Hey, Hey, 16K

Computers have become an integral part of our society.  We communicate with them, keep up on the news with them, find the answers to questions of all kinds with them, view pornography with them and exchange ridiculous quantities of cute cat pictures with them. We use them in our work and in our recreational activities.  They've created a whole new class of time vampire called social media.  I'll bet there are a lot of people who, if they had to go without facebook, twitter or any other form of social media for even just one week, would be at a loss for what to do with themselves and might even begin to experience withdrawal symptoms, not unlike those of my loyal readers who have been checking blogger.com for a new Halmanator post since last August.

Today, most everybody uses some form of computer on a regular basis; if not an actual laptop or notebook computer, then a tablet or a smart phone.  In fact, it seems to me that desktop computers are on the wane, as opposed to being on the desktop where they belong.  You hardly see them anymore outside of office environments.  Rather, they tend to be inside the office environment, where they do belong.

I personally am still sitting at a desktop computer as I bang out this blog post.  I still prefer desktop computers to laptop or notebook computers or tablets for two basic reasons; for one, I like to play games on my PC (as opposed to using a game console, which I do not own) and, when I play games, I want a full-sized screen and speakers to help immerse me in the experience in a way that a notebook computer or tablet simply cannot do.  The other reason why I prefer desktop computers is because, being a basically introverted personality type, it gives me an excuse to shut myself away from everyone for a while, up in my attic den,  That's where I keep my desktop computer, so that's where I must go when I need to use it for anything.

Getting back to my original point, though, computers today are commonplace and are used by pretty much everybody.  Even my technologically-challenged sister-in-law, who once changed her mind about enrolling in a college program because registration had to be done on-line, (in hindsight, probably just as well) now has a smartphone.  It was not always thus (meaning almost everyone using computers, not my sister-in-law owning a smartphone, although that was not always thus either).  I recall (fondly sometimes, I must admit) the late seventies and early eighties, when the first personal computers, like the Commodore VIC 20 and 64, the Radio Shack Color Computer, the Atari ST or the early Apple and IBM PCs were strictly the domain of geek hobbyists, like myself.

Back in those days, only real geeks used computers!  The personal computer industry saw to that.  To begin with, there were no namby-pamby point-and-click, GUI interfaces!  No-sirree!  Back then, if you wanted to use a computer, you had to type arcane commands like:

DIR C: /S|MORE (meaning "please give me the directions for making s'mores") or...

LOAD "$",8 (load eight dollars into my bank account).

Back then, if you did not know the correct commands to get the computer to do what you wanted, all that you typically got out of the machine was the dreaded SYNTAX ERROR message which was almost always unhelpful except for those rare occasions on which a syntax error was exactly what you were looking for.

Because most people were too busy having actual lives and interacting with members of the opposite sex to bother learning the arcane commands necessary for using a personal computer, those of us who did learn them felt the smug sense of superiority that comes with belonging to an elite secret society, much like the Freemasons only with a dorkier secret handshake.

Of course, even back then, those of us who used computers tended to spend a lot of time playing games on them, and this is another thing that set us apart.  You really needed a strong interest in gaming, of the sort that defies all logical explanation, to enjoy computer gaming back then.  Today's games are multimedia smorgasbords with Hollywood style production values.  I can easily understand why a game like the one below would appeal to a wide audience.

It's a little bit harder, though, for most people to understand what kept us early gamers playing games like the one below for any amount of time.  I should note that the narrator is definitely "one of us" - I can just tell, even without his giving me the dorky secret handshake.

And yet, countless nerds like me spent countless hours tanning their pale complexions by the light of the CRT, late into the night, playing this game for hour upon hour, usually unsuccessfully as it was actually a surprisingly hard game to win at!

Incidentally, the comments following the above video on YouTube included this one:

"I LOVED this game!  I used Norton Tools to hack it and change attributes.  Give myself unlimited armor, strength etc...   I tried to download it for my MAC but it said unsupported CPU :(  I want to play this again!!"

