Digging through the archives (always an advisable course of action) Waxy finds and shares this monograph from Kotaku recalling how listeners in Bristol within the sound of the broadcasted squelch of data could “download” computer programmes to the cassette drive from the Radio West’s show Datarama during the early 1980s.
Can anyone remember doing this? I certainly recall running a programme from a cassette tape but never one captured on the airwaves. This and similarly transmissions became a forum for sharing programmes, games, MIDI music and even digitised images before the development of modems and more advanced storage formats for home computing. Relatedly, I came across another neologism that came a bit after this phenomenon in the form of prosumer—a term that sounds at least to my ears as a more disdainful way of describing an enthusiastic early-adopted. Carrying some negative connotations of being amateurish and readily surrendering money on something untested, expect through test-marketing, I am kind of glad glad it fell out of use.
Friday 30 November 2018
pirate radio
catagories: ๐ก, ๐พ, networking and blogging
Monday 8 October 2018
linkrot
Via Messy Nessy Chic’s peripatetic exploration, we are treated to a fascinating tour of the physical campus—a former Christian Science church—of the Internet Archive, a project which has curated what’s approaching four hundred billion websites in the past twenty-two years.
With bots scouring the web at all times and collecting presently a half a billion new pages weekly, this operation as well as choosing what to conserve for future generations given limited space and resources is not for the meek and is a good reminder to appreciate your local librarians, especially given that much like in real life, those for profit industries flush with cash and influence lean too heavily on foundations like the Internet Archive and Wikipedia who count on the work of countless volunteers and the donations of those who believe that their pursuits are worthwhile and worth preserving. PfRC apparently made the grade the first time back in 2015. See where your contribution to the on-line world resides on the shelves and stacks and consider making a financial contribution. For all the justified angst over the panopticon of the internet committing everything to one’s permanent record, the fact is that websites and connections wither away and require a substantial amount of upkeep and intervention to conserve the past, particularly when the present acquires a selective memory.
catagories: ๐พ, libraries and museums, networking and blogging, ⓦ
Wednesday 14 February 2018
ux
Tip of the hat to The Awesomer for directing our attention to a group of retronauts at Squirrel Monkey who imagine how the user-experience would be for contemporary social media platforms (see other nostalgic examples here), applications and personal assistants had they had their debut in the early to mid 1990s.
How would interacting with Siri (which isn’t the backronym Speech Interpretation & Recognition Interface incidentally but rather the namesake of the Menlo Park Stanford Research Institute founded in 1946 under the auspices of the university to attract computation talent to the area and more directly as a spin-off from a DARPA programme) for instance be if it required switching out floppy discs and operating at a low baud rate?
catagories: ๐ก, ๐พ, networking and blogging
Saturday 8 July 2017
buffer memory
One archivist and curator of endangered and at risk television programming is discovering that there is a palimpsest of preserved historical data to be retrieved from VHS and Betamax tapes that might seem otherwise without much merit from a conservationist point of view in the form of teletext pages that were collaterally recorded along with the surface shows.
Before the internet and home-computers became ubiquitous, the Ceefax service furnished a wealth of information, as with these captured feeds from June of 1983—plus resources to be found at the link up top that have compiled whole days’ worth of behind the screen programming. Most broadcasters ceased their teletext operations in the early- to mid- 2000s once the internet (especially news websites) became robust enough to handle high-traffic volumes but the service still continues for some in TV Land.
Sunday 2 July 2017
random-walk or playable character
Via Waxy, we are introduced to a text-based, pixel art choose one’s own adventure game based around Wikipedia’s Application Programming Interface (API) that allows one to explore, interact with objects, talk to characters associated with each location and enter direct commands at the prompt—like go to 1889. This is really nostalgic and fun for those of us who remember the original King’s Quest computer games and similar series and how one would try to test the parameters of language and direction, especially when stuck in a seemingly inextricable dead-end. I wonder, if in the Wikipedia platform, one can simply walk into Daventry.
Wednesday 19 April 2017
chocolate-covered broccoli
Though I can’t claim to have had any direct experience with Oregon Trail (“You have died of dysentery”) and was quite fond of Carmen Sandiego (albeit mostly due to the later television game show adaptation with catchy musical interludes by Rockapella but I don’t think the edutainment software was terribly sustaining), I did enjoy this reminiscence and appreciation of the fusion of entertainment and education—described as chocolate-covered broccoli as that’s the resulting palate in most cases.
