awful

As a youngster I (the country?) was so excited, entranced for a bit, I read Chariots and Outer Space, stopped at maybe Gold of the Gods? I matured and grew, though I wanted it all to be real, there was little to no progression of the claims and evidence. Like Batboy or all the National Enquirer articles, it was clear it EVD was a crank.

I suspect there is quite profit margin in Sharpies compared to other similar markers from the global market. Exactly what a tariff would do by insulating them from a global market pricing, allowing flexibility in rearranging their costs. *even considering quality issues.

Ours a SGI 4D-220 in a molecular modeling lab, these demos made everything else look sick - we had the horsepower; engineers and programmers upset they didn't; trad CS and admins mad because I admin'd them as they were DEC and IBM snobs, mocked UNIX as a toy. Also Evans and Sutherland, a NeXT machine, MicroVAX, Macs used for building a hardware pulse sequencers for 3D NMR, custom DSP for 2D NMRs, (4) million dollar superconducting NMRs and an entire lab - all the cool toys of the day, life was good.

1989; SGIs flight sim GL demo on a brand new 4D-220. It did not appear to be a complete "game", could have been developed for military sim?, but nothing on a PC or home machine came close, as I recall.

Agreed; went into Fry's, off Lawrence?, just before it closed. Visited area on and off again over the years since. Central Computer did seem to have what I needed for that moment, but the area seemed barren, was simply not the same, and especially after experiencing Fry's, Weird Stuff, Halted?, Anchor, Computer Literacy, et al. in the late 1980s and 90s.

Haha; Thank You for sharing that.

side comment; Cub Scout project books of the 1960s, as I recall, had you make a hot dog cooker by connecting line voltage to two nails through a board...

I'm with you there; simply so bad experience w/BT. And, it often worked at first OS install but then degraded through kernel, BlueZ, and interface updates until it was unusable. Until recently, when it has been solid enough through most? Fedora 39 and now into 40, though I've found at times the config gets confused, forcing me to delete and re-add the device, sometimes manually, forcibly. But still, been solid enough for my daily use mouse and HD-Aptx audio (among others, all while crossing my fingers as 40 ages).

Now that is thoughtful, and I think, can open the conversation to youth what if, and of what to do in case of... I know as a kid we had Civil Defense, and that funny little CD symbol on the AM dial...

actually, a Wall Street industry analyst said and wrote approximately that, in what, the 1980s.

This guy fails basic critical thinking; Occams razor, and Sagans Standard, "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence".

_

While this definitely does not compare this experience, it did show this young person the utility; in the early 70s when Disney World opened, we used the trams in Fort Wilderness to get around for a week; shopping and back and forth to the camp store, going to the activities in the day, evening and at night. Just running around. Did this all with and without parents, and I think they were possibly electric at that time as they stopped right outside your campsite at the corner and must have been very quiet, or maybe diesel, just don't recall. We simply learned the schedule, hopped on and then off, and simply had a great time. Like many things Disney, I thought I was looking at the future and was pleased.

Loved my Vizio 60 until the backlights died; a known bad power supply engineering issue caused them to fail early. I have to wonder, though, why? Its not like led engineering isnt a solved problem. I'll leave that for someone else's discussion.

I like my HiSense 65 Android TV, and used to love it before the app providers started screwing with app updates (Netflix! Prime!). And the audio data stream/output conversion could do a little better to my home theater, but its fast enough, have bluetooth keyboard for quick searches/data entry. I think it is stupid that I cannot easily find a no-cost, dumb, Android photo screen saver for it (I think it ostensibly would rob from some Android app developer/Google Photos/Google Home). But it appears I can side load stuff, but I like to keep things clean. Anyhow, my original 60 Vizio was great, but died early b/c of known bad engineering of backlight power supply. But I like this even better.

These guys cannot leave money on the table; during the Sony vs Universal Studios, the Betamax lawsuit period, Hollywood said theirs "... is a premium product." They will never stop until every dollar is squeezed out of the public.

You are spot on, was there. The Ataris and ostensibly the Timex/Sinclair's were doing graphics from the very beginning, with their built in BASICs; typing in programs from the popular magazines. The Atari MAC/65 assembler came in 1982; the cartridge in 1984. Manx C in 1986 for Amiga. My school taught BASIC from "Micro-Soft" on an Altair. I went directly to doing bit level ops on Burroughs mainframes directly afterwards. And I still have all my Lattice C software for my Amiga circa 1990.

Dak, in the days of dot matrix printers, marketed a horrible one in the computer mags that I simply had to have but now don't remember why. It used glass ampules filled with carbon as a print head, and a high voltage arc? to drag it to the page. It did work though, and I used it for my Atari systems at the time. Simply an odd product.

Or even -rent- software from another state, even; place your order then a week or two later, it would show up. You had to then repackage and resend.