Yup. He's "one of us" too!

I'm most gratified to learn that I am not alone in looking back on those pioneering days of personal computing with a fond sense of nostalgia, as the video below, which celebrates those halcyon days of nerd-dom, aptly illustrates.

Vinyl Time Capsules

My mother's birthday falls this week.  Like many people, the older she gets, the harder she is to buy gifts for.  I mean, she's had a good life, rarely wanted for anything, sired the kind of son that most parents can only dream about and basically has pretty much everything she wants.

Mom doesn't own a record player and hasn't owned one for years now.  The one and only turntable that she ever owned was built into one of those all-in-one stereo cabinets; you know, the kind that has a receiver, turntable, tape deck and speakers built right into it, with compartments to store a few records and tapes thrown in to boot.  This wasn't the kind of modular sound system that's been the norm for the last 30 years or so; this was a stand-alone piece of furniture.  They were popular back in the seventies.  However, that old relic was finally taken to the curbside in front of mom's house some years ago, to be replaced with a much more diminutive stereo/CD player. 

Being the pack-rat that I am, I,  however, still have an old Dual turntable and a sizable collection of vinyl records to go with it so, having no further use for her old records, mom gave them to me.  I'd always had this idea that some day I might hook up the turntable to my computer and convert my favorite old records to CD, and I thought that mom might like me to do the same with her old records as well.  It was just one more of the many personal projects that I never seem to have the time for.

That's where I got the idea that maybe it was time to take the plunge and give mom a little trip down memory lane for this birthday.  So I dug out my old Dual, hooked it up to a computer and chose three titles out of mom's record collection that I thought she might particularly enjoy.  There was Harry Belafonte live at Carnegie Hall (mom was always a big Belafonte fan; I get a little embarrassed when she Calypso dances in public, particularly after a few glasses of wine), a German singer who goes only by the name of "Lolita" (no, it's not what you think - apparently that's a perfectly acceptable name among certain ethnicities) and, finally, the lady who's depicted at the top of this post; a fairly obscure Canadian country songstress by the name of Jean Pardy.

Jean Pardy was actually never one of mom's favorites, but I chose to convert the album for its nostalgic, sentimental value.  You see, I`d purchased it for mom back in 1973, when I was still but a young lad of ten years.  Records were still something of a novelty in our household at the time as the old stereo cabinet was still brand, spanking new so I decided to get mom a record for her birthday.  I didn't know much about music in those days.  I had no records of my own and I only listened to the radio when it happened to be on in the background so I marched down to the local Woolworth's department store, found the section where they sold records and scanned the rows of album covers for something that looked appealing.  The only reason I can offer today for choosing Jean Pardy is because I was a big fan of Popeye cartoons back then, and she appears to have shopped at the same fashion outlets as Olive Oyl.

As the album title suggests, most of the songs are tributes to Newfoundland and Newfoundlanders, Jean being herself a native of that maritime island.  Several of the songs sound as though they may well have been written by the iconic Canadian country/folk singer, "Stompin' Tom" Connors, with a few well-worn (even at that time) country favorites such as `D-I-V-O-R-C-E` thrown in for good measure.  Listening to the album during its recording (because analog recordings can only be duplicated in real time after all) I realized that I had forgotten how astoundingly bad this album really was.  Let`s just say it`s no mystery why Jean Pardy isn`t exactly a household name down in Nashville nowadays, or even in Thunder Bay for that matter (maybe in Corner Brook though).

And yet, I couldn`t help feeling a certain nostalgic pleasure as I heard those whining slide guitars, the wheezy concertinas and the clickety-clack of the spoons (yes, those are considered musical instruments among certain people of Celtic and Gaelic origin) and I waxed a little philosophical as I so often do, thinking how the music that I thought had been lost for all these years had been right there, safely stored away among the peaks and valleys that form the floor of the spiral grooves that are pressed into the two faces of that vinyl disc.

