string can phone

a Wired-gallery of photos, and notes on the “evolution” of that annoying gadget, the cellphone.

It’s been 40 years since Pong was unleashed on an unsuspecting world, and PongMuseum.org is there to celebrate. Check out their collection for some oddities like East-German TvSpiel, the chunky West-German Tele-Multiplay - 825-301, or the GD 1380 that came with a gorgeous blue light-gun from the late, lamented HeathKit, or celebrate the do-it-yourself ethic with your own TV game kit (sorry, PAL only).

Currently, there’s a not-to-be-missed video of Ralph Baer playing Pong back in 1969: wide ties and analog blips, ahoy!

SCP has featured some different pong incarnations: choose-your-own-adventure book; pong-mechanik is mechanical pong; and Pong Story which is heavy on the history and photos.

Spare Time Gizmos uses his, wisely. We are particularly intrigued by the COSMAC ELF 2000 and the SBC6120 — both machines the we, sadly, will probably never build.

z80.info is the home of all-things Z80-related.

You know, the Zilog chip behind the CP/M machines, GameBoy, and others. Ah, the mid 1970s, when so many things were possible! Nowadays, all we have to look forward to is the degradation of Moore’s law and multi-cores progressing towards the singularity. Nobody cares about undocumented opcodes anymore….

A 1999 Wired article by Howard Rheingold on the un-cliched use of technology by the Amish:

Amish settlements have become a cliché for refusing technology. Tens of thousands of people wear identical, plain, homemade clothing, cultivate their rich fields with horse-drawn machinery, and live in houses lacking that basic modern spirit called electricity. But the Amish do use such 20th-century consumer technologies as disposable diapers, in-line skates, and gas barbecue grills. Some might call this combination paradoxical, even contradictory. But it could also be called sophisticated, because the Amish have an elaborate system by which they evaluate the tools they use; their tentative, at times reluctant use of technology is more complex than a simple rejection or a whole-hearted embrace. What if modern Americans could possibly agree upon criteria for acceptance, as the Amish have? Might we find better ways to wield technological power, other than simply unleashing it and seeing what happens? What can we learn from a culture that habitually negotiates the rules for new tools?

Gizmodo reviews Byte magainze’s first-ever (1983) MS Windows review.

Mouse, what’s a mouse? And why would I need it when I have this great keyboard interface here?!

Dark-roasted Blend gives plenty of images (as usual) of smoke-belching, steam-filled tractors. We are particularly enamored of the wheels.

How the Computer Works: selected scans of the 1979 book.

NB: don’t trust everything you read.

In the library of nearly-dead-protocols, we come across the dimly remembered tome of Gopher. Developed at the University of Minneasota in the early 1990s, “Gopher was at its height of popularity during a time when there were still many equally competing computer architectures and operating systems. As such, there are several Gopher Clients available for Acorn RISC OS, AmigaOS, Atari MiNT, CMS, DOS, MacOS 7x, MVS, NeXT, OS/2 Warp, most UNIX-like operating systems, VMS, Windows 3x, and Windows 9x. GopherVR was a client designed for 3D visualization, and there is even a Gopher Client MOO object. [emphasis added]”

Sadly, I don’t see back-ports for the Timex-Sinclair or Commodore Pet in there. However, Hyperlink 2.5e is a gopher-supporting C64 web-browser. But the Atari 2600 implementation misses a few critical features.

The boffins down at Royal Pingdom have done it again: a History of PC Hardware in Pictures.

I’m particularly fond of the bowling-ball trackball, and the first laptop - a GRiD Compass, shown on the Space Shuttle (?).