Crave

(Credit: Johan Van den Brande)

I use Twitter. A lot. Twitterfon is likely the most-used app on my iPhone. I have a Twitter widget in my MacBook's dashboard. And Twitter itself is one of my browser's home tabs. I make sure I've got a Twitter client of some sort on all of my devices.

Now, thankfully, I can tweet from my Commodore 64 using the adorable app called Breadbox 64 (yes, guys can say "adorable"). Of course, your Commodore needs an Internet connection, but as developer Johan Van den Brande points out, it's all very doable. In a post on his site, the Belgian engineer gives a step-by-step and even offers the app for free download.

Not only does Breadbox 64 allow you to tweet, it also lets you access your friend feed, as well as individual friends' timelines. And, of course, Van den Brande also has details on the hardware, like the MMC plug-in ethernet adapter, as well as various screenshots. It looks pretty awesome.

Sadly, I don't really have a Commodore at home. But if someone can get Twitter running on a Texas Instruments TI-99/4A, I'd be a very happy guy.

At a garage sale in March 2009, I spied an old piece of lab equipment for sale with the word "Quantumeter" written across the front. I had no idea what it was, or if it worked, but the $10 asking price seemed reasonable for a device that looked like it fell off the back of a time machine.

After getting the Quantumeter back home, some online research turned up a vague explanation of its origins as a pseudo-scientific piece of medical equipment, used to administer low voltages of electricity to sick patients in the first half of the 20th century. As awesome as it sounds to own a vintage electro-therapy machine, in practical terms, it was actually a bit disappointing. For a device that could have been Ben Franklin's lost extra-terrestrial communicator, the Quantumeter was just a piece of turn-of-the-century hokum.

Donald's ThingamaKIT project

If it hadn't had such an awesome name, I might have been content to give the Quantumeter a cozy place in the attic until "Antiques Roadshow" rolled into town. Instead, I did the only thing any self-respecting geek with some soldering iron skills would do: I turned the Quantumeter into the kind of bizarre gadget it deserved to be.

Using a $70 kit from Bleep Labs (the ThingamaKIT), my father in-law's garage, and some patience from my wife, I was able to turn the Quantumeter into a blinking, bleeping, tentacled mess of nerd fun.

I've put a video of the final result below, but to see the transformation unfold, take a look at the photo gallery.... Read more

My first cell phone was an Ericsson CF688 on AT&T Wireless (original incarnation). I got it in roughly 1998. I bought this model instead of some of the flashier ones because it was small. I modified it with a new antenna and smaller battery to make it pocketable. I loved that phone.

Not many years before that, though, portable phones were large. We all remember the brick "Zack Morrison" phones, but do you remember the ads? They were fantastic.

Oobject has put together a collection of some of the best, with my favorite embedded above. Is it just me, or does that seem like a pretty good plan in that ad?

Before analog tape was invented, recorders like this used wire.

(Credit: Video Interchange)

Legend has it that on December 4, 1877, Thomas Edison was the first person to record and play back the human voice. Maybe not.

The Video Interchange site notes that "a possibility exists that Edison himself, in fact, might not have been the very first person to have recorded and played back the human voice. This was most likely made by his two key assistants: Charles Batchelor, his chief assistant, and John Kruesi, his head machinist."

You can see Edison's machine on the Video Interchange Web site. And while you're there, check out a few of the fascinating but obscure audio formats on display.

Video Interchange offers transfer services for a vast range of ancient and recent audio formats. For example, Video Interchange can transfer 78 rpm records to CD.

This dictation machine recorded to vinyl records.

(Credit: Video Interchange)

... Read more

Everyone has a wire box -- that container you toss random wires, plugs and other tech junk into. It's generally all the useless stuff that you just can't bring yourself to get rid of just yet. Being in "the biz," my wire box is actually a set of four interlocking plastic storage containers, which had become a serious closet hazard, to put it mildly. Here's how I spent part of my MLK weekend -- the dreaded annual wire box cleanup.

Cleaning out the wire box

The year was 1983--the last De Loreans were produced, the final episode of M.A.S.H. aired with more than 125 million viewers tuning in to watch, the "Just Say No" anti-drug campaign debuted, Jaws went 3D (don't know why), and the A-Team released so much ammunition without ever hitting anyone--Oh, What a Feeling!

I take good care of my stuff.

