Breakfast Links: Floppy Disk, Moon & WiMax
UPDATE: Remember how you had to bust out the hole puncher to turn your single sided disk into a double sided one? Good times… good times…
Back in the day, when I was rocking the Apple II+, me and my brother would stay up all night playing Galactic Empire (and it’s sequel Galactic Trader - I think we had the whole saga), that game was soooo the bomb. I fondly remember my trips to Eventide and Moonsweep, one day when I write an SF book, those names will appear. Anyhow, it was late one night/early one morning when I accidentally spilled orange juice on one of the 5 1/4 disks - panicked, as we were close to winning, we decided to kinda just move the internal platter and make sure it wasn’t sticking and then shove it in the drive. Needless to say… that was the end of the game and our drive. None of which has anything to do with this fargin’ awesome floppy disk notebook except that these are the kinds of fond memories 5 1/4 floppies give me. (via)
Perhaps it was that game that engendered a love of the space in me. It may be why I so love this high def video of the moon’s surface that Japan has been so kind as to take and put in the internets. It starts out great and then about 1/2 or 2/3 it switches into kickass mode with a closer view of the moon and at the very end goes all Pitch Black, I’m not positive, but I am pretty sure that I saw Vin running through the valleys near there. I might be wrong.
Sadly, you know how there’s all this question going on with the whole WiMax thing? More bad news has come up - Sprint just gave Clearwire the boot on what was going to be their joint rollout. That can’t be good, can it? Sprint says that they’re still rolling on with XOHM but it is seeming less and less likely to me with every passing press release. I’m going to quietly shed a tear now.
November 9th, 2007 at 10:53 am
My floppy game was demolitions Derby on the Comidore 64. Build your own tracks baby! And by the way that moon surface video is sickness. I watched it a dozen times already. One of these days Alice……
November 9th, 2007 at 10:58 am
My mom used to call felix “floppy disk” when he was a kid. no joke. He did kinda resemble those skinny awkward things and he always had his face in a computer.
November 9th, 2007 at 11:13 am
Ah C64, I played Taipan non-stop on that system with Steve Winick! No disk drive, though… tape drive. Geez. Always wanted to play but never actually got to play Mail Order Monster. Sad.
I always had my face on the puter? Geez, man… you had the modem and every apple computer from the apple II+ to the GS. Fo’ REALZ! But your mom did call me floppy disk…
November 12th, 2007 at 12:50 am
And here I thought, all these years, that it was because of the limited amount of data you can retain. . . and if that was the case then I would be a card with hole patterns punched into it. Another quick old school game shout out. My father had a “portable” computer (I think Compaq) which consisted of one 45 pound metal and plastic case. A port slid open manually in the back for the plug (no batteries of course, you would need car batteries) and the top snapped off reveling on the reverse side a keyboard. The new front of the box was a tiny green screen. The game was Decathlon. It was the first game I ever got really mad at, the first game I stayed up late to play and the first game I missed when we got the C64 even though it was a giant leap forward. Okay, not that giant. More of a hop.
November 12th, 2007 at 8:22 am
I think Matt Groner’s dad had a laptop like that! And a bernoulli box. A bernoulli box! Heh, maybe http://tinyurl.com/3ypwh3 is the new version of those crazy “portables.”
November 12th, 2007 at 12:00 pm
Matt’s dad did have the bernoulli. But i only remember Brian’s dad having the “portable”
ONE Taipan is ZE TAIPAN!