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Walkman, at 30, a mystery to teen
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/07/01/BU2618GKE7.D...
I remember my first Walkman. I got it at this speciality electronics store in the Dallas Galleria in 1982. It was over 100 bucks I think. I don't rightly remember, but at the time it was a considerable purchase. I remember that. I got alot of mileage out of it though. Used it all the way through High School when I got a newer and slightly smaller one.
It must be funny as a kid who has these nanopods capable of holding 16 gigabytes of music and more to look at one of the Walkmans.
It makes me think of Moore's Law really and wonder just how soon we'll hit technological singularity. I mean when I was born my father worked at a company called Northern Research and they had a computer. It was the size of a house and not even close to as powerfull as my phone is today. Ten years later we were using a TRS-80 at home with a whopping 4k of RAM. Then my Apple II C with 128k of RAM a few years later. My first PC, a 286, then a 386 and a 486.
My first laptop was a Pentium motherfucker. Huge. No real batterylife to speak of, I had to plug it in wherever I went. I was the only person in my grad school who used a laptop in class. People looked at me like I was mental, but nowdays everyone has a computer in class. Not back then.
Heck I was one of the few people to have a computer at all in college. Most people used the computer labs. Few signed up for email accounts, and those that did used PINE email via Unix. ONe of my girlfriends even had a modem. That was nuts. A modem at home?
Now look at me. 3 computers, and flatscreens, a laptop more powerfull than any of that crap put together, a phone even more powerfull than most of that stuff put together.
30 years ago having to go to an arcade to play a computer game, and it was something simple like Asteroids, wearing a 5 pound walkman. Now playing a 3d graphic game on your phone, which also is your walkman and holds 300 of your favorite albums....
What will we be doing in 30 more years?
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- by Talarashne
What will we be doing in 30 more years?
What will we be doing in 30 more years?
Fuck that
You can wake up. I'll eat the steak.
...
Now I know he's lyin' through his teeth...
yeah it was wild
I don't know why but just seeing someone hook into the school's network from their apartment and check their email without having to go to a computer lab just blew me away. Which is weird because I was all over that network and even daemoned into other places to have live chats with friends at other schools. You know back before people had cellphones and text messaging. I chatted alot that way with a friend of mine at a college in Ohio. We'd arrange times we'd be at the computer lab and we'd hook in and chat that way rather than call because we couldn't afford the long distance calls.
yes. Long distance calls back then cost money. no text messaging or cellphones and your walkman only held one album at a time and you had to carry all the albums you wanted with you and they were the size of a pack of cigarettes each. That must just break the kids noodle.
But yeah no seriously I dated a girl with a modem. She was great. Totally fucked up in the head which made her great in bed too.
*sigh*
I was just telling my wife when Michael Jackson died that the first Album (and I mean Album) I ever had owned was MJ's solo debut. And she looked at me sideways... and went on about what an old fart I am. Now before you go calling me a cradle-robber (which I am) know that there is only a 7.5 year spead between the Mrs and I, and she has never owned a record. I then went on to tell her how I thought it was so cool that my dad recorded this particular vinyl onto a metal cassette for me so that it would last "forever"... she asked me what a metal cassette was... *plant forehead in palm*
At this rate, I think it's more appropriate to ask about technology 10 years from now.
One of my walkmans had that setting
you'd flip a little switch for normal or metal and it'd sound different.
Future Computer Interface
I'm gonna go out on a limb
That the future of computing isn't a 300 pound table. Just a hunch.
My guess has been, and still is either glasses, contacts, or a retinal implant that pump the same stuff that surface table does directly to your eyes/optical nerve, shareable with other people via bluetooth or simliiar wireless technology, and interactable with detectors on your fingers to manipulate the imagery you're seeing iwth you fingers by moving them in front of you wher eyou see the items.
