<

Tech Stuff

Taking Old Friends For A Spin

Nothing seems to elicit memories quite like music.  A song or album of songs can touch off a whole string of memories of people, places and events. For me certain songs are intertwined with significant milestones of the 60s and 70s, I can even picture where I was and what I was doing on occasion.  Although I’ve been able to amass a fair CD collection over the years there are many “LPs” I’ve never replaced with CDs let alone Mp3s.  Prized LPs have all been safely stashed away, in spite of the hassle of moving them over the years.  To me they enjoy the same status as old family photos, I would never consider getting rid of most of them.  And of course CD cover art can’t compare with cover art of the large format LP album. Try to figure out who is who on the cover of Sergeant Peppers sometime on the CD version.  And certainly it would have been impossible to uncover clues in the Paul is dead hoax of the late 60’s.

About a year ago I pulled out my old Phillips 212 turntable purchased for me by my dad back in 1973.  At the time it was a classy piece ($250) of equipment that I was thrilled to add to my simple stereo setup.  Back then, a “stereo system” was perhaps the most prized and expensive possession one owned.  Other components of my system have changed over the years but the 212 has always tagged along and kept pace, I’ve hauled it all over the country.  The last time I used it was probably ten or more years ago.  I recently discovered that the 30+ year old drive belt had finally disintegrated but was able to find a replacement belt online. Last week I put it all together and hooked it into my system with the intent of ripping some of my favorite LPs to mp3 for my IPOD.

Fortunately I was always very fastidious about my records taking care not to scratch or leaving them with finger prints and dirt on them.  There is nothing worse that trying to listen to a song with hisses and pops or even big skips.  Oh, that horrible feeling when you hear “errruppp!!!” as the needle scrapes across the record surface when started by a careless hand. 

Flipping through my collection is like a stroll down memory lane. I have the Doors “Strange Days” album, the first album I ever heard in stereo. I was at my grandparent’s house and I brought it along to play on my grandfather’s stereo which was much better then my parent’s mono HiFi.  I’ll never forget sitting with the headphones on hearing stereo separation for the first time, it was an extraordinary discovery.  I have my original collection (minus the Vee Jay release worth hundreds that my mother probably sold for a quarter in a garage sale) of Beatles albums and many other old favorites in their original releases.

The first album I set spinning was side one of ”All Things Must Pass ” George Harrison’s first solo album.  Fabulous, what a collection of wonderful material.  Next I pulled out Emerson Lake and Palmer’s ”Tarkus”; what a wall of sound, talk about stereo separation!  Next out came Four Way Street”Four Way Street a terrific live recording of Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young from the summer of 1970. 
And next the 1964 debut album of Jesse Colin Young “Soul of A City Boy”.

Of course, after playing a few one realizes the labor involved in the process: carefully removing the record from the sleeve, cleaning the disk, gently applying the tone arm and needle to the spinning surface, turning it over after 20+ minutes.  I’m reminded of enthusiasm we all had with the coming of CDs.  Yet, the ease and portability of the CD and now the Mp3 can’t diminish the joy and memories associated with two old friends the LP and my Phillips 212.

 

My First Computer

I have fond memories of my first computer, a KayPro II. Purchased in 1985 for $1800; it had 64kb of memory, CPM OS, sported two 5 1/4 floppy drives, and a 9in monochrome amber text screen.  It came with Wordstar for word processing and several other programs.  To run a program you had to put the program floppy disk in one drive while saving work to the other drive since there was no hard drive.  When the drives engaged they made a loud mechanical sound.

At The Kaypro 1986 For those of us who grew up using typewriters, even this simple machine was a huge breakthrough.  You could turn out perfect documents (well as perfect as dot matrix printers could make them!), do things like find and replace words, among many other time saving tasks impossible with a typewriter.  To make bold or italics text, you would have to insert formatting tags much like you do with html today. 
I still have floppy disks with documents I’d written on them, unfortunately I have no way to read them since Kaypro went bust in the late 80’s and I gave my KayPro to a local thrift store.

Find Out More About Kaypro Computers
Read A Review From Byte Magazine 1983
Obsolete Computer Museum
Old Computers.com they are currently working on a personal computer timeline

WebTales

Over the weekend I heard from a dear old friend, Robin, whom I had lost touch with over the last few years. Robin and I met through my brother David. She had been on tour with David in “A Chorus Line” in the late80s . Robin and her longtime friend Stephen, another Chorus Line alum, lived in Seattle. When David would come to visit me he would always look them up. On one trip he took me over to their place, we had a riot, it was nonstop laughter… we became fast friends. Stephen has since passed away from cancer… that’s a story in itself!

In 1995 Robin, Stephen and I decided to collaborate on an idea I had to create a story to be written entirely online, we called it “WebTales An Evolving Tale of Cyberspace”.  Nowadays, there are probably hundreds of such things online but at the time it was a new concept. To give you an idea of how long ago this was in terms of the web, Internet Explorer 1 had just been released with the new OS Win 95! Netscape 1.1 was the most advanced browser with over 90% share of the market.

Hearing from Robin made me think about WebTales so I decided to look for my old files to see if I still had everything. Fortunately I found a floppy with just about everything still intact. I built the site on a 486 x66PC with 16 megs of ram on a 14.4 modem.  One of the only available web graphics editors at the time was a program called Lview (still available), very primitive by today’s standards. The graphic above was made with it. Style sheets didn’t exist, the use of tables to control layout was relatively new. The design is very simplistic and looking at it now not very appealing. The technologies that support this site,php and mysql didn’t yet exist. 

We didn’t keep the site up very long. We had some interest but in hindsight we were a bit too early. A year or so later the web really took off. It was similar to what I had experienced trying to sell businesses on the idea of a website, “what’s the WWW and why would I want a website?” was the common response. Well, we all know what has happened since then.

See the WebTales site

Honey Your Computer Is Ringing!

I recently got turned on to Skype a free Internet telephony product that is amazing. Skype uses P2P technology which decentralizes network resources that scale in proportion the number of users.  Such notorious services as Napster and Kazaa popularized P2P technology.

I’ve not used Skype other than with one friend of mine but a co-worker uses it to talk with his brother in Sweden.  My experience has been very favorable, sound quality is as good if not better than standard phones. 

You can even call standard landline phones for a small fee.  Also international calls are possible and are as good as calling computer to computer I’m told.  There are even real phones that work with Skype