Taking photos for the SNES plastic discoloration article.
The pink wall didn’t help. (September 2006)

Compact Disc Protection

Here’s a computer artifact you don’t see very often these days: a CD caddy. Many early CD-ROM drives (released roughly 1985 – 1993) required the use of CD caddies, which were designed to protect CD-ROM discs from dust and rough handling. With a CD inside, they look a lot like a bigger version of a 3.5″ floppy disk, albeit with a clear window on one side.

When I ran across this caddy in my collection recently, it made me think a little deeper about why engineers invented them in the first place. Why were CD caddies so common at one point, I wondered, and why are they virtually extinct today?

I have decided that it all boils down to the price and preciousness of commercial CD-ROM discs.

[ Continue reading [ Retro Scan of the Week ] The CD-ROM Caddy » ]

I’d like one of each, please.

Discussion Topic of the Week: Have you ever bought a piece of Nintendo-licensed merchandise? Do tell!

A U.S. Airman types in coordinates while designing a weaponized golf course.

Discussion Topic of the Week: Have you served in the military (any country)? If so, did you use computers as part of your service?

Strange proportions courtesy of Blip’s comic book dimensions.

Discussion Topic of the Week: Quick! Favorite space shooter of the 1970s or ’80s?

The time Apple went AOL.

In the lost era between Jobs (1985-1996), Apple produced many strange and ill-fated products. Here we see an ad for eWorld, Apple’s subscription dial-up online service that launched in June 1994.

eWorld offered proprietary features like message forums, email, weather, news, and other information in a fashion similar to CompuServe, Prodigy, or AOL. It also provided an early consumer portal to the Internet.

Due to its high price ($8.95 per month plus $7.90 per hour from 6 AM to 6 PM on weekdays), poor marketing, and the fact that the World Wide Web was breathing down its neck, eWorld never really took off. Apple shut down the service in March 1996.

By the way, Happy New Year!

Discussion Topic of the Week: Did you ever use a subscription online service? Which one(s)?

Quite possibly the first ever print ad for Sid Meier’s Pirates!

Discussion Topic of the Week: What’s your favorite Sid Meier game of all time? Oh, and what did you get for Christmas?

Santa has little respect for floppy disks, shoving them in there without sleeves.

Discussion Topic of the Week: When’s the last time you used an Atari ST series computer? What did you run on it?

I see great things in your future.

I recently scanned this lovely Nintendo-sponsored Christmas greeting off the back of a 1988 issue of Nintendo Power. You can see the complete magazine back in the full-sized version of the scan (click the image above to see it). In that larger scan, names and addresses have been changed to protect the innocent.

Kinda gives you that warm and fuzzy feeling, doesn’t it?

Discussion Topic of the Week: Did you ever receive a NES (or even a NES game) for Christmas? Tell us about your memories of the occasion.

Two teen girls compare notes on vampires that attend their high school.

Ah, the dedicated electronic pocket organizer — an ever-present, seemingly useful device for want of a market.

Since the early 1980s, electronics manufacturers have produced pocket-sized computer gadgets that store databases of phone numbers, addresses, calendar appointments, and not much else. These electronic organizers reached their peak (in terms of number of devices in the market) in the mid-1990s. At that time, the technology involved became cheap enough to market to kids.

Despite manufacturers’ best efforts, such devices have continuously failed to gain widespread use for a simple reason: none have demonstrably improved upon the paper address book. Not even the socially-hungry teen girl market, as targeted by Sharp in this 1995 ad for the Pocket Locker, could push them into the mainstream.

It was only when manufacturers rolled electronic organizer functionality into a more general-purpose device (think palmtop computer, PalmPilot) that the idea of electronically maintaining personal contact records in a mobile setting took off. Address books, calendars, and phone databases became separate programs that lived in a larger ecosystem of applications that could be run on the device.

Most palmtop computer-style PDAs offered significant advantages over the paper organizer. They synchronized with PCs to back up information, and they could use the stored data in conjunction with other programs for more useful effect — for example, you could actually email someone directly from a record stored in your digital address book.

Contrast that experience to the dedicated pocket organizer model, where the the information you entered became trapped in a tiny plastic box with a crummy display and a kludgy interface that would lose its memory if its batteries ran out.

Today, the organizer-as-software clearly won over dedicated units, and anyone with a mobile phone now carries an organizer software suite in their pocket. It’s only one of many functions that cellphones have absorbed on their quest to become the ultimate multipurpose pocket device.

Discussion Topic of the Week: Have you ever used a dedicated electronic pocket organizer device? Tell us about it.