71–80 of 96 posts
Hey guys, Peter here from vintageapple.org. My server is experiencing a bit of a hug of death from this. Please be kind and don't try to download everything all at once. I've had to apply a rate limit to that site for now to make sure the applications I'm hosting continue to work.
Joe. joe@via.net
I read these as a kid, but I got a few of these from the antique mall a few weeks ago and I was amazed at how half baked it was at times (the industry was moving so fast a few months of latency meant they were often out of date.) Steve Ciracia was the guy holding it all together. Every month he published a hardware project that was commercial quality (you could buy it) except for the occasional two month project. It…
I worked at a place where we used one of Steve Ciarcias circuits - the 8052-AH Basic module and used it as a security controller. We took the circuit as it was in the magazine, and built it and added some optocouplers and it worked, it was unique. Upon thought, I think we also used an 8051 microcontroller circuit as well.
Many of his projects were really a fully realized example of an example circuit from the project datasheet as opposed to an adventure in discrete logic such as Steve Wozniak's "Breakout with 44 chips."
> Please don't download too much at once
please just torrent it bro.
I miss those days so much. 80s computer magazines were exciting. The web is great, but it doesn't have the anticipation of waiting for the next issue and then sitting down to dig into it with focused attention to see what was fresh and new and to be wowed by all the things you couldn't afford. A 20 megabyte hard drive for ONLY $1000? That's a good price! Unimaginable luxury, I only had floppy disks into the 1990s. I…
It was almost pure luck if I managed to save the silly little thing, and all i was really interested in were the games.
I do remember to joy of getting a little ASCII slot machine game actually working after like 3 sessions. and the guys at the RS were so impressed that they left it running and used it as a in store demo.
The world has moved a lot in the last 33 years...
Looking at one of these now I remember how magazines made technology very exciting (I don't think it was just because I was younger). I think a lot of it was down to the visuals. You just won't get illustrations like that on someone's blog. The illustrations made the technology seem more real and certainly more glamorous.
I don't think it was just because we were younger. I also don't think it was just because of the visuals (though those helped). I think a lot of it was because things were moving so fast. The 386 was an astonishing improvement over the 286. But now, the next generation Intel chip is... kind of nice, I guess? But it's not all that exciting. Windows 95 was a massive improvement over Windows 3.0. Windows 11 doesn't make…
This is well timed. I was actually going over the Internet Archive's collection just the other day. It's a bit sad to watch the decline in quality as you move through the volumes. Somewhere around 1985 - 1986 BYTE shifted towards becoming just another magazine hocking hardware/software. It got so bad that some issues started to look like a rip-off of Ziff-Davis's PC Magazine. Around that point I'm betting a lot of BY…
There was, of course, a ton on innovation on peripherals. Laser, ink jet printers, optical storage seemed to be the future (and it was, for some time), Unix workstations… Even after the PC killed off most of the home computer market, the high-end was still a thriving ecosystem.
The predictions for the future of computing, December 1996, had some truly prescient gems. And a few misses. > We may experience a gradual drift into a surveillance society ... > The merging of cellular phones, portable computers, and highspeed networked servers offers many exciting possibilities. > The Internet will be as ubiquitous in our lives as cable television is today. https://vintageapple.org/byte/pdf/199612_…
Fun thing: my 9yo daughter learned what a commercial break is on YouTube. We haven’t watched live TV since the 2010’s or so.
Looking at one of these now I remember how magazines made technology very exciting (I don't think it was just because I was younger). I think a lot of it was down to the visuals. You just won't get illustrations like that on someone's blog. The illustrations made the technology seem more real and certainly more glamorous.
I don't think it was just because we were younger. I also don't think it was just because of the visuals (though those helped). I think a lot of it was because things were moving so fast. The 386 was an astonishing improvement over the 286. But now, the next generation Intel chip is... kind of nice, I guess? But it's not all that exciting. Windows 95 was a massive improvement over Windows 3.0. Windows 11 doesn't make…
I collect and restore vintage computers. I rarely would think of a PC as interesting because, as you go back the past couple decades, it’s essentially the same computer, but slower. And not even that much slower - a surprising amount of my work is done on an 8 year old laptop. It’s not as fast as the new corporate issue MBP, but it’s fast enough. And it has the same amount of memory and twice the storage.
Back then the very idea of working on an 8 year old computer was ludicrous.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think it was just because we were younger. I also don't think it was just because of the visuals (though those helped). I think a lot of it was because things were moving so fast. The 386 was an astonishing improvement over the 286. But now, the next generation Intel chip is... kind of nice, I guess? But it's not all that exciting. Windows 95 was a massive improvement over Windows 3.0. Windows 11 doesn't make…
The Windows 3.11 -> 95 transition was built on user research, but the Windows 10 -> 11 transition was build to enable market research. There are many competing interests that get in the way of building things that the users actually want.
My last Symbian phone was objectively better than the first iPhone, but we never suspected the fluid multi-touch UI was what we wanted until after we saw that Jeff Han demo.
A future of computers that are just faster, with more pixels, is very boring.