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Pocket Calculator’s Vintage Walkman Museum wants you to know that it has only been 25-short years since the Sony Walkman first started causing people to walk in front of busses, while snapping their fingers:

We owe much gratitude to Sony, for they were responsible for making the personal stereo cassette player a reality. For over 25 years, Sony has been bringing a personal, portable stereo music experience to our ears–creativity and innovation have continued to make Walkman a useful product to everyone. Walkman has reached pop icon status and become a symbol of youth, individuality and freedom. In 1979 Sony warned, “Remember the name: Walkman.” How could we forget?

SCP hopes that you will remember to dress properly when listening to your Sony Walkman. High collars are, as always, a must.

And we at SCP owe much gratitude to MetaFilter, even if they aren’t as stylish and portable.

SCP is pleased to have stumbled upon the Music Box Society International, a non-profit organization dedicated to the enjoyment, study and preservation of automatic musical instruments, with members in 50 US states and 19 other countries. MBSI publishes several newsletters, sells a few choice books, and provides a note-worthy list of museums around the world, a useful—if brief—FAQ, and a small butdelightful photo-gallery replete with digital recordings of the mechanical recordings.

SCP has found ourselves counting pennies, again.

SCP is not sure what to think of all the Commodore Rebranding, such as the eVic music box, and the mPet data and music player.

SCP thanks endgadget for bringing this to our attention. Now, we would just like to pretend that Tulip Computers bestaat niet. Although we begrudgingly like their C64 repackage.

Enjoying the myriad and connected wonders of the Interweb, but its convenience is troubling to your Victorian need for an oblique interface? Try this command line interface for Blogger, and immerse yourself in an historic horror of green phosphor. (Attribution: Waxy)

The 365 Days Project (in it’s new home at Ubu) offers an ecclectic song-a-day, each with an explanation of its origin, source material, et cetera. This project rescues many songs from their scarcity-based obscurity and placing them in the digital cornucopia that is the web. Some of the songs are faboo. Some need to remain scarce. All of them are, at least, interesting.

Mike Konshak, is Our Kind of Renaissance man. He is a Vietnam-era combat veteran who’s a data-storage designer by trade, writes screenplays, dabbles in art and photography, he’s a former street minstrel, and has written software for the Commodore 64 & 128.

Mr. Konshak is also a collector of slide rules. Several hundred slide rules. Several hundred slide rules with copius high-resolution photographs.

Mr. Konshak, SCP is in awe (and we thank MetaFilter for the advice).

UPDATE 05.28.2008: most of the links above have died of bit-rot, as Mr. Konshak has moved his collection to the Slide Rule Museum site, and your author cannot find, ahem, analogues for all links.

Whilst on a Quixotic hunt for living references to Tim Hawkinson’s Überorgan, your author was pleased by the serindipitous encounter with Mechanical Music Digest, an awkwardly-layed out website (and mailing list—hence Digest) devoted to, ahem, Mechanical Music.

There a quite a few rare gems contained therein, such as a dissection of a purportedly-antique musical automaton (with some contemporary anachronisms in the hidden interior), a related page on “Fake Monkey Automatons”, a chart to help identify music rolls, and a page doubly-devoted to a wooden-whistle calliope and a “do-nothing machine”.

In which the author discovers a poorly drawn cartoon and is made to frown.

When you listen to new music, do you hear exciting new melodies and rhythms or just random clanging and screeching?

SCP believes there was humor intended in this scrap of illustration, but fails to find any.

The indefatigable Mr. Johnson at Gizmodo has tipped us (and the rest of the world, if truth be known) that the Netherlands-based Tulip Computers is launching a C64 Direct-to-TV unit. This prosaic name is shorthand for “joystick containing 30 games running on a Commodore 64 clone that plugs directly into your television set” (let no-one say that the men and women in marketing are not concise). The device is expected to be available for retail purchase in late 2004.

The launch of the C64 Direct-to-TV product has been prompted by the success of similar products based on the Atari, Namco and Intellivision gaming systems. The C64 Direct-to-TV unit is the natural evolution of the currently huge demand for “retro” video games and will set a new standard for excellence, with superior sound, graphics and gameplay experiences over the products currently on sale. With 30 games pre-installed on the device, the C64 Direct-to-TV product offers significantly more than its competitors. Millions of these games are sold in the past. Included in the device are the classic Games™ series from Epyx™ including Summer Games™, Winter Games™, World Games™ and the seminal California Games™, which arguably created the extreme sports video games genre.

Tulip, which bought the rights to Commore in 1997, expects to release more Commodore products with thousands of games. They also allow you to read their press release in the original Dutch.

SCP is curious, and will wait to find out why it should have to pay more for a C64 that we can at the Salvation Army. Of course, we also recognize that portability is nice. Not necessary, but nice.

A Mr. Brad Slager of the impetuous periodical Film Threat unfairly savages Robert Longo’s film adaptation of Johnny Mnemonic, the William Gibson novel. We say unfairly becuase saying this film is bad is reminiscent of pointing out that foreigners come from other countries.

Additionally, Mr. Slager has the temerity to assert the following:

One additional limitation to William Gibson’s version of contemporary fiction is that it quickly becomes outdated. The type technology that he chooses to involve himself with evolves at a quick pace, with hardware and software becoming outmoded in scant few years, so that Gibson’s tales are as relevant today as a Commodore-64.

SCP respectfully (and a bit dismissively, if we must be candid) begs to differ. And a good day to you, sir.