All telephones should look like this. (click above for full scan)

It’s the Rolm Cedar — a combination PC/Telephone with 512K memory, a 9″ monitor, dual 5.25″ floppy drives, and MS-DOS 2.11. I’m not sure if this unit ever went into production, but I want one! (It also came with a keyboard, not pictured.)

Click the image above see the full text from this product’s January 1985 “What’s New” introduction in Byte Magazine.

Discussion Topic of the Week: What’s the weirdest computer you’ve ever used?

I’ve been working too hard and my brain feels like a block of sand (whatever that means), but I need to share this link with you before I collapse.

Just today, PCMag published my latest piece for them, a slideshow of 12 “forgotten” online games that you can still play. It’s mostly composed of intriguing telnet classics, although a few ancient, overlooked MMOs show up on the list as well.

I hope you enjoy it. If you do, please spread word of it far and wide. Leave no door unknocked; no word of slideshow evangelism unsaid. Tattoos — lots of tattoos. If you succeed, there will be more to come.

“PROCOMM PLUS: Totally Connected”

I used Procomm Plus for DOS during my early years of BBSing, although I called it “PC Plus” because of its shortened executable file name, “PCPLUS.EXE”. I never did migrate to Procomm Plus for Windows, although I remember salivating over it in a software store back when anything and everything modem-related exciting me.

“Terminal” for Windows 3.1 left a bad taste in my mouth, so I didn’t use a GUI-based terminal emulator steadily until the Windows 98 era. After using PC Plus for a few years, I switched to Telix (essentially a PC Plus clone), and one my friends swore by Telemate, which touted some advanced features for a DOS terminal program.

Ah; those were the days.

I’d be interested to hear about your terminal software experiences on all platforms. Hit me up in the comments below.

(P.S. If you’re interested in BBSing again, telnet to my BBS at cavebbs.homeip.net.)

Discussion Topic of the Week: What’s your favorite terminal emulation software of all time?

10 years ago today, Apple released the Mac OS X Public Beta. It was the general public’s first chance to experience the new OS and the commercial debut of the software (a previous release, confusingly named “OS X Server,” was based on a pre-OS X prototype called Rhapsody).

The Public Beta sold for $29.95, and Apple offered that amount off the purchase of OS X 10.0 for those who bought the Beta.

I’ve always been a fan of OS X, and this anniversary got me wondering how development on this very innovative OS started. After some digging, I wrote a brief history on the origins of OS X for Macworld. I was fortunate to have the help of Avie Tevanian, former VP of Software Engineering at Apple (1997-2006), as a reference to help me get some points straight.

While I was at it, I also wrote a shorter piece about some of the differences between the Public Beta and Snow Leopard (the most recent version of OS X).

What are your thoughts on OS X? Do you use it? Did you use it? Let us know in the comments.

The Internet’s first search engine, Archie, launched 20 years ago today. To celebrate this occasion, I decided to look back at the early days of many search engines (mostly web) of the past 20 years. The resulting slideshow is up on PC World.com for all to see. I hope you enjoy it.

Apple IIc and the Apple Flat Panel Display

I’ve always loved this cover shot. It bursts with vivid, colorful photography of a particularly beautiful Apple IIc.

“Particularly,” I said, because this Apple IIc is not in its usual configuration. It sports a rare and wondrous peripheral known as the Apple Flat Panel Display, an LCD monitor which initially sold for $595 (that’s about $1,205 in 2010 dollars) in 1985.

Despite being Apple’s first LCD display, the device sold poorly. Here’s why: For one thing, it was way too expensive for what you got. And what you got wasn’t that great. Sure, it displayed 80 columns by 24 lines and even high resolution graphics, but in a bizarrely squat screen ratio. In a 1985 review of the monitor, Infoworld wrote, “…characters displayed on the Flat Panel Display have the same oddly stretched appearance of writing on a fat man’s T-shirt.”

The same review notes how difficult it was to read the non-backlit display under any lighting conditions — bright light, dim light, direct light, etc. The combination of intense glare and low contrast made the monitor uncomfortable to use. Mix those elements together, and you have yourself a recipe for a genuine ahead-of-its-time Apple flop: innovative, but not quite ready for prime time yet. Sound familiar?

Still, I’d love to get my hands on an Apple Flat Panel Display and report my experiences directly to you. If anyone out there has one that they’d like to get rid of, please let me know.

