I was a nerdy kid ("Noooo" I hear you cry). Had a hand-drawn periodic table on the wall, took apart anything I could get my hands on and had a number of toys that apparently you just can't get any more because they're "not safe".
One of my favorites was the Thomas Salter Chemistry Set. These things were available in "Levels". Level 1 contained some water, iron filings and probably little else. But by the time you reached Level 7, you had most of the periodic table, a dash of plutonium and enough odds and ends to do start some serious fires. Well, okay, maybe not plutonium, but you could have some scarringly good fun with any kit beyond Level 4 or so.
Sadly, if Wired
and other sources are to believed (and I think they can be), such
danger has been removed from the lives of today's kids. And that's a
real shame.
I distinctly remember some random combination of Salter chemicals that bubbled up and out of the test tube, melted the test tube holder and made a fair sized hole in the various layers of newspaper etc protecting the kitchen table. Now that's what I call an educational toy -- I gained far more respect for chemicals from my Salter-inspired misadventures than I ever from what we did in school.
It's been a long time since I wrote a dead tech post.
Logan (CTO) and I are almost exactly the same age. I'm not sure which of us was online first -- probably him since he started coding pretty much in-utero. Before the web, we both used tools like email, gopher, and telnet. I even recall using telnet and the Unix "talk" command to IM a girlfriend I had in college.
Yep. I'm seriously old in internet years.
We were both also very early users of the web, back when NCSA Mosaic was the tool-de-jour and there were only two porn sites on the web (which represented about the same percentage of the web back then as porn sites do today).
But one of the things I had forgotten about until recently was the joy of sending attachments via email "back in the day".
Without getting well beyond my technical knowledge & re-writing history, email was basically designed to handle ASCII text -- letters of the alphabet. There was no direct support for binary files e.g. a jpg (bad example, JPG wasn't around then) or other image.
So you went through a nifty process called UUEncode, which converted a binary file into chunks of ASCII text, something like this:
Yes. The ever fabulous Knight Rider. I happened to catch an episode last week and it was a smorgasbord of cheesetastic loveliness. And my car still doesn't do all that stuff...
Now bear in mind that when Knight Rider aired when I was a kid growing up in England, most cars looked like this: (the trusty Fiat 126)
or this (my first car):
(the Renault 4)
or, if you were really lucky, this:
(yay Austin Maxi)
So looking like this:
was a turbo-boosted ride to amazing...
That ever-trusty bastion of trivia, wikipedia, says that 90 episodes were created and they aired in more than 30 countries. Did you know the crazy Swedes called it "Knight of the Night", and for the terribly literal German market, it was titled "Knight Rider - a car, a computer, a man - A man and his car fight against injustice". And in Hungary, KITT had the "S-P-M-Fokozat". Have you ever wondered what the Fokozat?
Fantastic! And just try not humming that theme tune all day after you watch the video clip...
I mentioned the Franklin Rex card previously. It was a marvel. I also mentioned that I had a better mobile office setup in 1997 than I do now. The Laurel to my Rex's Hardy was the HP Jornada 820.
This thing ran Windows CE, had a full size keyboard, weighed less than 2lbs and was tiny. Take a legal-sized piece of paper and fold it in half, and you have about the right size. It was about an inch thick when closed. The screen was color, the batteries ran for 12+ hours per charge, it came with a CE version of MS Office, and it even had a modem built in. I also seem to recall that the OS was all in ROM, so it booted instantly.
Last, but not least, it had a PC-Card slot, and played happily with the Rex card.
My previous experiences with laptops weighed in at almost 10lbs. With the Jornada and Rex, I barely had 2lbs of luggage. I could create and edit Word and Excel files, and send and receive email. Life was good...
Back in 1997, I had a slicker mobile office setup than I have now. This was largely thanks to the Franklin Electronics Rex PC Companion. Here's a picture of the little fella...
This thing was awesome. It was about the size of two credit cards glued together. The whole thing could be placed in a laptop's PC-Card slot (then called PCM-CIA) and sync'd with Outlook. It ran on two watch batteries that literally powered it for months at a time.
The screen was a modest black-and-white 160-by-98 pixels, and the whole thing only had 5 buttons. But it worked like a champ.
