When I was locking myself up in my room to chat with people online in the 90s, I didn’t have Discord, Telegram, WhatsApp, Messenger, Instagram, or Twitter. None of them existed yet.
When I was locking myself up in my room to chat with people online in the 90s, I didn’t have Discord, Telegram, WhatsApp, Messenger, Instagram, or Twitter. None of them existed yet.
Floppy disks, or diskettes. Well, not exactly floppy—the ones I used mostly were rigid. But they started floppy! The first ones before my time introduced by IBM in 1971 were thin, floppy, and at 8″ in diameter, they were almost as big and functional as uchiwa, round Japanese hand fans.
Thought I wouldn’t write much this month, but here we are with yet another entry in the same month. Good things come in threes. Consider this one a bonus.
Alright, I thought my last entry would be my only one for 2024, but… Since it’s the end of the year, with everything being festive and colourful, I thought I’d write memories about that trend in the late 1990s and early 2000s of products made of colourful translucent plastic.
It’s that festive season at the end of the year that makes the young excited and everyone else nostalgic.
Thought I’d say hi. It’s been awhile. Today, it’s raining cats and dogs outside so most of my plans have been cancelled and I didn’t go out much except to go buy food at the corner store.
Techies online sometimes asked what was my first computer. I usually mention the first Windows PC I got, but when I think of it, that is not entirely true. It was indeed the first Windows computer my family owned, but I did have a few fun and sometimes strange computers before that one. As I went back in time of computing and the Internet a few times on here already, why not just add to the memories and present those odd machines to you.
I’m sure by now we’re all aware of the resurgence of the third-to-last letter of the alphabet on the Internet lately, as one of the world’s richest man acquired a popular social platform and turned it into… uh… something. He owned the x.com domain for several years and decided to put it into use, pointing it to the site he now owns.
Following the article “Offline,” here are some resources to help you relive the days of computing from the past decades. Or if you’ve never experienced it, now you can! For most of the links below, all you’ll need is a modern Web browser—like Firefox or Safari… not Netscape 3 or IE6. ;)
Today, you’re on the Internet, practically always connected. Wherever you are, at the office, at a café, at home, in bed, even on a toilet seat… Whenever there is Wi-Fi or 5G, your smartphone, your game console, your watch, your tablet, your computer is online. You can go offline if you choose to. But really, when’s the last time you’ve seen anyone do that? When did you ever turn off a computer instead of letting it sleep?
As I mentioned in An evening in 1997, one TV show I loved watching regularly was Video & Arcade Top 10.
It was a Monday, 5 PM, in the fall of 1997, somewhere in Canada. I finished my first day of school, grade 10, after a nice two-month summer vacation that never feels long enough. It took me about an hour for the bus to take me back home.