This was cool...

I actually got the Powerbook 540c to boot!

These things were so baller for their day. They had built in stereo speakers with 16 bit sound, 640x480 active matrix color display, 33mhz 040 CPU, dual battery bays... it was one of the first laptops that could also work as a hoss of a desktop machine. 

Of course, they were originally something like five grand, which'd buy you a pretty nice used car back in 1995. They had product placement in movies, of course, since they looked so cool.

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Conflation...

Somehow the term "pro-sumer", as it was originally used in commercial electronics like cameras and computers to describe high-end gear that was affordable by hobbyists but had features in common with professional equipment, has gotten absorbed into the term "prosumer", which was coined by Alvin Toffler back in the '80s as a portmanteau of "producer" and "consumer".

I blame old-school Apple fans.

After the original departure of Steve Jobs, the most expensive Mac models kept trending upward in price. In 1990, the top of the line "wicked fast" Mac IIfx cost. like, ten grand. In great big 1990 dollars, not itty bitty 2021 ones. 

You know what else cost ten grand in 1990? A base frickin' Camaro RS.

Now, there were plenty of artsy people who loved doing artsy things on Macintoshes, but they weren't likely to be able to lay out new car money for a computer, especially if it weren't a business expense. 

They could maybe swing used car money, though. Hence cheaper Macs, which may run the same professional software, albeit slower, could be afforded by hobbyists. And, hey, if you did some desktop publishing for the church bulletin or family newsletter, weren't you producing something? Therefore a prosumer?

I know if you go back and look at the earliest days of a site like Digital Photography Review, back around the turn of the millennium, the term "pro-sumer" meant cameras in the ~$1000 price class. It was used to refer to cameras like the Coolpix 990, which had features in common with advanced pro cameras but price tags more approachable by the hobbyist user.

People rarely "produced" anything with these other than vacation pics, and "pro-sumer" was clearly being used to indicate pro features at a consumer-friendly price, but that usage seems to have largely withered away. You have to wander into the dusty corners of Wiktionary to find it referenced.

"Pro" in camera body terms is used to refer to big cameras used by pro photogs and built to withstand the occasional out-of-bounds NFL cornerback.

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Killed by Smartphones

Hey, remember the Sony mylo? No? Don't feel bad, neither does anybody else.

Old Fashioned

I've been playing around with a weird lungfish of a digital camera as part of a project to revive a moribund blog.

Digital cameras of that vintage can be hard to use. Some used built-in flash memory and required specialized cables or docking stations to get the images off. Others used defunct memory card formats that can be hard to find these days or, even if they use a card format that's still around, are limited to tiny card sizes that are almost as difficult to source. Power-wise, while some used simple CR123 or AA batteries, many used specialized battery packs that are currently unobtainium.

The Mavica FD-88, though, records its images on 3.5" 1.44MB floppies. If you haven't thrown away all your old AOL Free Trial Install discs or used them as beer coasters, they can be formatted and pressed into use. Also, while ten-packs of Verbatim floppies may not be on the shelf at the corner drug store, they're still available on Amazon. While we're a long way from the days where every desktop tower had a floppy drive for emergency boot purposes, you can get USB-powered 3.5" external drives easily enough. Be aware, however, that while they'll run fine off a desktop or laptop, your iPad probably doesn't have enough ass to spin a 3.5" floppy drive.

Further, while the Mavica does use a proprietary Sony battery pack rather than a double handful of AA batteries, the NP-F550 was used as a common power source for consumer and professional Sony video equipment and is still widely available. It even uses the same "InfoLithium" technology used on current Sony camera batteries.

Even if you get your Mavica FD88 off eBay or out of the bargain bin at your local camera shop, the instruction manual is still available in PDF on Sony's site.

If you want to amaze your friends by recording photos or low res 320x240 MPEG video on a giant plastic SAVE icon, it's pretty inexpensive and accessible fun.

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It's true.

People downloaded ASCII porn unironically. https://t.co/68eDJUQeDI

— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) February 10, 2019

What I hate...

...about the license model of software "purchasing" is encapsulated in the picture below:

I am positively swamped under deadlines, and Microsoft has decided that it can't remember if I have an Office subscription on this machine or not. Never mind that I was using Word as recently as last night.

So, I have to re-purchase everything because I simply don't have time for lengthy phone holds today.

Kids, once upon a time, you would buy a box with some things in it that were shaped like the "Save" icon, and you would stick those in a slot like a giant thumb drive, and you would load the "Program"...which was like an App, except it didn't constantly tie up your machine with unwanted bloatware updates...onto your computer, and there it would reside. It would function until you decided to sell the machine, at which point you could stick the "Save" icons into the next computer and install the "Program" on it and keep using it!
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Relics...

Seen in the parking lot at the Peru Hamfest this past weekend. I quipped to Bobbi that there were only three in there when he first dropped the tailgate.