Picture this: Prepare for a trip and sync your laptop with your desktop. Get to your destination, update your calendar, to do list and notes on your laptop and download it all to the Rex. Put the Rex in a shirt pocket and walk to the tradeshow with all the information you need for the day contained in just a few ounces of electronics that never failed, never locked up, almost never ran out of battery life and could easily be READ in bright daylight...
Sadly, the Rex never really took off. I think it was mis-marketed -- too many folks thought it was a replacement for a PDA. Since you couldn't enter data, those folks were always disappointed when they tried it. But back then, PDA's were awful. Palm's ate batteries as though they were candy and Windows CE was mostly a disaster.
But as a device to carry data, the Rex was second to none... and it spared me many pounds of luggage on many occasions...
I was trading emails with Tony earlier today -- he's someone I've known for many years and even founded a company with. Along with a number of other things, in response to my Bigtrak post, he mentioned a toy his brother had: the Evel Knievel Stunt Bike.
I had one too. And DAMN was it cool. Fast, dangerous (if pointed in the right direction), battery-free and pretty much indestructable (much more so than Mr. Knievel himself in fact).
For those of you that grew up in the era of all electronic toys, you missed out.
The bike attached to the red and blue base. On the side of the base you can't see was a large handle. You cranked the handle for as long as you dared and that charged the friction motor in the bike. Then you let it fly...
Here's the diagram from the original instructions. And it really would have made this jump...
I distinctly remember jumping mine up and down flights of stairs, on concrete driveways, over a variety of objects (including my long suffering younger sister) and not once did Evel fail me...
In the pre-computer age (practically in the pre-battery age for that matter) this was THE cutting edge.
In even better news, brought to you via the tubes of the internets, a replica (allegedly made from the original molds) is available on Amazon.
Thank you Mr. Kenievel -- not only did you inspire a lifelong interest in physics, you made a damn fine toy that contributed many happy hours to my childhood...
So yes, I was a nerdy kid. But this "laboratory" was a wealth of technological whizzyness. Not only was it crammed with 14 crazy electronic components, it was chock full of fantastic, almost Confuscian, worldly advice: "most of the interconnecting wires can be the short ones; in cases where the wires do not reach, use the longer wires." And my other favorite "this will assure that a leaky battery will not damage your unit." Not sure I was worried about my unit at such a tender age, but their concern was comforting nonetheless.
And the point of this marvel? 10 different projects, ranging from a simple crystal radio to a broadcasting radio station (less impressive than it sounds, sadly) to a high-falutin home burglar alarm.
Heady stuff.
I can clearly remember hurling a damn long piece of wire into a very tall tree in my parent's back yard and actually being able to hear european radio on my bakelite headphones (hey, I'm not _that_ old, they just happened to be lying around).
Jokes aside, this little kit rocked. It's probably the clearest thing I can point to as the starting point of my interest in all things technical.
If I ever find it again, it's going in a shadow box on the wall ;-)
The heady days of group cooperation that facilitated the purchase of a ZX-81 had their seed somewhere in the late '70's. And that seed's name was BigTrak. Pristine white (UK version) and chock full of coolness, fresh from a Jetson's-esque robot-filled future.
Bask in the glow and feast your eyes on the mobile armageddon on wheels that changed the world: BigTrak
Man. Dig those crazy retro 70's stripes! At the time, I think I would have donated body parts to medical science to have my room painted the same way. <sigh>.
Now it is possible that you just weren't cool enough to own one of these. Or perhaps you're just too darn young. But BigTrak could steamroller Aibo's skinny canine butt any day of the week.
"It was a six-wheeledtank
with a front-mounted blue "photon beam" headlamp, and a keypad on top.
The toy could remember up to 16 commands which it then executed in
sequence (such as "go forward 5 lengths", "pause", "turn 30 degrees right", "fire phaser" and so on."
Got that? A tank, people! Photon beams and everything! What's not to love! And we haven't even gotten to the kicking electronic steamroller-from-the-future noise Bigtrak made with every move.