(Credit: Matthew Fitzgerald - CNET)

This time portal has been initiated because I've dug something up from my closet. Not a skeleton, but a working 1983 original Game & Watch Nintendo Popeye tabletop system. For those who don't know how the Nintendo tabletop models worked, the LCD is mounted on the top of the game and reflects onto the mirror. It is illuminated via an opaque panel on the top, which works as a natural light source in order for the game to be visible. Color is simulated with a colored film placed over the LCD. The convenience of a rechargeable battery pack or adapter didn't exist. Instead, two "C" batteries powered it. The tabletop also doubled as a clock, hence the name Game & Watch.

Back when the adorable factor was high and worries nonexistent, I was an arcade-playing fiend. A single quarter and it was on like Donkey Kong; taking down anyone who put their quarter down on the machine to battle. The extent of the obsession showed every Sunday, after church, when I detoured to the only eatery known in the neighborhood to house arcade games, on the way home. Imagine an angelic little girl, in her Sunday dress, shiny Buster Brown shoes, and ribbons in her hair, feverishly slamming on the fire button while rolling a track-ball back, forth, up, and down, with such psychotic focus in her eyes. How adorable is that?!

So, when the opportunity came to purchase something that emulated the coin-operated arcade experience, in the form of a portable tabletop, I was there. The next three Christmases I got one; Galaxian, Donkey Kong Jr. (Nintendo version), and Popeye. However, the honeymoon was short-lived once the NES console came into the picture.

Popeye was a single-player game and the plot was simple: Bluto has kidnapped Olive Oyl, tied her up, and Popeye must save her. The goal is to box Bluto on the landing till he falls off. With each win, Olive Oyl kicks a can of spinach toward Popeye. Eating the spinach allows Popeye to knock Bluto out, onto a hanging hook, with one punch. There were two levels: Game A (easy) and Game B (adding in a shark to sporadically come up from the water to poke Popeye in the--err--bum, sending Popeye back a step.). For 8-bit graphics on a 4.5-inch screen, the colors were rich and vibrant, and the gameplay was neverending.

Ironically, Popeye was the least favorite of the three, but it was the only one I've found thus far. In the meantime, some co-workers have been playing with it relentlessly, while waxing nostalgic. Amazing how something so simple can be so addictive.

Dream Authentics Tabletop Arcade

If the need to recapture those moments has hit close to home, check out the Dream Authentics Tabletop Arcade (MSRP $2,495.95). Although it's helluva lot of money, it does include 160 arcade classics--Asteroids, Bubble Bobble, etc.--in one machine, on a 19-inch flat-screen LCD.

See inside the TRS-80

(Credit: Mark Kaelin/CNET Networks)

Yep...that TRS-80. The one from Radio Shack. You know, from the '80s. The one you spent countless hours learning how to talk to in the most intimate terms then known to computer science. Well, TechRepublic dives right in with its screwdriver, in a gallery excerpted on CNET News.com: "Cracking open the TRS-80"

Get out your handkerchiefs, computer scientists of a certain age--this one's a tearjerker!

I had a great time over the weekend at the 10th Vintage Computer Festival, which took place in the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif.

A LINC system in the home of programmer Mary Allen Wilkes in 1965

(Credit: Courtesy Mary Allen Wilkes and DigiBarn)

In addition to the exhibits of vintage computers--including the largest collection of Radio Shack Pocket Computers I've ever seen--and the marketplace, where I managed to avoid buying any slide rules, Vectrix video games, or Cray supercomputer circuit boards--there were several notable presentations.

On Saturday, Tim McNerney spoke about his work to reimplement the Intel 4004 microprocessor, which led to a 130x-scale working model of the chip composed of individual transistors on a large circuit board exactly duplicating the layout of the original integrated circuit. Pretty cool.

On Sunday, two talks were especially interesting to me.

Phil Lapsley presented a history of phone phreaking--using tone generators called "Blue Boxes" to make long-distance phone calls without paying. Several key players in the computer industry were introduced to engineering and computer science through phreaking, including Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, and Woz's friend John Draper, who wrote EasyWriter, an early word processor for the Apple II.

Draper was on hand for Lapsley's presentation and offered his personal insights on some of the key events Lapsley described. For example, Lapsley talked about the 1971 article in Esquire magazine that brought phreaking to broad public awareness. After the article was published, criminal prosecutions of phone phreaks (usually for wire fraud) soared, then began to taper off again five years later when AT&T introduced new telephone switching systems that were immune to the techniques described in the Esquire article.

Draper was able to explain the origin of the Esquire article: a fellow allegedly selling Blue Boxes to the Mafia got caught phreaking because he was using relatively insecure methods. Several phreaks called him to chastise him, which annoyed him enough to spill the beans to the Esquire reporter.

Also according to Draper, phreaking remained technically possible until relatively recently, particularly in towns with small, independent phone companies--but calls in and out of these places are routed through modern switching systems that would cut off any attempts to exploit this potential vulnerability.