My thoughts have wandered off along those lines before when listening to my stereo.  It's sometimes incredible to me to think that an electronic box can reproduce any music that a person might imagine.  Beethoven, Caruso, AC/DC, Rolf Harris, Mike Oldfield, Lady Gaga... you name it, this box can faithfully reproduce any of their masterpieces without "knowing" anything about music.  More than that, it could even, theoretically, play compositions that haven't even been conceived yet much less written, if we could only feed the correct sequence of magnetic signals to it.  This idea is somewhat akin to the "Infinite Monkey" theorem which states that a monkey banging on typewriter keys for an infinite amount of time will eventually reproduce all of Shakespeare's writings.  If you fed random electrical signals to your stereo receiver for an infinite amount of time, it would eventually play any music you can name.

And now, having transitioned from the nostalgic to the silly and, finally, the completely whimsical, the nice men in the white coats tell me that it's time for my sedation.  I'll try not to stay away for so long this time, faithful readers.

Games Unplayed

I've mentioned before in this blog that I'm a computer gamer.  Well, actually, I used to be more of a computer gamer than I am now.  Somewhere along the way I became halfways responsible and I spend a lot less time playing games on my PC than I used to, mainly because annoying distractions such as work, family and my home (i.e. the maintenance thereof) tend to place demands on the time that I used to spend playing games. 

But I still do like to tinker with them from time to time, and I'm a pack rat when it comes to computer software.  I keep everything!  Others play games and then, when they've finished them or they tire of them, either throw them away or give them to friends or sell them or something.  Not me.  I keep 'em, and collect 'em.  Incidentally, I'm a dyed-in-the-wool PC gamer.  I own no gaming consoles, nor to I plan to get any.  "Give me a game that requires a keyboard and mouse!" I say.

Even when I used to spend a lot more time playing computer games, though, I failed to finish them, more often than not.  Over the years, I've collected a lot of games.  There's a post on this blog entitled "Clutter" which shows some pictures of my little attic retreat, whence I go to play games, post to my blog or just get away from the world for a while.  Said pictures include a shot of my main computer game shelf (I say "main" because that's not all there is by any stretch of the imagination).  Click here for a look.  As your eyes scan the boxes and their various titles, know that I have not finished most of those.  Know too that, some of them, I haven't even started!  I picked them up because I'd heard good things about them and/or they were being offered for what seemed like a bargain price, but I just never got around to trying them.

I also used to read computer gaming magazines fairly regularly.  My favorite was the now-defunct Computer Gaming World (or CGW for short).  I found a really cool web site called The CGW Museum, where you can view or even download almost every issue of CGW that was ever published in PDF format.  Being the nostalgic fool that I am, I'm gradually downloading the whole collection.

I was browsing through the October, 1986 issue this evening (the pleistocene era using the computing time scale).  The inside cover featured an ad for a game called ROADWAR 2000.  "Hmm," I mused, "I think I might have that in my collection somewhere".  I seemed to recall purchasing a copy of something called "ROADWAR" several years ago, at a small computer store that was moving and therefore selling off their older inventory at bargain basement prices.  So, you see, ROADWAR was already dated even at the time!

I scanned my gaming shelf and, sure enough, there I spied a pale yellow box with the title ROADWAR emblazoned on its spine.  Interestingly, it said only ROADWAR, not ROADWAR 2000, so I pulled it down for a closer examination, in order to determine whether this was the same game that was being advertised in CGW back in October of 1986 or something different.  Well, it turns out that what I've got is ROADWAR BONUS EDITION, which includes ROADWAR EUROPE, ROADWAR 2000 and something called WARGAME CONSTRUCTION KIT.  Inside the box are three 5¼-inch floppy diskettes for IBM PC-DOS or MS-DOS PCs.  Yes, I said 5¼-inch and, yes, I said DOS.  And, yes, you guessed it, I have never tried these games even once.  And, yes, I still intend to someday.

P.S. - For those of you not in the know who are now protesting "But today's PCs won't run those games anymore!" I say, that's what DOSBox is for!