In elementary school, moreover, I do remember weekly visits to the computer lab to sit before terminals connected to a mainframe that cycled through some human-interest stories of made-up newspaper that I supposed tested for reading comprehension but none of it was particularly engaging. Once we matriculated to Computer Literacy class, outfitted with Macintosh IIe models that one could program and communicate with rival middle schools with a modem, things did rather grow interesting and our attention was rapt. I think people take for granted that conversation that they have with themselves once they resolve to allow technology into their lives and homes. The novelty, entertainment value of technology was a poor decoy for the recalcitrant learner, but its capacity as a vehicle for education comes out in the tinkering—like with the ownership that comes from working on a jalopy—and to find oneself confined within a world of bounded possibilities that makes risk-taking paradoxically less risky. Fortune still favours the bold and awards those able to step outside themselves.
Friday 3 March 2017
silver surfers
catagories: ๐ฏ๐ต, ๐, ๐ก, ๐พ, holidays and observances
Sunday 20 November 2016
ios
On this day back in 1985, the Microsoft corporation introduced the graphical interface, DOS-overlay known as Windows 1.0 in order to complete with the popular Macintosh released a year prior—think of that seminal Big Brother, Nineteen Eighty-Four advertisement whose revolt promised to free us from the tyranny of the PC.
I wonder when cultural the geneology of version n-point-o of something became idiomatic. Back then the battle for dominance between Microsoft and Apple struck me as something not very much different than the Cola Wars—one has to wonder if innovation comes because or despite the branding, and it doesn’t strike me as very much different nowadays, excepting who’s Tab and who’s Royal Crown may have flipped.
Sunday 23 October 2016
legacy software
Corroborated with the US Government Accounting Office’s (GAO) annual report, the Simpsons have been vilified in accusing the Internal Revenue Service (the IRS, the tax authority) of operating the “slowest, punch-cardiest” computer in the government—at least, in one sense.
Those who work for the government have enjoyed heretofore some measure of job-security in knowing that their position is justified because different, entrenched systems cannot communicate with one another and need human translators—or at least water-bearers, but often it’s not the equipment, the hardware that’s wholly off life-cycle. Those laurels can be awarded to the nuclear defence platforms running on the same mainframes since inception and cannot be taken offline for updates and payroll systems. They may not be the most sophisticated but that does not necessarily mean that a system that goes on working for decades, with proper maintenance, ought to be overhauled for the sake of efficiency or intelligibility—since they are impervious to attack (at least the lazy, automated kind) and there might be an element of self-preservation in the programming, like the Voyager space probes exploring the Cosmos as our competent ombudsmen.
Monday 10 October 2016
tron/troff or pitch-perfect
Recently an archivist made a fascinating discovery in the form of the first programme, score of digital music from 1948. Cryptologist and polymath Alan Turing wrote the instructions to have his building-sized computer at a laboratory in Manchester perform God Save the King followed by a few other melodies.
While we do have some insight into the pragmatic drive for Turing to modify the mainframe to produce sound—wanting to untether himself from monitoring gauges and screens to check the status of a running programme, a B- of an F-note indicating whether the programme had concluded or ran into a logical glitch (the beep, bop, boop of vintage super-computers), so he could check for bugs elsewhere or attend to the engineering requirements of the hardware, we are sadly not privy to what Turing thought about electronic music or its potential, since for years Mister Turing was blacklisted and his contributions to computer science went unacknowledged.
Monday 19 September 2016
megabit, metabit
To my peril but also to my subsequent delight and emendation, my love-letters from Brain Pickings are usually dog-eared and set aside for reading that I always promise to get to at soon point, but that pile in my inbox is seething and threatens an avalanche. Happily, I was able to return to an intriguing sounding review of the life and times of a young mathematician who’s pioneering work in circuitry demonstrated that all logical operations could be reckoned by switches and relays and the just invented transistor, leading Claude Shannon to quickly and intuitively conclude that all information in the wilds—its natural habitat could be corralled and tamed, with data emerging as information thanks to the transfiguring exchange between the observer and the observed.
Saturday 5 September 2015
your princess is in another castle
Via that other intrepid adventuress, Nag on the Lake, we are invited on field-trip with the team of explorers of Atlas Obscura to Saint Petersburg to see the conservation efforts of a group of nostalgic and impassioned group of college students, which has produced a vintage arcade experience.
Visitors are immersed in an ensemble of loving restored and playable games and refreshments that capture the ethos of the Soviet Union during the ‘70s and ‘80s. This unique installation (which is presenting some major maintenance challenges) consists of gaming machines that were not only about fun and fantasy—commissioned in accordance with the wishes of the state, there was little time or tolerance for anthropomorphic mushrooms and damsels in distress and these games rather emphasised hand-eye coordination, strategy and team-work over competition. Although no one can say for certain as the provenance of the games is a classified matter, they were probably designed and programmed in the same facilities and by the same computer scientists that were charged with the maintenance of the Soviets’ nuclear weapons arsenal.
Thursday 7 January 2010
these kids today with their y2k...
catagories: ๐พ