Fiction Studies program in 2006, Christian, Sunshine, and I boarded the River Mersey Ferry for a trip to Spaceport in Wirral where the Doctor Who Up Close Exhibition was taking place, which I wrote about here. Sadly, Spaceport has been replaced, but these photos–most are mine and a couple were taken by Christian when my camera battery died–recall one of its coolest exhibits there.
On April 20, 2013, I attended the first Vintage Computer Festival Southeast outside Atlanta, Georgia at what is now the Computer Museum of America with my friends Mark, Paul, and Bob. This was the spring of my first full year back in Atlanta after becoming a Brittain Fellow at Georgia Tech in Fall 2012. It was a good day like old times before I went to grad school.
The following year, I co-presented with Wendy Hagenmaier about Vintage Computing at Georgia Tech, which I blogged about here. I will post photos from the 2014 VSFSE next week.
If you’ve seen the film WarGames (1983), you know what kind of mischief you can get up to with a tricked out version of an IMSAI 8080.
I often regale my students with tales of the rise of the personal computer with the big three mass manufactured models: Radio Shack’s TRS-80, Commodore’s PET, and Apple’s Apple II (though, it’s actually an Apple IIe pictured below).
I didn’t know anyone with a VIC-20 or Commodore 64 growing up. Mark told me about having a VIC-20 when he was younger. After my trials with the Tandy Color Computer 3, my first GUI-based computer was an Amiga 2000HD. I used it for years for writing, drawing, and gaming until a tree branch attached to a long strand of Spanish moss swung Tarzan-style into my bedroom window and hit the back of the Amiga. It never ran again after that strike.
Years later, I got another Amiga 2000 from someone at a Goodwill auction. He had won the pallet that I wanted that included the Amiga. I don’t remember what I paid him for it, but I stored it at my used computer stall at Duke’s Y’all Come Flea Market in Darien, Georgia. We had a falling out and I abandoned what I still had in the stall, which included the Amiga. I never found out if it still ran or not.
My first desktop computer was a Tandy Color Computer 3 that I hooked up to the family console TV. While I did all that I could with it, I think my mom recognized my frustrations. I wanted to make it work so badly after not having a computer and wanting one for so long. The next Christmas, my folks gave me a Commodore Amiga 2000HD, which was light years ahead of the CC3.
I have a large print out of this original Apple I motherboard hanging over my desk at City Tech.
I had a Quadra 700 when I lived in Atlanta with Y. I put it in a box and left it with my folks in Georgia when we moved to NYC. Where it is now is anyone’s guess. There are many hiding places for a small box with this tiny powerhouse of a Mac. I hope to find it again one day.
My first laptop was a PowerBook 145B, which was my companion during my last two years of high school and the beginning of college of Georgia Tech. Later, I owned a PowerBook G4, iBook G3 (the result of a trade with my friend Kenny), 15″ MacBook Pro (2006), 12″ MacBook (unibody, 2008), and 15″ MacBook Pro (2012–Y still uses it).
Apple Macintosh TV
When the 20th Anniversary Macintosh debuted, my friend Chris and I lusted after it. It was a sexy computer, but it had an out of this world price tag of $10k (though, that included having a technician deliver, setup, and demo the computer in your own home). In retrospect, it was a terrible product that ignored what the original Macintosh represented as an every person’s computer. This computer was about style and prestige and money. A lot about what Apple represents today after Steve Job’s passing seems to be drifting back toward what this computer represents.
The Apple TV/Video System was an expansion card that gave you a TV tuner and video inputs for your Mac. The PowerCD was an external SCSI CD-ROM drive for Macs that might not have a CD-ROM drive built-in. And the QuickTime Conferencing Kit included a camera and software for video conferencing and collaborative tools like a shared whiteboard–back in 1995.
The thing that used to burn me up when Apple released innovative products like the Newton, popular media like SNL would shit all over them, which would turn the general conversation away from what the products could do and had the potential to do towards the limitations and lack of imagination by those folks who would otherwise never purchase or use those products. It wasn’t criticism. It was product assassination. Had that not happened, I think the Newton would have been in a stronger position that might have let it develop further before getting killed off.
It seems like the Internet and social media provides a force or pressure against these negative megaphones of the past. However, there’s equally a lot of fanboys and cheerleaders who don’t temper their enthusiasm with a little bit of reality.