I wonder how many extraneous CRT's are in the attic? I mean, I want to save the NeXT and I know there's one little 14" Mac color monitor, and there's a 9" green screen Apple that goes with the IIc, but there are probably one or two 17" generic CRT's up there, Viewsonics or the like, that are mine. Probably one or two of Bobbi's two.

Heck, there's probably my first round or two of LCD screens, too. All that stuff is, essentially, garbage now.

It's a weird side effect of not wanting to throw away something that works and then, by the time it's depreciated to zero, we're living in a day and age where there's a city ordinance banning throwing away electronics. I wouldn't have any fear of slipping a dead calculator or clock radio in with the coffee grounds, but a 17" CRT is the sort of thing that could trigger an incident if Officer Obie finds it next to my junk mail at the bottom of a pile of garbage.
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Computers, life, and stuff...

So, the big desktop gaming rig had sat lifeless on the corner of my desk for...well, several years now, I'm ashamed to say. The hard drive had shat the bed and I kept meaning to replace it, while using my laptop as a substitute machine.

First it was my cheap 17" HP Pavilion, before going through a couple of more potent, game-capable 15" machines. The irony of the latter is that when doing anything that works the GPU hard, you generally want to keep the lid open for maximum cooling, and so here I'd be, playing games on a 15" screen with a dormant 25" monitor behind it.

I'd been kicking around the idea of a Mac Mini for a while, especially now that I'm using an iPhone and iPad. Being able to get stuff seamlessly back and forth between tablet and phone and working computer would be mighty handy.

I mentioned this in a discussion on Facebook and Marko PM'ed me to say he had a Mini that wasn't being used for anything right now. Further discussion developed that he had a MacBook Air that was also surplus to requirements at the moment. He made me a good price on the pair and so now I'm doing all the stuff involved in setting up a new desktop for work.

Except this one isn't going to have games on it. It's strictly for work stuff during the day. At 6PM I can rack the keyboard and hang up the mouse and lift the lid on the gaming laptop, pull out my Razer Naga, and get my WASD on until bedtime.

The MacBook Air is because, after dragging this six pound beast of a computer and its ginormous power brick around SHOT in my laptop bag, I'll be damned if I'm doing that for NRAAM. Or SHOT next year, for that matter. It doesn't take a lot of machine to do word processing and some simple Lightroom work, or blog updates.

I hadn't used a Mac as my primary machine since...what? OS X Snow Leopard on a G4 eMac? So there's some learning curve going on here as I get back into the groove with the shortcuts and menus and the whole driving on the left side of the road thing.

The Mac Mini desktop had another, unexpected benefit. Moving that huge tower case out and replacing it with the tiny mini-pizza box of the new computer caused me to start excavating the hideous mess on the back of my desk. I'm about halfway to a clean desk and starting to eyeball other notorious clutter areas. If I can quit smoking cold turkey, then turn around and lose some seventy-plus pounds, who knows what other things I can find the willpower to do?

Don't Know You're Born...

By 2015, Apollo 11 will be as long ago as 1923 was to the Moon landing itself. And I don’t know what we have to show for it.

— Neil deGrasse Tyson (@neiltyson) January 1, 2015

"We haven't made any science-y progress since the Apollo moon missions," Neil deGrasse Tyson instantly communicated to millions of pocket computers around the globe.



As I was idly perusing the entertainment choices in the seatback touchscreen entertainment center on an eastbound 737-800 (I ended up watching the documentary Fastball), I couldn't help but remember this commercial. Now all this stuff is in your phone.

In retrospect, most of the hand-held computing technology in most science fiction from the last fifty years is laughably primitive. Hell, most of the computing technology, period. 2001: A Space Odyssey predicted a lot of things with Kubrickian attention to detail (flat screen color monitors did not exist when the movie was made, so all those video displays are rear-projected on frosted glass) but its computer predictions, at least regarding size and form factor, were knocked into a cocked hat by Moore's Law.

We still haven't caught up to Kubrick's vision in the field of murderous AIs, but I'm sure we're getting close.

Future is now.
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Ephemera...

Went to the Indy Hamfest with Bobbi today.

The sellers there are interesting to me as a non radio nerd. Half of them are guys doing this as a business and the other half are guys who have cleaned out their man-caves with shovels and hung price tags on the debris.

Lots of fairly recent electronic flotam and jetsam. One guy had a bunch of iPAQs for $3 each. (When Marko got one back in late '00 or early '01, we called it the "GeekMaster 2000"...)

As someone who once gave real money for a Canon AE-1 Program, it was interesting to see the bin that had a bunch of 35mm camera bodies in it included a T50 and a T70 for $4 each.

I passed on the Mac Performa 6400 and the Mirror Drive Door G4 tower, although the LNIB C64C was tempting.

Bobbi picked up some stuff that I would no doubt find cool if I knew what it was.

Also, there was a purchase which will get a post on The Arms Room!

Oddly, Derek Smart was not involved.

Was Outpost just too fast-paced and plot driven of a video game for you? Emperor of the Fading Suns not rambling and pointless enough?

