This is The Modern World

-

Apple across the decades (and a couple of Psions)

 

 

I think my increasing love of the analogue, arcane and just plain retro is probably down to the fact that I was a very early adopter of all things digital and networked, having had some form of 'tech' around the house for decades, now. As I wrote before, I started using what were then called 'Microcomputers' around 1979/80 when I worked at Birmingham University. By the early '90's we had a dial-up internet connection and computers around the house all the time. I don't think any of my son's friends parents actually knew what a computer was, let alone any knowledge of the fledgling internet.

There was no Amazon, no eBay, not even search was possible: you had to find stuff by knowing exactly where it was in the first place. It's so hard to visualise that Google was simply just one search option among many when the technology first came along and not the monolithic behemoth we now know and love/hate. As for cleaving to the retro/analogue world, I'm not turning my back on the present day, Rees-Mogg-like (Heaven forfend, Sirrah!); something that's fairly self-evident from this little blog. Having been networked as a matter of daily course for so long, it would be very difficult to backtrack to a pre-internet era way of working. Rather I use the old fashioned to leaven the experience of technological life; it allows me to filter out some of the noise I've referred to in previous posts. This affords a level of focus that we have largely lost, having traded it off for the multiple, often simultaneous data-flows that we are hooked into on a daily basis. Social media, Twitter being a particularly good example, encourage an always-alert state of mind; they play on the natural tendency that people have to simply not miss out on stuff. Sometimes, the off-grid devices like this one [the AlphaSmart] help me to just get on with the thing I'm meant to be doing, i.e. writing this. At the same time, most of my retro tech has been bought online. I find the combination and juxtaposition of the two spheres fascinating in itself, as well as just plain useful.

A long-term goal I've got in this melding of past and present technologies, is to finally find a way of getting internet access via the old Mac Classic that I inherited from my late friend and colleague Jean-Charles Boude.  He was intending to get this very limited old beast online just before he died and I would very much like to finish his project one day if at all feasible. What would be a corker of a follow-up to that if it is, would be to get HyperCard - the software I mentioned vis a vis the Zettelkasten - to be the networked software that it could have been in the 1980s, had it's inventor - the great Bill Atkinson - had that sideways leap of imagination at the time. As he later would have it, HyperCard presaged the fundamental mechanisms of the World Wide Web, HTML, document-linking across networks and what we take for granted to the point where it's invisible to most of us: the web browser. Now that would the perfect mix of old and new. 

Postscript: I've just been reminded that limited connectivity via LAN using HyperCard was being looked at in the early '90s - a good place to start!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Of Feedback & Wobbles

-
Image
Many years ago I came up with an analogy for poorly damped feedback loops. The feedback loop that prompted this frankly tart analogy was indeed a horror. Anyone who remembers shame-faced their first attempts at clutch control resulting in the good old kangaroo launch across the lights only to stall in the middle of the crossroads will have some idea of the kind of data transfer lag involved in said system. The analogy I made was that of a large blancmange. Untouched, a model of stasis and eminently stable and predictable; but prod the bugger and the resultant chaotic behaviour needs a very complex physical model and some very decent computing horsepower to predict its outputs, if at all. The system in question was a large and complex audio-visual display at what eventually became 'The Electric Mountain' in Llanberis. We were ultimately contracted to maintain the thing having been witness to and peripherally involved in its installation. Certainly not involved in its des...
Read more

A Time of Connection

-
Image
I was just reflecting on the vacuum of continuity that's left behind when someone dies: that sudden sense of disjoint, of fracture, in one's personal history that takes one completely by surprise at the oddest moments. These pinch-points in memory can often yield some surprising revelations of fact about periods in one's past. One such occurred to me tonight, tending my rather lazy meal of pizza in its journey from shrink-wrap to mouth via the oven. Al's recent demise still catches me out from time to time: the space he left bounded by forty plus years of friendship. But the thing that struck me tonight was just how much change was happening on a personal and social level in the very early years of our acquaintance. Between moving here from Birmingham in September 1980 and our buying our first proper house eighteen months later, all manner of things occurred that would chart the course of our lives to the present day. At around the time of our meeting Alan & Irene [...
Read more

Sister Ray

-
Image
Ray Keats - aka Ann Key - local artist & family friend, died this morning. She'd been ill for some years, but never let it get in the way of her work or of tending to the massive network of friends, colleagues and fans she had accumulated over the decades. Her house on the High Street of Rachub, just below where we live - a former cockle factory(!) - bought many years ago when she and her late husband Ronald moved here from Manchester to set up home in Yr Achub, is currently still home to her paintings and drawings, and the front window displays her work, including the last drawing she made in hospital, just days before she died. Her good friend Colin has been a diamond in her latter years, looking out for her and just being there when she needed him. She will be much missed by this tiny community of ageing bohemians up here in the hills, but suffice it to say, George, her cat, will be well looked after now she's gone.
Read more