This isn’t something that actually surprises me, given the nature of capitalism and the ability for marketing to make people pay for damn near anything, but seeing that it’s actually a thing now amazes me. There are now services you can pay for that will set up video game consoles. Yes, seriously. And yes, they […]
Since their inception computers have been business tools, machines designed to assist their user in efficiently doing work. It’s not a foreign concept to most of us – we all certainly use computers in some form in our day to day lives, some of us more in-depth than others. While the same was true in […]
In keeping up with the recent anniversary of the launch of Apollo 6, I’m sharing this film from 1968 going over general operations at Kennedy Space Center, specifically in preparation for the Apollo 6 launch. It’s produced more like a proper film than many of the other NASA films from the 60’s I’ve shown here. […]
So, we all know how YouTube has been, apparently, stealthily unsubscribing people from various channels over the past few years. This is a pretty well documented trend that is quite the annoyance for most users of the site, especially when compounded with how the site now no longer seems to wish to show people some, or […]
Early in the morning of April 4th, 1968, on launch pad 39-A at the Kennedy Space Center, the second Saturn V rocket to fly was launched. This mission was Apollo 6 – another unmanned test of the Saturn V and the Apollo Command-Service module, much the same as the Apollo 4 mission in November of […]
The past week, before its demise in the atmosphere over the South Pacific Ocean, Tiangong-1 was, naturally, the subject of quite a bit of news coverage. Of course, that meant commentary from the peanut gallery, as they say – everyone decided to toss out a comment, or a question. While some were intelligent, many just […]
Something I like about the Internet is how quickly people will update you when information is out of date or incorrect. In this case, I have been following what sources I could on Tiangong-1 when someone on twitter alerted me that it had already been confirmed to have re-entered, in this case, at 5:16PM Pacific […]
Back in October I gave a status update on Tiangong-1, China’s first Space Station, and how, since the end of crewed operations, contact and control of the station has been lost. Well, we are approaching the final week or so of the stations time in orbit, and the situation hasn’t changed – it’s still out […]
This is a rather interesting, albeit outright strange episode of the Computer Chronicles. It discuses a concept known as the “Fifth Generation Computer” which when you first hear it sounds like a discussion on computers produced around the time of this episode, 1984. That’s not actually the case: The term “Fifth Generation Computer” in this […]
It’s well known that I like to go out to thrift shops around in Memphis hunting for things that may be useful, or otherwise interesting to own . While I was out on one of these hunts in late 2016 I stumbled across something that I originally thought was some kind of older computer printer. […]
Right now I’m waiting rather impatiently for a box to be delivered to my front door. It contains an item which I’ve been wanting for a good while, and will certainly be worth ordering. The item is being shipped via FedEx, the massive freight company that happens to be located here in Memphis. The company […]
We take for granted the fact that over the past 20+ years now we’ve been able to pretty much run whatever we want on our computer at whatever time we want – even at the same time. This seems normal to us, but it wasn’t always the case. In early computer systems, either as a […]
A few months back while browsing YouTube, I found a video of a segment from the game “Sam & Max” where the two titular characters are in a support group style meeting for obsolete electronics. The group, known as the Computer Obsolescence Prevention Society, or C.O.P.S is a quirky little group, made up of an […]
Today I present you with this rather simple 1982 clip from the Australian television program “Towards 2000” where they discuss the newest thing in music – the Compact Disc. Starting off covering a history of non-magnetic music recording mediums; Wax Cylinders, Edison Diamond Discs, Standard 78 RPM records, then finally the microgroove Long-Playing record, the […]
The Compact Disc, commonly known simply as “CD, the primary distribution method of music over the past nearly 30 years, is on its way out. This isn’t anything new to anyone – digital music sales have been climbing over the past decade, and now well surpass sales of physical media on a whole. The CD, […]