Discussion Topic of the Week: When did you first use a computer with an LCD screen? When (if ever) did you switch to using LCD screens on your desktop PCs?

An image like this should be familiar to early Macintosh users, since the first Macs only supported 1-bit color. That is, two colors total: each pixel could be black or white — on or off — and nothing in between. The image above uses only black and white and a dithering effect to trick your brain into perceiving shades of grey. Somehow, it makes me feel warm and fuzzy inside.

Update: Hover over the image to see 1-bit Mona Lisa rendered with Floyd-Steinberg error diffusion, which is another algorithm for converting color images to black and white.

“Press <CR> for more”

For my sixth grade social studies class, I wrote a report on Mikhail Gorbachev, former President of the Soviet Union. And he really was “former” then — the USSR had fallen apart just two years prior to my report in 1991. For that report — which I ran across recently — I used every resource available to me, including a novel one at the time: Grolier’s Encyclopedia on CompuServe Information Service. My family subscribed to CompuServe — that massive, pre-ubiquitous-Internet dial-up service that cost amazingly large fees an hour — and I loved it.

What you see above is part of the Gorbachev encyclopedia entry in the form of a dot-matrix printout from the DOS version of CompuServe Information Manager (a front-end client for CompuServe) that I printed myself. Various lines are crossed out and underlined, noting areas of interest that I was to paraphrase for the report. This wasn’t plagiarism — I even cited the online encyclopedia in my report’s bibliography. That fact is actually kinda impressive to me in retrospect.

CompuServe’s online encyclopedia was amazing at the time (1992-1993 era). It was so easy to just search for a term, look it up, and print it out. It sure beat our family’s musty 1968 World Book Encyclopedia set that I used for every report prior to this one (yes, the information in my reports was often woefully out of date). For Christmas 1993, my dad bought us Microsoft Encarta on CD-ROM, and that served as the meat of my school reports for the next few years after that. But that’s another story entirely.

Discussion Topic of the Week: When did you first use an electronic encyclopedia — CD-ROM or otherwise? What did you use it for?

Ten years ago this month, Apple shipped the Power Mac G4 Cube, a unique computer that fared poorly in the marketplace but captured the imaginations of many computer enthusiasts. Naturally, I warmed up my dexterous typing fingers and wrote something about this anniversary. Well, two somethings, in fact, and they’re both up on Macworld.com today.

The first, “The Cube at 10: Why Apple’s Eye-Catching Desktop Flopped,” is an exploration of reasons why the Cube fared so poorly sales-wise.

The second, “Apple’s Cube Was Ahead of Its Time,” compares and contrasts the G4 Cube and the Mac Mini, exploring in particular why the Mini was successful when the Cube was not.

I’d like to thank my editor at Macworld, Philip Michaels, who always does an excellent job of distilling my work into crystal clear prose.

I Wanted One

On a personal note, when Apple announced the G4 Cube in 2000, I thought it was amazing and I immediately wanted one. Although I’d traditionally been a PC-clone user, I had been following Apple news closely since the return of Steve Jobs in 1996.

Of course, I couldn’t afford a Cube, so I simply pined away and read about others’ Cube experiences online. I remember the “cracks” issue being a fiasco in the news after the Cube’s release (one my articles discusses that issue), which seemed embarrassing for Apple.

Overall, I’m glad I didn’t buy one, because they were very expensive. I’m lucky I only had a credit card with a $200 limit (Amazingly low, isn’t it? That was just before banks started throwing high-APR credit at everyone and their brother. Now I can’t get them to stop raising my limit.) I still don’t own a Cube, so if anyone wants to donate one to the cause, I’d be willing to listen.

Anyway, I hope you enjoy the articles. Feel free to share your G4 Cube memories below.

The pagan god manifests in many forms, demanding a tribute of small children.

This image is part of a two-page double-sided fold out ad attached to the back cover of Home PC magazine. Its main subject was not actually Microsoft Bob, but a Micron P75 PC (click there to see that page).

Microsoft designed Bob (1995) to serve as a friendly graphical interface and operating environment for beginners, but the product flopped mightily and has since become a tech punchline.

Speaking of Bob, my buddy Harry McCracken has written more about Microsoft Bob than any other living human being on the planet. A good place to start would be his Bob Chronicles, which talks about the origins and history of Bob.

Discussion Topic of the Week: Have you ever used Microsoft Bob? What did you think about it?