Blast from the Past

When 10MB could be had for a mere $3400

Long time, no see.

I’ve been toiling away at numerous projects, traveling, writing, composing music—and basically doing everything except writing this newsletter.

Mea culpa.

This is going to be a brief entry today, but I stumbled across a couple of photos in my archives that I thought I’d share.

If you’re my age or older, you certainly remember when having a 10MB hard drive was a BIG deal. (To put this in context, I’m working today on a PowerPoint presentation about Abraham Lincoln and New York in the Civil War; it currently has about 50 slides in the deck and is already 11MB, so it wouldn’t fit on either of the machine’s being advertised here.)

Certainly there were people in the 1980s who saw that technology would continue to get faster, cheaper, and smaller. After all, Moore’s Law, which says the number of transistors on an integrated circuit doubles every two years, dates all the way back to 1965. But the general public wasn’t always on board, and it’s fascinating to back and read magazines and newspapers from the 1970s and ‘80s, many of which have stories about ways to overcome “computerphobia” (a word with such a short lifespan that my spellcheck doesn’t recognize it).

One such way to buy devices that had one foot in the old world, and one in the new, such as the Phillips Magnavox VideoWriter, which featured a small, amber screen where you could see what you were typing and a thermal printer to produce the finished product.

This type of “it’s a computer but it’s not a computer” is having a comeback. I’ve been bombarded with ads recently for all sorts of word processors that don’t connect to the internet and thus will keep me from getting distracted while I work. (My problem, of course, is that I need the internet at my fingertips most of the time when I’m writing, but I do see the appeal.)

Before we move on to my reading lists (for paid subscribers, below the fold), I’ll leave you with this ad from Motorola predicting the rise of the cell phone.

…and, in other news…

Below this point are various links to things I’ve been reading recently that might be of interest, including about the Civil War, that geyser on 28th Street last week, and HBO’s The Gilded Age.

These are for paid subscribers. We’d love to have you join us!