What did we ever do before the internet?

---

Update - September 25, 2012

Somebody out there appears to have created an online game especially for people like me who never finish games.  It's called You Have To Burn The Rope.  Click the link and have fun!  That's one more game that I've actually finished. 

WOO-HOO!!!

Wrong Decade

After typing out last week's post about Battling Tops, I turned to Google's image search, as I usually do, in search of an appropriate graphic with which to dress up the post. Whilst searching for pictures of the Battling Tops game, I came across pictures of several other games from the same period. One of these was the sixties version of Milton-Bradley's Battleship.

You've gotta love that! Dad and "Junior" getting in some quality male bonding time over a friendly game of Battleship, while mom and sister smile approvingly from the background as they do up the dishes like good wenches. Man, I was born in the wrong decade!

Incidentally, I've updated the Battling Tops post with a couple of embedded YouTube videos. One shows the original seventies TV commercial, and the second shows four grown men playing the game, and totally getting into it. I think the latter really captures the flavor of the game. Check it out!

Battling Tops

If you're part of the baby boomer generation (like me), you likely remember a host of games from the seventies by Milton-Bradley, Mattel and Ideal such as Battleship, Don't Spill the Beans, Ants in the Pants and Ker Plunk! These games tended to feature some kind of gimmick; a plastic case containing a grid full of ships and pegs, a large pot on a swivel that you filled with beans, a plastic pair of pants into which you flicked colorful plastic ants or a transparent plastic tube full of holes into which you stuck colourful straws, atop which you piled marbles and then proceeded to pull out the straws one-by-one trying not to drop any of the marbles. These "games" were essentially built around interesting toys and very much targeted at younger kids. One of the most memorable, for me, was a weird little game called Battling Tops by Ideal.

Battling Tops was a game for two to four players that featured a circular, slightly concave arena with four gates or corrals at the top, bottom and sides. Each gate or corral belonged to one of the players, who would wind a little plastic top into it using a string with a finger-loop at one end. A quick yank of the loop would unwind the string and send the player's top spinning out of its corral and into the arena, where all four tops would collide and bounce off each other. Eventually, of course, the tops would lose their momentum and fall over. The last top left spinning was declared the winner. Each top bore a sticker eblazoned with a funny moniker such as "Hurricane Hank", "Dizzy Dan" and "Twirling Tim".

This sort of game provided endless hours of entertainment to one as easily amused and as transfixed with spinning objects and buttons and gadgets as I. Once in a rare while a collision between two or more of the tops would pop one up into the air and right out of the arena (I recall the TV commercial for the game showing just such an occurrence). But I recall one incident in particular that was so bizarre that I wouldn't believe it myself if someone related the tale to me, yet I swear that I am absolutely not making this up (® and TM Dave Barry Enterprises, inc.)

One evening, while playing Battling Tops with my sister, my mom and my dad (yes, back in those days, families actually played games together sometimes) my hapless top did get knocked out of the arena, just as described above. Surprisingly, it landed upright on the table, outside of the arena, still spinning.

Amused, I decided to let it go and continued to watch it. As it shimmied slowly across the table, its base hit a seam (this was one of those extendable tables, you see) which caused it to pop up into the air, right back into the arena, where it landed, still spinning! The moment this happened, the other three tops, which were also still going, converged on the upstart survivor, as if to punish it for its audacity, mercilessly beating it to the ground. My top didn't win, but it sure did try!

Boomerang Formica

The pattern that you see above is what I see underneath my cereal bowl as I douse my Shreddies with milk each morning. No, it's not the result of over-imbibing the night before, as evidenced by the fact that I was able to capture a photographic image of it. It's my kitchen counter top.

