World Readable: a personal blog about anything that comes to mind for anybody who cares to read it.
I’ve imported all of the posts (about 50) from my old TechToys blog into this one, so any post older than my first one (on March 25, 2008) is from there, dating back to 1999!
It’s fun to look back and see some of the old tech I’ve gone through over the past 10 years.
I was sad to hear (on TWiT episode #188, via Ars Technica), that the University of Virginia has decided to dismantle their student computer labs. Apparently there’s not much of a need for them now that just about every incoming freshman has a laptop.
I have lots of fond memories of my college’s computer labs. As a Computer Information Systems major, I spent a lot of time the various departmental labs: the VAX lab, the word processing lab, the UNIX lab, the programming lab, the multimedia lab, etc. Even once I finally had my own IBM-compatible PC (my freshman year I still had my Atari 800XL), I still spent a lot of time in the lab. It was a community … a place where you could go to work on assignments, get help from other people, or give assistance to others. Some nights, when the “homework” was done I would spend time playing multi-user games like Galactic Trader on the local VAX, or any of the various MUDs on the internet (like AmberMUSH or the one hosted on the Cleveland Freenet … man, those were some serious time sinks for me back then). I even ran my own MUD on the university VAX for a while, a heavily customized version of Monster, written in Pascal.
Later on in my college years I actually worked in the various school computer labs as a lab monitor. I’d have to help the engineering majors with their FORTRAN programs, or the comp-sci majors with their Ada, or C, or COBOL homework, or the math students with their SAS assignments … I encountered a wide variety of people and problems in those labs. And I enjoyed every minute of it.
So it’s sad for me to see that social part of computing starting to disappear. I’m sure not all schools will follow UVa, but I’ll bet this is the start of a trend. Like the UVa post says:
Lab software usage statistics from 2008 reveal that out of a total of 651,900 hours spent using software in the ITC-provisioned public computing labs, 95% of the time (over 619,500 hours), students were running commodity or free programs such as Firefox, Internet Explorer, Adobe Acrobat Reader, or Microsoft Office. All of these software programs come pre-loaded on student laptops or are available at low or no cost to UVa students.
In contrast, just 5% of the time spent running software in ITC-provisioned public labs was devoted to specialized packages such as MatLab, Eclipse, Mathcad, or SPSS.
It’s hard to argue with statistics like that.
On one of the forums I frequent there’s been a recent thread about the evolution of the graphical user interface. In that discussion someone posted this link to a GUI timeline that shows screenshots of many of the UIs that evolved over the years. It’s a really cool walk through GUI history and made me recall (some fondly and some not so much) the operating systems behind those GUIs that I’ve used over my 25+ years of computing.
Whew.
… has long passed, I know. These days a person’s presence on the ‘net is usually defined by a social networking profile (like Facebook, MySpace, or LinkedIn), maybe a personal blog (like this one), or a Twitter feed. Gone are the days when people crafted their own home pages, hosted by their ISPs (or places like GeoCities).
I was reminded of this a few days ago when I received an e-mail from RoadRunner informing me that they will be shutting down their current user home page site (home.tampabay.rr.com) on March 17. If I wanted to keep my home page I would need to migrate to the new home.roadrunner.com site (with, wow, 25mb free storage). It occurred to me that most of the stuff on my RoadRunner home pages was old … really old. Once I started this blog last year I never really touched that content. So, after over a decade of having a hosted home page of some sort on the ‘net, I decided to take them down.
Ok, so they’re not really gone … I moved them all to my own server to be preserved for (arguably questionable) “historical” purposes. Nothing ever disappears from the internet after all …
We got back this evening from our trip to Los Angeles, CA where we spent Christmas with my wife’s family.