My first experience with an original Bondi Blue iMac was soon after its announcement. I was working at NetlinkIP on St. Simons Island, Georgia when a client called asking for help setting it up. I drove out to a very nice house on the island, unboxed, and configured it to dial up to the Internet. Admittedly, I took longer than was necessary so that I could thoroughly check it out.
Later, my friend Bert got a G4 Cube. Despite its complete lack of internal expandability beyond upgrading its RAM or hard drive, he used his beyond what I think most people would. Every USB port was used for devices or hubs and it was connected to his stereo system. He used it for a lot of graphics and video work and showed how it really was a supercomputer in a small package.
I had a 17″ Luxo iMac for awhile in the early 2000s, but I sold it before I built another desktop PC using an AMD Athlon 2500+ CPU. While I had it though, I liked its crisp 17″ LCD and it was a powerhouse for some of the video editing projects that I did at the time.
Steve Jobs’ second act and the salvation of Apple when the prodigal son returned.
This is Xerox’s GUI desktop minicomputer that brought together what Xerox PARC had been developing and demoed to Steve Jobs and his team at Apple that led to the Lisa and eventually the Macintosh.
I really like the concept of pocket computers. When I was in middle school, my grandparents gave me a Radio Shack PC-7 Basic Programmable calculator. It looked like a calculator with a built-in soft cover that had a ABC keyboard layout. Considering its programmability, it was the first computer that I owned. The only digital device I had before that was an Atari 2600.
Pictured below with his tic-tac-toe computer that demonstrates binary digital logic, Jim Stiner’s creation still works. Before we left the VCF, I enjoyed speaking with Mr. Steiner about his project inspired by a humanities class. I was reminded of Steve Job’s 2011 special event demo for the iPad 2 where he talks about Apple’s DNA marries technology with the liberal arts. That concept seemed apt for Mr. Steiner’s project, too.
Who needs a display, printer, and program storage when you have a teletype machine like this hooked up to a mainframe or time-share minicomputer?
With the sounds generated by these cereal box toy whistles, which were adapted and expanded electronically with so-called blue boxes, you could commandeer the phone network for your own uses.
This is a digital re-creation of the German Enigma machine used to cyptographically secure their communications during WWII.
Thankfully, LEGO provides digital copies of their set instruction books online. This means that if you have the bricks, you can build anything in the LEGO catalog. Of course, it might take time and energy to hunt down each individual brick and element that you might need to assemble a given set if your collection is as disorganized and binned as mine is. Nevertheless, it’s satisfying being able to build something new with what you have instead of having to go out and buy it.
In this case, I assembled a set that didn’t buy when it came out in 2010: 8099 Midi-Scale Imperial Star Destroyer. It took a considerable amount of time to find all of the bricks that I needed to complete it, and I had to cannibalize some other sets to get all of the parts. Eventually, it came together. However, I did have to make one off-color substitution deep within and hidden from external view.
Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio: a fellow
of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy: he hath
borne me on his back a thousand times; and now, how
abhorred in my imagination it is! my gorge rims at
it. Here hung those lips that I have kissed I know
not how oft. Where be your gibes now? your
gambols? your songs? your flashes of merriment,
that were wont to set the table on a roar? Not one
now, to mock your own grinning? quite chap-fallen?
Now get you to my lady's chamber, and tell her, let
her paint an inch thick, to this favour she must
come; make her laugh at that. -Shakespeare, HamletI bring my trusted skull and brain model nicknamed Yorick to my writing and science fiction classes when I want to talk about something related to cognition–e.g., how our attentional focus works, cognitive costs of switching cognitive tasks, time delay from sensory perception to processing to conscious awareness, where are the speech regions–Broca’s area and Wernicke’s area–located, etc. Yorick’s skull and multi-component brain gives students something that they can see and feel and manipulate when it gets passed around the classroom.
And when students leave a hat behind, Yorick gets a treat.
I picked up this faithful R2 unit from LEGO when I began my position as a Brittain Fellow at Georgia Tech in 2012.
It’s the 10225 R2-D2 set that was released in 2012 (shortly before I moved back to Atlanta).
It features a turning head, a little bit of wobble, arms, saw, data port interface, and a retractable third leg. It’s blockier looking than the 2021 R2-D2 75308 set, but its the blockiness that makes it endearing.
Though, be warned that R2, when left to his own devices, might try to hack your computer . . .