What I didn't realize, until recently, is that it has a name; boomerang Formica. The "boomerang" part of this interesting handle is an obvious allusion to the vague way in which the curvy little shapes resemble boomerangs, and the "Formica" part is owing to the fact that the laminate material upon which said curvy little shapes are printed is a heat-resistant, wipe-clean brand of composite materials manufactured by the Formica Corporation, based in Cincinatti, Ohio (according to Wikipedia). So, all in all, boomerang Formica is a very sensible moniker. "Amoeba Formica" would have been another possibility, but you don't want to associate the countertops upon which you prepare food with microsopic living organisms. I'd have to say that the marketing whizzes at Formica Corporation called this one right.

According to Jane and Michael Stern's Encyclopedia of Pop Culture (HarperCollins, 1992), patterns similar to this adorned the counter tops of homes and diners such as Al's back in the Happy Days, which gives you some idea how old my house is. It also gives you some idea how long it's been since any renovation or serious redecorating has been done (hint: not since before I moved into the place).

Boomerang Formica, say the Sterns, "signaled a forward-looking point of view, defiantly different from old, dowdy motifs such as the cabbage roses and Grecian urns" which embellish my bathroom walls and counter tops. That's me all over. Forward-looking but, unfortunately, riding in the caboose.

Wikipedia tells us that Formica was invented in 1912 by Daniel J. O'Conor and Herbert A. Faber, who worked for Westinghouse at the time. Before then, the word "formica" was used only in reference to a particular genus of ants (again according to Wikipedia), which would explain why my kitchen counters are overrun with ants each summer. I'm not sure how O'Conor and Faber were able to foresee this, but it all begins to make sense now. The ants probably follow the boomerangs, assuming that they point the way to the food.

Sadly, the heady days when counter tops such as the one in my kitchen exuded optimism and alluded to a "sleek, curved and speedy" future have faded into yesteryear. Now, say Jane and Michael Stern, "boomerang Formica is as nostalgic as doo-wop music and Brylcreemed hair". Well, I've admitted before on this blog that I have a weakness for nostalgia.

Okay, so my home is looking a little dated and I suppose I should really redo my kitchen counter tops. On the other hand, some styles are cyclical. If I hold out just a bit longer, maybe boomerang Formica will come back (Get it? Har! I kill me!)

The Good Old Days

I've noted before on this blog that I'm a sucker for nostalgia. I probably spend more time than I should reminiscing about my childhood and my adolescent years. The old neighborhood in which my family lived for the first ten years after arriving in Canada. The neighborhood kids; Mark, Randy, Donna, Brian, Eric, Karen, Ruthie and the rest. I can still see most of their faces in my mind's eye. My kindergarten classmates, many of which remained classmates all the way up to the seventh grade. I still remember most of their names; Dave Wendling, Valerie Oestreich, Doug Halley, Laura Murray, Brian MacIsaac, Patty Michalewicz, Johnny Pacheco and Laurie Kennedy, my first schoolboy crush. The music that I grew up with; Blue Suede, the Brothers Johnson, the Bee Gees, the Knack, 10cc, Brook Benton. The TV shows; the old Batman serials, Star Trek, the Brady Bunch, Gilligan's Island, Quincy, The Night Stalker, Banocek ... ah, the good old days!

Let's begin by giving credit where it's due. This post was inspired by a podcast called Before Fast Food from a regular feature called Lovers and Other Strangers hosted by Don Jackson of Toronto's CHFI-FM. In fact, you may want to listen to the podcast, either before or after reading the rest of this post. For those of you who multi-task, you can listen while reading. Just click here. You'll need some time, though. It runs for about an hour.

The podcast begins by quoting former U.S. Vice President Herbert J. Humphrey, who once said, that the "good old days" were "never that good". He had a point. The past often tends to look rosier with the benefit of hindsight, doesn't it? Case in point; here's a link to a web site that romanticizes the sixties. Boy, those sixties sure were wonderful, weren't they? Mind you, the presentation also mentions the Vietnam war, the assassinations of Dr. Martin Luthor King Jr., John F. Kennedy and his brother, Robert Kennedy, and the Cuban Missile Crisis that brought the world to the brink of full-scale nuclear war. Even this nostalgic web site acknowledges that the "good old days" weren't always all that good, just as Humphrey said.