Try Penn and Teller's tour de force of digital ennui, Desert Bus!

(Of course, they did have the advantage of actually setting out to make the most pointlessly dull video game ever, an excuse not shared by Sierra On-Line...)


(h/t to Claire Wolfe.)

808 State... I'll wait.

So Windows 8 debuts to a resounding chorus of "meh".

Remember: Microsoft releases a functional OS only on every other attempt, so if history is any judge, this one’s doomed from the jump-off.

(Myself? I ran 98SE until I switched to XP in '02, and then clung to XP up until I bought this laptop earlier this year. Windows versions are like Star Trek movies: Every other one's a dog.)

For you kids who are fortunate enough to be too young to grok the graphic: Behold the suck.
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Back when it really was a series of tubes.

I believe my exact words were "If I don't get a photo of this, my roommate will kill me."

It's not a big truck!

Dearly beloved, we are gathered here today...

...to mourn the loss of Supernaut, the valiant old 2.2GHz Pentium 4 box on which the vast majority of this blog has been written. (Better known on this blog by his alias "VFTP Command Central".)

Although twice replaced already, both proved temporary and both times the old XP box was dragged back out to soldier on, remaining powered on for the better part of nine years*.

Last night, during an electrical storm intense enough that I bid a hasty adieu to my posse in World of Warcrack after questioning the wisdom of having a copper wire running essentially straight from the wall socket, through the laptop I was using, and to my head**, the nearby power lines took a hit that staggered the wireless router, knocking me offline, and also caused poor little Supernaut in the next room to reboot.

When I went in to check on him, the Winders drive scan was hung up at 80%, so I powered him off and went to bed. This morning, despite futzing around in the BIOS, not a flicker came from the HDD light. Hopefully it's on the board and his hard drive can be rescued, but I fear that it's essentially Game Over for old Supernaut himself. :(


*As you can tell by me using the same G3 iBook from '01-'12 and driving the same car for the last eleven years, too, I tend to stay loyal to hardware, often past the point of good sense.

**Bobbi pointed out to me that, since I was playing WoW on a laptop, all I really needed to do was unplug the thing from the wall and I could have kept playing. Derp.

A heck of a run...

Sitting at Oleg's kitchen table last week, composing a post, I realized that while I had blogged from that very chair many times before, it was the first time that I'd done it with anything but my old G3 iBook.

When I picked up that 17" Dell in New Hampshire earlier this year, it ended an eleven year run of using the key lime clamshell Mac laptop to do my interwebbing from the road. That's a heck of a run in today's world of disposable electronica.

It's still usable as a backup, too. Maybe I ought to look into getting a spare battery or two for it. You know, just in case.

That's, like, a million in blog years.

Fifteen years ago, I had a 14.4k modem in a Pentium 133-powered Compaq Deskpro, but no 'net connection at home. The only web surfing I did was occasionally at work; it wasn't 'til a pending layoff coincided with AOL offering flat-rate monthly pricing that I bothered installing the internets on my home machine.

Had I been aware of it, I could have pointed my shiny new Explorer icon at the web log of one Charles G. Hill, which is celebrating its fifteenth birthday today. By way of comparison, my first blog post is so recent that it was typed on the same computer I'm using to type this one.

Games people can't play.

Kids these days... They can't even play Ultima IV!

I'll confess to never having gotten into the Ultima games myself. Richard Garriott's nom de geek ("Lord British") was just too twee for me. I did like the fairly straight forward hack'n'slash of the Wizardry series, but beyond that, computer role-playing games were not much on my gaming radar outside of the SSI gold box AD&D adaptations and the eventual rise of the Baldur's Gate series.


(H/T to Popehat.)

Three Easy Steps.

The new router at Roseholme Cottage claimed installation in three easy steps:

Step 1. Connect router to modem.

Step 2. Plug router into wall socket.

Step 3. Futz with network settings on VFTP Command Central. Curse some. Try again. Curse some more. Reboot VFTP Command Central. Curse. Turn on eMac. Strangely, six-year-old Mac sees new network just fine without any action on user's part other than hitting the "On" button. Curse Bill Gates specifically. Futz with one more setting on VFTP Command Central. Curse. Start pulling pages, finally. Go to bed in state of exhaustion.

Handicap.

Roomie scored me a power supply the day before yesterday, but I haven't gotten around to bolting it into the old machine. I'm still doing all my blogging and web-surfing on the eMac, which is holding up pretty well, considering that it was a low-end machine when it was introduced six years ago. 

Still, not being able to boot up my old tower makes me realize how much stuff I had free-floating in my "My Documents" file just waiting to be used. I need to get that power supply installed this afternoon.

It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.

>
>Get lamp.


You kids today will not believe this, but once upon a time we spent hours and hours playing computer games with no graphics at all. Uphill both ways in the snow! Now get offa my lawn!

If you'd like to try your hand at Big Computer Fun Circa 1980, here you go.



(H/T to The Freeholder.)