Wiser souls than me have assembled more info on the BigTrak than I remember, but here are some more highlights:
"Let Big Trak's electronic memory treat you to an absolutely spectacular performance. Just punch in your program of
commands and watch Big Trak carry them out: moving forward, backward, left and right, up to 99 length units! Order Big Trak
to picot into a sharp or wide-angled turn, full circle, or even beyond that. Big Trak can lurk silently before continuing
on its course, and can fire either a single shot or a volley from its "photon" cannon. Send Big Trak out of the room,
around furniture and other obstacles, and back again! Easy enough for kids to learn, but so much fun, even adults won't be
able to resist. One 9 volt transistor battery and four 1.5 volt "D" size batteries."
Aww. They even called it a "transistor battery". Cute. And 99 length units? How charmingly analog (and terribly far).
The amazing this is that this toy delivered on the hype. Sure, ours didn't quite get it's turn angles right, or the delay times, or even the distances, but it could be told to sally forth down the hallway, tool around the kitchen, zap an undeserving relative with it's Photon Beam and return home. As long as you didn't miscalculate or exceed the maximum number of steps (and that's just CRAZY talk).
I have no idea where BigTrak is now. Off in some kind of space-age 100-length heaven from the future.
But thanks to the magic of the Internets, you can click the clip below to see this beast in action.
In an earlier post, I mentioned the illustrious history of the ZX-81 and the massive cooperation entailed in order to purchase the thing.
But fast forward to 1984/1985 and I guess I was rocking enough cash to boldly go it alone. And I did, with the stunningly whelming (neither over, nor under) Acorn Electron.
I'm not sure this was ever available in the USA. So here's a picture of the beast, resplendent in it's beigey-ness:
Are you in awe? 32K of RAM. POW!!! Real keyboard. ZAP!!! Third best selling computer in the UK at the time! Ka-Blooey.
Take that ZX-81. Cower in shame before the mighty beast that was... the Acorn.
Actually, I have almost no recollection whatsoever of what I did with the thing. But I can tell you one thing. The Acorn Electron was the computer that introduced me to the difference between hype and reality.
Elite. It was the game to lust for. The item beyond ALL ELSE that must be possessed. I seem to recall it was ungodly expensive, but according to the Internets, it was 13 quid ($26 or so), which I guess was more than a 13-year-old's bank account could handle.
But MAN did that game suck. Here's a picture of the box:
Note the lavish $26-worthy graphics on the right. And also note the wireframe badness on the left. As I recall you were supposed to land on various planets and trade. But the problem with low-res wireframe graphics is that you can't tell when you are just near a planet or actually crashing in to it.
After many hours of frustration, I admitted defeat and returned the product (I guess back then the notion of piracy was just toooo crazy and hi-tech to entertain).
Perhaps this brutal childhood disappointment is why I never became a gamer.
But hey, who has time to start a company and "command a Cobra space ship in a fantastic voyage of discovery and adventure" anyway ;-)
1981... The heady times of Thatcherite Britain. Deep in the industrial north...
A vast private-equity fund is assembled for the sole purpose of the deployment of 21st Century technology.
Well okay, it was actually my brother and my sister and I that pooled our hard-won Christmas cash to spend 80 quid (about $160 for most of you) on the supercomputer known as the Sinclair ZX-81.
And we bought the thing upstairs in WH Smiths (think: Barnes and Nobles magazine section as a high street store).
A Z80-compatible processor running at 3.25 MHz and an unbelievable 1 KB of on-board RAM. And a black and white display running at 64x48 pixels! Was there nothing this machine could not accomplish!
Well actually, as I recall, the first two we bought failed to boot. But third time was a charm. We didn't purchase the 16K RAM pack because (a) we had no idea what we would do with that much memory and (b) our fund was tapped out. In the interests of historical accuracy, (a) was a satisfactory excuse after (b) was discovered.
It also took a while to get the funky old TV to pick up the signal. But we got there in the end.
Hello World.
Some months later, when we had progressed to buying magazines and typing in programs (!) we found out that the tape in/out didn't work. For those of you confused at this point, you backed up or loaded your programs on audio tape via the line in/out on a chunky old cassette player. Or at least, you did on any ZX-81 except ours.
And that marked the beginning of the end for the trusty ZX-81. The last time I saw it, the z-key of it's membrane keyboard had become irreparably indented, so every boot produced a screen full of perfect Z's, in all caps, of course.