My love of nostalgia lead me to choose a Chrysler PT Cruiser for my current car. I like the retro styling. It looks like something from the forties or early fifties. Are you old enough to remember what the cars of the forties and fifties were like? I'm not, but I know that they used a lot more gas and caused a lot more pollution than the cars of today do. They were a lot less safe, too. Before the Tucker and, later, Ralph Nader forced the automotive industry to start taking safety seriously, cars often had no seat belts. Before safety glass, broken windshields could be lethal. Before fuel injection, engines often stalled when it rained and too much dampness got under the hood. Brake efficiency suffered noticeably as well after driving on wet streets or through puddles. A lovingly maintained 1949 Packard Convertible Coupé may bring a sentimental smile, but you probably wouldn't want to drive one, at least not with any regularity. My PT Cruiser has the retro looks without all the retro headaches; the best of both worlds, one might say.

On the other hand, some of our modern conveniences seem to have backfired on us. Take the cell phone. We can call anyone at a moment's notice, no matter where we are, and they can reach us too. So can the boss. Suddenly, we're never really off the clock anymore. Jim Balsillie of RIM, recently touted the Blackberry's ability to give people more "flexibility" with regard to their working hours. Seems to me that "flexibility", in this context, is just a positive-sounding way of saying "just because we're not at the office, doesn't mean we're off duty." It's becoming harder and harder to spend time with our families without worrying about interruptions from the office, or simply to shut the world out and just find a few quiet moments to think and to reflect.

One particular woman that I recently read about who runs a catering business noted that, thanks to her Blackberry, her clients can reach her even on Christmas Eve, as though this were a good thing. Imagine if Jesus had been born today. There's the Holy Family, huddled in the modern equivalent of a stable (probably some budget motel in Bethlehem, PA) when suddenly a buzzing emits from Joseph's hip. Reaching down, he examines his Blackberry, looks at Mary and apologetically mutters "I have to take this".

If we really examine exactly what was so "good" about the "good old days", I think that most would conclude that it's more about simplicity than it is about what we had then versus now, or what was happening then versus now. Earlier times were simpler times. In his book, Information Anxiety, Richard S. Wurman writes that a single weekday edition of today's New York Times contains more information than the average person was likely to encounter in a lifetime in 17th century England, and that's just a single hard-copy newspaper, never mind the internet, where we're inundated with the mindless rantings of the likes of me! What do we do with all of this information? How do we manage it? How do we sift out the useful and discard the rest? In his book (and television series), Connections, James Burke demonstrates how modern society has created what he calls a "technology trap". We use technology without truly understanding how it works and, in so doing, we've made ourselves so dependent upon it, we can no longer function or even survive without it. I think that many are at least subconsciously aware of this fact, if not consciously, and it scares us.

Small wonder that some of us longingly remember a time when we could drive our big, honkin' (no pun intended) finned gas guzzlers without feeling guilty about warming the planet; when the dawn of a new century didn't cause people to panic over the possibility of widespread power outages, inoperative gas stations, empty grocery store shelves, a stock market crash or elevators and aircraft crashing to the ground, all because of two little digits; when it was normal to retire from the same company that first hired us after we graduated from school; when a "family" was a clearly-defined and easily understood unit consisting of a married, hetrosexual couple and one or more of their direct offspring; in short, when the world was so much easier to understand and manage. The greater feeling of control over our own lives and destinies that we had then made us more self-confident and less anxious, even though that feeling of control may well have been largely an illusion caused by our own ignorance.

During the podcast that I mentioned near the start of this post, Gladys Knight says that, as bad as we may think that they are, these will become the "good old days" for our children. I'll take that one step further and suggest that, ten to twenty years from now, we ourselves may well refer to these days as "the good old days". It's okay to wax nostalgic every so often, as long as we're careful not to spend so much of our time reliving the past that we miss out on the present.