Back in 2004, my brothers-in-law and I started a (somewhat dubious) new tradition: the holiday frag fest. We were all at my in-laws house that year and we all had laptops and my father-in-law had just put in a wireless network. One of us (I think it was me) came up with the idea of playing a game over the network on all of the laptops. Since this wasn’t pre-meditated, the only free, easily downloadable game we could come up with on short notice was Doom II. So sure, it was some classic retro gaming, but it was fun! I think we went a little (ok, a lot) overboard that first year, deathmatching into the wee hours of the morning (our spouses were not amused).
Christmas 2006 found us back at my in-laws and the tradition “officially” became a tradition (you have to do it more than once, right?) as the laptops returned. That year’s game-of-choice was Doom 3. Once again, much joyous fragging of family members occured into the wee hours each night.
This year, I suggested Assault Cube, a small, free, cross-platform, open-source FPS. While AC doesn’t have the crazy range of weapons like the Doom, Quake, or Unreal series of games, it has enough to be fun (including grenades!), plus a lot of maps and several different game modes (our favorites being capture-the-flag and one-shot-one-kill).
We really put AC through its paces: we used two Vista laptops (both of which needed video card driver updates to run smoothly), a MacBook Pro, and my Eee PC running Ubuntu. In fact, I hosted the AC server running our LAN game on my Eee (while playing via the client at the same time). That shows you just how a small a footprint AC can run in (my Eee only has a 900MHz processor with 1gb of RAM). There were times when my framerate got choppy (and thus caused me to be gibbed by my opponents) and the 7″ screen is a little small for gaming (yes, I probably could have used an external monitor), but overall the experience was pretty good. We tried to cut back a little this year so as to stay on the good side of the other family members so we didn’t play as extensively in past years. Still, a good fragging time was had by all involved.
Now to start planning for FragFest 2010.
The beloved computer mouse turned 40 earlier this week. Check out some of these great video clips from Doug Englebart’s 1968 demo at Stanford. Jump right to clip #12 to see Doug demo the mouse and explain how it works. Did you know they used to call the cursor (or pointer) the bug? Really cool, amazing stuff.
The office directory touchscreen in my building has been stuck like this all day:
Nice to see that Win98 is still in use … I think.
To celebrate the 25th anniversary of the movie “WarGames” it’s showing in select theaters tonight at 7:30pm! You can use the event locator to see if it’s playing near you.
Unfortunately I just found out about this today and have prior plans so I can’t go … but I totally would if I could. As I mentioned two weeks ago when I was reunited with my old Atari 800XL, “WarGames” was the movie that really piqued my interest in computers and got me started down the technology path.
This is also a promotional event since the new sequel, “WarGames: The Dead Code” is being released on DVD next week.
Today I realized that in the past 12 years I’ve owned 4 Palm and 3 Windows Mobile devices:
That’s a lot of PDAs … boy was I glad once I got the Treo and didn’t have to carry around a phone and a PDA!
When I was up in Ohio on vacation last week, my mom presented me with a cardboard box she found while cleaning out the basement. Score!
The Atari 800XL was my first computer, given to me by my parents as a Christmas present in the early 80s. That, combined with seeing the movie “WarGames“, is what steered me into computers and eventually, my career. This particular 800XL isn’t my original unit. I sold that one and “upgraded” to this one, which had the RAMBO XL memory upgrade to a whopping 256k (from the original 64k). So technically it’s my second computer. 😉
The cardboard box also contained my two 1050 floppy drives, a KoalaPad (no stylus), and an ICD P:R: Connection. I also had a 256k ICD MIO but sadly that was missing. I used to run a BBS on all of this hardware and with the 256k internally on the computer and the 256k external RAMDisk I was able to load the entire thing into memory to minimize floppy disk access. The 1050s were not the quietest drives and since the whole setup was in my bedroom, I could get woken up in the middle of the night when someone on the BBS saved a message board post and the disk drive would grind to life.
I managed to get the Atari hooked up to a Sony LCD HDTV in my home office:
Seeing and using the Atari again, compared to my Eee, really drives home how far computing has come in the past 25 years. Wow.
Now if my mom could only find the other box filled with game cartridges and disks …