However, some international phone systems may remain vulnerable today. An audience member mentioned a 2004 article in Wired that described a trio of blind brothers, Palestinians living in Israel, who were convicted of telecommunications fraud after a "six-year spree of hacking into phone systems and hijacking telephone time" in the 1990s that allegedly yielded $2 million.

And the first shall be last--the final big presentation at VCF X was a 45th anniversary celebration of LINC (Laboratory INstrument Computer), which some say was the world's first personal computer. No less an industry luminary than Gordon Bell, for example, was on hand to make that claim.

The celebration was organized by Bruce Damer, founder of the DigiBarn Computer Museum, a private computer museum in the Santa Cruz mountains currently open by appointment only (apart from occasional open-house events; see this recent CNET article about the DigiBarn collection), and Severo Ornstein, an engineer of the original LINC and author of Computing in the Middle Ages.

Although LINC systems were generally purchased and used for professional rather than personal reasons, it otherwise qualifies as a personal computer. They came with keyboards and displays that could show text or 256x256-pixel black & white graphics, and could be operated from a single AC power outlet. LINCs could be used for biomedical laboratory scientific research, document processing, simple graphical games, and even, in a limited way, digital photographic imaging (according to an anecdote related at the event).

The photo above shows a LINC in the home of Mary Allen Wilkes, who wrote the LINC's system software. I don't know if this qualifies LINC as the world's first home computer, but it has to be pretty close.

It was a big machine; the cabinet on the right side of the picture was roughly the size of a refrigerator, and the cabinet for the operator console and dual tape drives was also pretty hefty. All that hardware combined to offer a 12-bit computer system with 1,024 or 2,048 words of memory. Not bad for 1962...

A LINC machine-- one of several rescued from destruction and stored for years by Scott Robinson--was recently restored by a group of early LINC users who were honored at the celebration along with LINC designer Wesley A. Clark ("not the general," as he says). That machine was up and running in the VCF exhibit area, looking pretty good for a computer almost as old as me!

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.--For an industry that's just 30 years old, personal computing has a lot of history.

Here at the Computer History Museum, just a stone's throw from the Microsoft campus in Silicon Valley, PC industry veterans, tech enthusiasts, and even a few kids came out for the annual Vintage Computer Festival.

The ConBrio 200R, one of four that exist in the world.

(Credit: Robert Balousek/CNET Networks)

The event is highlighted by seminars and panels on topics like "Deconstructing the Intel 4004" and "The Disk Drive Industry Family Tree," but the real payoff is the Exhibit Hall, in which hobbyists display their dusty, yellowed sets of two-decades-old computers, usually arranged around a theme: calculators, Macintosh, Hewlett-Packard, Atari, and more. The collections are usually culled from attics, basements, garages and, of course, eBay.

Of the sessions, a clear crowd favorite was the DigiBarn presentation. DigiBarn is a computer museum housed on a farm in California's Santa Cruz Mountains, famous among the PC hobbyist crowd for its extensive library of seminal computers and accessories. DigiBarn is run by Bruce Damer and Allan Lundell, who describe their museum as the container for "the garages of Silicon Valley."

DigiBarn first opened 10 years ago as Damer's ode to the birth of the graphical interface, first developed by Xerox. Now his collection includes a range of PCs, calculators, and even flight computers for airplanes.

The centerpiece of this year's festival was the LINC (Laboratory Instrument Computer), first developed in 1961 at Washington University St. Louis. Damer hailed it as the "first personal workstation devoted to one person." The hulking gray metal box covered in knobs and a tiny display was invented to do online biomedical research in individual research labs.

In the exhibit hall, Tom Wilson of Woodside, Calif., an attendee of the Vintage Computer Festival for several years, showed off his collection as an exhibitor for the first time. He brought along his Atari 800 and Atari 400 computers, along with an Atari cassette player, printer, and popular games like Donkey Kong, Frogger, Qbert, Pac-Man, and more, which he let anyone try their hand at.

Next to a vast collection of calculators sat a hulking combination computer and keyboard--not the computer peripheral, but the musical kind. Called the ConBrio 200R, it's one of four that exist in the world. It was invented in 1980 by three students at the California Institute of Technology to write synthesized music. It recently fell into the hands of Brian Kehew, a Los Angeles-based music producer. While he's not touring as the keyboard player for rock band The Who, as he did last summer, Kehew is hatching a plan to be the first person to use the ConBrio to record music. But first he has to figure out how to use it.

"There's no owner's manual," Kehew said. "I'm learning how to work it by myself with tips from the old (inventors)."