This video paints a very pessimistic picture of how the flood of information we are creating today could be lost over time. As someone who has been playing with computers since the Reagan era seeing the images of floppy disks reminded me that indeed I still own a few that have data for computers like the C-64 and Apple II that have long since vanished — never mind zip disks from just a few years ago. We’re only been into this data revolution for a few short years, but I’ve already had several bad experiences which make me wonder about the long term security of the medium we’re crafting. Read more…
The world of personal electronics is currently in an arms race to see who can come up with the smallest, coolest-looking entertainment devices, but there was a time when the mere concept of a “home computer”was almost unbelievable. Atari may not have had decades of staying power in the PC market, but the Atari name will always be synonymous with early efforts in home computing and video gaming, and these amazing technical drawings and pieces of concept art drawn up by Atari industrial designer Regan Cheng in 1981 show why. Read more…
In my final year of art school (which was 1987) I had a friend from Japan who owned the Sharp X68000 — in fact the computer was only ever sold in Japan. As you can see in the commercial above this machine was very friendly for folks who liked to work with video and graphics, and that wasn’t by accident as the box was powered by a Motorola 68000 CPU which was the same family of chips that powered the other artist friendly machines of that era which were the Macintosh and the Amiga. The first model of this system ran at 10 MHz, had 1 meg of of RAM and no built in hard drive, so it’s sort of amazing just how much this system could do. It’s also interesting to note that many game designers in Japan created arcade games using the X68000 and today you can find emulators for the system. Read more…