Everything has been about getting smaller and faster and more integrated as we progress. The Surface thing is cool and all, but I think a meme gone wrong. Why use the table if you can give people glasses and everyone sees the table as if it were there when they wear the glasses and can interact with it in even more and fucked up ways.
Also using the Surface for Porn doesn't make much sense, but if you're hooked into your optic nerve and ear....Well lets just say that Porn could be a whole lot more....interactive. Whichever way porn chooses is usually the one that will be successfull.
I would love for them to
I would love for them to come out with a built in interface for one's glasses or like you suggested contacts.
Nothing would be cooler having you own "built in" interactive HUD for updates and interacting the world around you.
DIY Multitouch
gotta love Maximum PC!
Kass is old for her age
i had a walkman when i was five, it played cassette tapes. we also owned a beta tape player. it's still in the attic somewhere.
Consider this.
Your average desktop computer has more processing power than all the computers in Mission Control that landed men on the moon.
Your average cell phone has more processing power than the Apollo CSM and LM put together. Hell, some alarm clocks do too.
I'm old-old school. I've used a wardialer. I've used a 110-baud acoustic coupler on a rotary-dial line. (Admittedly, I'm not old-old-old school, in that I've never programmed a machine with punch cards, but I have friends who did.) I remember getting my first 2400 baud modem and chuckling that I couldn't read the pages as they loaded anymore. I had DEVO albums on vinyl, and I had one of those first-gen VCRs where you slid the tape into the carriage and pressed it down into the machine, and the remote was on a long cord. I had a cable box where you slid a lever across the front like the A/C in old cars, clicking into slots representing each channel. I had an 8-track player (although admittedly it was my dad's old one, I had a cassette player as well).
I kind of miss the old clunky tech sometimes, but I can't wait to find out the kind of things that are going to make my iPod Shuffle and dual-core desktop seem old and clunky.
When I first joined the Army
When I first joined the Army I was a RATT-rig (Radio and Telephone / Teletype) operator. Basically this meant that I sat in a big metal box with a huge antenna sticking out the top (a.k.a. the "Target Reference Point"). Inside I had an AM radio that put out enough wattage to kill fish I decided to drop my antenna in the lake, a few FM terminals, and a UGC-74b.
This 100lb monstrosity bridged the gap between typewriter and PC. It had a built in modem that went from 75-300 baud (later upgraded to 1200 baud). It had a few k of RAM used to store pages of text. Everything you typed out had to be in code - it was basically a step up form morse code, but not much. It took about 25-lbs of pressure to to type each key. Hitting 25 WPM was about the cap - but you couldn't sustain it for more than a few lines before your fingers and forearms wore out.
This thing didn't even have a monitor - you loaded a big role of pale green or yellow paper into the top (think like a role of paper towels). You'd type out your whole message into memory and then display it. It would take you like an hour to edit it because the interface was so clunky and you had to triple check every code.
But knowing all the codes to this thing initially got me my TS clearance (I had to be able to transmit TS data - i.e. nucular launch codes). http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/library/policy/army/fm/24-19/Ch5.htm Now for the really odd point - people still do this for fun???
Ironically, years before this I already had gone through my TRS-80, TI-994A, and C64. Apple IIg's and 8086's were already pretty common too.
-MageChick
Heh.
Reminds me of the Compaq "portable" computer I had. Basically, imagine a medium suitcase filled with cinderblocks, that's about the size and weight. Now set that suitcase down on a table, with the bottom facing you. Unlatch the bottom panel, which folds down to become the keyboard, revealing a green 80x25 monochrome screen and a pair of 5.25" disk drives.
http://oldcomputers.net/compaqi.html
(Holy crap, I'm going to waste a lot of time on this site.)
AN/BSY-2 Sonar System
All you tech nuts out there might enjoy what was considered top military tech in this article I found. This was the SONAR system I was trained on to both operate and repair.
http://www.ittc.ku.edu/~dandrews/files/ANBSY2.pdf
It was also considered "state of the art" because it was a touch screen system.