I got a Cox Red Baron in 1972, as I recall. Sad because I lived right next to a huge school yard but was never able to get it started. I had no one to ask how and why these things worked. It sat in the box on a shelf for the longest time.

The Heathkit/Zenith ET-3400 trainers with 6800s, and the accompanying Heath/Zenith coursework, were fantastic in 1982. 50+ of us completed it that year, the class final was bit-banging the tune of "Anchors Away" as the instructor was a Navy officer and educator, retired to civilian teaching. I later learned machine language on broken superscalar mainframes as bit-chaser, but the 6800 were simply fantastic devices and prepared me well. Flat, shared memory, von Neumann architecture. Very nice op codes and indexing, as I recall. Ill have to go back to my coursework and reminisce...

I recall; miniature incandescent bulbs embedded into push switches that could display/set registers, it was very important to test the bulbs before trusting them (a long press) else a burned out bulb may catch you off guard. Right next to the core memory cabinet, someone accurately patched it to show huge "$" during idle time!!

In retrospect it would surprise some at how advanced the B5000 arch. and implementations were, virtual memory and concurrent, parallel, quorum processing and so on. I learned the stack based, superscalar B7800 CPU to the gate, bit level; single clocking and chasing the op codes and small code through the entire machine including the IO and stacks in memory. I was supporting 4x4 (cpuxio) B7800 and a 2x2 B6700 and all peripherals including hundreds of disk spindles at a 24x7 site. As well as the IOM and then new 4k chip memory infrastructure. Unfortunately I was not able to spend any time at the OS level though, running an early C(?) and Cobol compilers maybe. Spent months taught by Jerry Jackson at the Paoli plant. And sadly no longer have any tapes or docs. My last experience was confguring host devices allowing high speed direct parallel communications between disparate running systems. I cannot describe how powerful the exposure to these technologies were for my future understanding.

So many great (and bad) things: The Aminet repository. AREXX language. Directory Opus utility customizable file manager. Ability to sync w/ TVs. Hundreds of rich assembler coded video, audio, and graphics Demos of international origin. Cinemaware games. NewTek DigiPaint. Diga telecomm tool. Miami TCP/IP (I helped H.K. to get PPP working with NT Server). Unixy and open source tools available. Lattice C. Very capable multi-tasking. Hardware accelerators, FPU, SCSI boards. Dragging dropdown virtual screens. A single fixed root vector for OS (I no longer remember why important but the obvious), Logical Volumes and automatic mount requesters; good for small storage systems as the system knows to search and otherwise ask you to insert the correct disk, data or program. Dungeon Master. FA-18. Music Tracker and mods. Good enough quality sound. Again Directory Opus and Im sure I missed a lot.

Burned my modified Atari OSs into switchable eeprom boards, built the 256k memory expansions for the XL series, and made a kit for builders at the user groups. Still have them, all original 400,800, several XLs, and hundreds of games. Moved to the Amiga where it was so very much advanced, having admin'ing the SGI (4D/440), a MicroVAX II, Suns, and helped with Evans and Sutherland workstation. Spent a lot of time in Palo Alto, Sunnyvale, Mt. View, as well as haunting out the old Atari buildings and all the prototype junk that ended up at the surplus stores..

"Mapping the Atari"; Ian Chadwick, 1983. A must have, so very sought after.

Walked into new multi-campus hospital; fiber and an ATM core. Didn't take much to configure and start up an IP instance, some token ring I think, and associated support daemons. It worked very well and left me impressed. Oh, and synchronizing two sniffers to actually force our management to apply pressure to AT&T when it wouldn't acknowledge dropping packets.

Never bored, I went from basic electronics and microprocessor to troubleshoot mainframes at bit/op code level, replacing heads and aligning disks, to admin'ing new then Silicon Graphics, Sun Unix and VMS and large scale databases, analog and digital research instrumentation (NMR, among others, RF, cryo, even writing minor pulse sequences and HW to control laser excitation of molecules, among others), new then IP networks, IBM Server and NT and automating rollout of thousands clients, email (cc:Mail international) architectures, the early network security configs and proseltyzing, a hospital systems ATM (not money machine, a net arch) mesh network, and later specializing study in computer science/information systems and all that, Apache servers, and automating certain new aircraft systems. The magic was being generalist, understanding fundamental concepts. You cannot believe how upset some people, who locked into their narrow fields, became when I was able to move around so easily(? - it was a lot of work though, but it was always a hobby so never a job). Now retired and following/studying NMR technology applied to quantum computing to leverage my way into the algorithms, and ESP32. that is how the generalist wins in many ways, in my opinion; leveraging fundementals to do interesting things. But I do find that without the steady back pressure, I tend to wander a bit much into the wilds.

Dr. John Harvey Kellogg, of Seventh Day Adventist, the Battle Creek Sanitarium, and cereal fame. Doctors there of circa 1910s,1920s maybe discovered it affected and was used to treat epilepsy, as I recall.

Internet In A Box.