Since moving into my new house I’ve been unboxing stuff that’s been stowed away for years. Some of it decades. As fast as I’m unboxing, my mother is emptying my little corner of her attic. Why I’m the only brother being dumped is a story for another time. Tonight I’m going to talk about the cool timeline of stuff I’ve been finding.
Old Electronics Design
When I was a kid I started designing electronic circuits. In those days everything was done on paper and then traced onto a bare copper circuit board. Tonight I found all the supplies including a bottle of acid used to etch the copper. How and why I was allowed to use these acids in the house is a mystery to me. Especially as a father.
Everything now is done with a computer. Circuits are generated in a specialized schematic CAD suite and then exported to a circuit board layout package. Most boards today are sent to a fabricator who makes nothing more than printed circuit boards. Although it’s rare, some circuit boards are still made the old fashioned way.
My Old Atari
Last week I unearthed some Atari 2600 game cartridges. I was surprised to still have them, Donkey Kong, Pac-Man, Pitfall and other relics of the era. Although the Atari wasn’t the first gaming console, it was arguably the most iconic. I remember coming home from college one day and looking for the console to bring back to RIT. I remember my heart stopping for a brief moment as my mother told me she sold it at a recent yard sale.
Memories of My Commodore 64
Like the Atari, my old Commodore 64 went the way of $2.00 stickers and best offers. Some curbside hustler got a great deal on my Commodore that I had kept meticulously boxed with the original everything. I learned to write basic programs on that thing. That old Commodore was my first computer and the news of it being sold crushed my soul worse than my first breakup. All I have left of it is the memory of my first programs printed on tractor feed paper by an old black and white dot matrix printer.
Pieces of my First PC
Way down deep in the bottom of a mouse eaten box was a Ziploc baggie of old computer parts. Let’s see, Here’s an Intel 80286 processor and 4MB memory. I remember building that computer in the late 80’s or early 90’s. I can’t blame my mother for discarding the computer though, I made several upgrades prior to selling it to pay rent one year. In those days computers sold for $1,000.00 and up giving me enough money for a couple moths rent. It’s hard to believe 30 years later $500.00 gets a fairly top-of-the-line computer.
Original MS Office (I shouldn’t have)
I have the original Microsoft Office on floppy diskettes. I’m not going to count them tonight but it looks like there’s about 50 in the set. I shouldn’t tell you how I acquired them, but I can tell you that I worked in a computer lab years ago and my boss allowed us to take the floppies home to install on our own PC’s. She wasn’t allowed to lend them out so she didn’t keep written logs of who had the set. Well, the weekend I took them home she called me to let me know she had been fired for other reasons.
The Original Palm Pilot
Somehow I still have my Palm Pilot from the late 90’s. My first job out of college was selling industrial automation equipment and the salesman before me had managed the territory with pen and paper. I found it inefficient so I purchased a Palm Pilot and used it to interface with the company software. Before laptops became mainstream, Palm Pilots were pretty hard to beat for mobile organizing and scheduling.
My First Pager
Finally, my old pager. Yup, I still have my original pager from the days of carrying around the Palm. After getting the pager I put in a request for new business cards listing my pager number. I was the king of road warriors everywhere. A customer would page me, I’d find a payphone to return the call and then log the appointment into my Palm Pilot.
Unearthing old stuff is fun. It tells a story about how things used to be. Maybe they were simpler, but based on the 50 or so floppies to install Office and the cumbersome Palm Pilot and pager system I’m not so sure. I do know that we don’t know what we’re missing until we have that new technology in our hands and pockets. The smartphone, for example, took the place of Palm Pilots and pagers. But the cell phone wouldn’t have been possible without all that other stuff before it.