Explain the context of this image and I will grant you the power of flight. Hint: it has something to do with computers.

“Refresh Your Memory. And Keep Your Cool.”

I recently ran across this ad for the ICD FA-ST Atari ST hard drive system in a 1988 issue of STart magazine that my wife’s uncle gave me. He was quite an ST fan himself back in the day, and I was the lucky recipient of his ST collection last year.

According to an ICD catalog I have, the 20 megabyte model of this HD system (the FA20ST, seen here) retailed for US $699.95 in 1988 ($1,294.60 in 2010 dollars). The highest end model( FA52ST), which included two 50 megabyte drives, sold for $1649.95 (or $3,051.68 in 2010 dollars).

Those steep prices (common for all hard disks at the time), along with the small market size of Atari 16-bit owners in the US, made drives such as these quite rare. I’ve never seen one in the wild.

Discussion Topic of the Week: Do you own hard drive systems for any of your vintage, non-IBM PC compatible computers? Tell us about them.

It’s the Datalife Holiday Pack!

It’s Christmas morning, 1983. You eagerly run downstairs to the fireplace and notice a stocking stuffed to the brim with goodies. You dump it out and find ten boxes of Datalife 5.25″ floppy diskettes.

Choose your own Adventure:

a) You are happy because disks are expensive for a kid and you use a personal computer.

b) You’d rather have candy.

Discussion Topic of the Week: What did you get for Christmas this year? Any gadgets, games, or computer stuff?

A few days ago, PCMag.com published a slideshow of vintage Christmas graphics files that I put together. Some of those images were stills from animated GIFs. Below, you’ll find the full animated GIF files featured in the article and a whole lot more. Merry Christmas!

Prepare to be besparkled.

[ Continue reading Animated Christmas GIFs of Yore » ]

I’ve been collecting vintage Christmas GIF files for a while now, and I finally decided to put some of the best ones from the 256-color PC era together in a slideshow. You can check it out over at PCmag.com.

Please disregard the “Christmas Card” stuff they inserted in the title and introduction — I’m not sure why they did that. The images have nothing to do with Christmas cards (those paper things you mail to people). I guess it’s hard to concisely describe to the general public what exactly these images are and why someone would want to look at them. Also, the captions are to the upper right of each image. Hope you enjoy it. Merry Christmas.

Update (12/21/2010): I just posted a bunch of animated Christmas GIFs, including those featured in this slideshow.

35 years ago this month, Steve Sasson and his crew at a Kodak laboratory in Rochester, NY tested the world’s first digital camera for the first time. The device only took 100×100 pixel photos, storing them on audio cassette tape.

Sounds like a good excuse to create a slideshow overview of digital camera history, doesn’t it? Mosey on over to PC World and check out what I put together — “35 Years of the Digital Camera.”

How your Apple II sees itself.
(click above to see full ad)

This early Apple II video digitizer (the DS-65 Digiselector) took a regular video input and…well, digitized it. The result was a 256×256 pixel greyscale still image that you could manipulate on your Apple II. In an age before consumer digital cameras, this was quite a novel feat of technical wizardry.

It sold for $349.95 in 1979, which is equivalent to $1,054.24 in 2010 dollars. That’s actually not too bad.

Discussion Topic of the Week: Have you ever owned a video capture card? Tell us about it.

“And you say this is some sort of football simulator?”

Discussion Topic of the Week: Does your family play video or computer games around the holidays as part of a tradition? Please discuss.

On November 20th, 1985, Microsoft released Windows 1.0. Back then, it was just a fancy graphical shell that ran atop MS-DOS. But over the years, it evolved into a full-fledged OS that dominated (and still dominates) the PC desktop.

To celebrate 25 years of Windows, I recently crafted a slideshow for PC World titled “Windows Through the Ages” and another for Technologizer called “Windows Oddities.” The latter article is the latest in my Oddities series for that site.

If you get a chance, I hope you can take a look. They were fun to make, and I think you guys will enjoy them — even if you’re not a big fan of Windows.

And let’s face it: I’m not sure anyone is a “fan” of Windows. Most of us just use it because it’s there and it works. But if you have more passion for Microsoft’s OS than that, feel free to let us know. Speaking of that, this looks like a good chance for a discussion topic.

Anniversary Discussion Topic: Overall, do you think Windows has been good or bad for computing in general? Explain.

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Previous entries in Benj’s “Oddities” series:
Nintendo Entertainment System Oddities
Super Mario Oddities
Game Boy Oddities

Here’s a question for my intrepid readers: Do you collect software? Operating systems, applications, computer games, or even image or sound files? If so, do you have a focus for your collection? How do you store it?

I’ve been collecting software for about 17 years. Much of it was once locked into deteriorating floppy disk formats, but luckily I’ve been able to find working disk images of those particular apps and games (say, for the Atari 800 or Apple II) created by others, so not much is at risk of being lost there.

Everything else — all my personal floppy disks, ZIP disks, CDs, and hard drives for Macs and PCs — I long ago backed up to a central file server that uses a RAID 5 array and offsite backup for extra protection. In that collection are the contents of over 30 different PC hard drives imaged and preserved “in state” for research purposes. I keep all the files in place as they were when those drives were in use, because you really never know what you’ll need in the future when it comes to historical research. Many of those files have come in handy already.

I should note that if you have anything backed up on CD-R, get it off now, because I’ve already found CD-Rs from as recent as 2000 that I can’t read anymore. They really are a terrible archival format. The best hope for long-term software preservation (in my opinion) is to maintain a live RAID array of hard drives that you maintain and update over time.

So how do you do it, and what do you collect? I’m interested to hear from you in the comments below.