PC World recently published my latest slideshow, The Evolution of Removable Storage, which examines removable computer storage media of the last 60 years. You’ll find plenty of fascinating pictures and lots of written history as well. It’s less like a slideshow and more like an illustrated article in spirit. I hope you enjoy it.

Technologizer also posted one of my latest pieces yesterday: 15 Consumer Electronics Design Mistakes. It’s not perfectly VC&G-related, but it is part of a series with two previous Technologizer articles of mine: 15 Classic Game Console Design Mistakes and 15 Classic PC Design Mistakes.

“Computers designed with kids in mind.”

Discussion Topic of the Week: Would you ever buy a PC with a themed case? If so, what would be the theme?

“The Blue Bomber takes to the road…”

By the way, I’ve been posting a Retro Scan of the Week every week now for four years straight. It kinda blows my mind. That’s over 200 scans. Is there anything left to scan? You bet.

Discussion Topic of the Week: What’s the best Mario Kart clone of all time?

So that’s how you write music.

Yes, it’s Victor Borge hawking Verbatim floppy diskettes. Despite his goofy grandpa-humor presence, “Specify Verbatim” still stands as the geekiest slogan in advertising history. It’s almost begging for the nerdy hipster t-shirt treatment. I’ll let you wear it for me.

If you want to see more computer ads featuring celebrities, check out this slideshow I did for PC World back in April 2008. Unfortunately all those scans are tiny due to image size limitations PC World had back then. You can see larger versions of a few ads that were taken from previous Retro Scans here: 1 2 3 4

Discussion Topic of the Week: Who’s your favorite celebrity computer or video game spokesman of all time?

Meanwhile, the cover remained a one-fist affair.

I love Ultima VI, so it’s excellent that Origin made two spin-off games using the same engine. I’ve played Martian Dreams, the other Worlds of Ultima game, but never The Savage Empire. Is anybody out there a fan?

Discussion Topic of the Week: Which is best: The Savage Empire or Martian Dreams?

There’s a little bit of Clive in every box.

The Cambridge Z88 (1987) was a slim, diskless, battery-sipping laptop computer similar to the famous TRS-80 Model 100.

Interestingly, former VC&G contributor Gnome wrote about this machine for us in 2006. He makes specific note of the Z88’s relationship to Sir Clive Sinclair of Sinclair Research fame.

I don’t have a Z88, but I love laptops in this monolithic, almost slate-like form factor. If you have one you’d like to get rid of, I’m all ears.

Discussion Topic of the Week: Have you ever owned a laptop with a non-folding screen (i.e. not a clamshell design) like the Z88 above? What did you like or dislike about it?

Click above to see the full advertisement.

Ten years ago, InterAct began advertising this obscure online attachment for the Nintendo 64 called “Sharkwire Online.” I personally don’t know much about the device or how it was supposed to work beyond what Wikipedia and IGN have to say about it.

That is, it appears the Sharkwire was a dial-up modem that plugged into a N64 and allowed game console owners to access an ISP of sorts, through which they could download the latest cheats and codes to their Sharkwire units, which would then function, I presume, like the more common InterAct GameShark peripheral.

This whole setup seems like an overly elaborate Rube Goldberg way of cheating at games, so it’s no surprise that the Sharkwire Online quickly faded into oblivion. I didn’t remember it at all when I came across this ad in EGM the other day; not only did I pore over each issue of that magazine religiously throughout its entire run, but I usually took specific note of any online-related accessories.

Did anybody out there have one of these? Would you care to fill us in on what exactly it did from a user’s perspective? Did it do it well?

Happy 2010

As a side note, it’s now 2010, which, thanks to my longstanding but completely arbitrary “vintage” guideline, means that the year 2000 now opens to us as a source of VC&G material.

History marches on, and what was once new continuously slides away from us until it crosses into the realm of obsolete curiosity. Funny enough, in a time when a five year-old cell phone seems like it was from the stone age, ten years is beginning to feel like a conservative figure. Still, it’s always a minor shock to see what becomes the nouveau vintage every year.

Discussion Topic of the Week: How do you feel about “cheating” at video games with devices like the GameShark, Pro Action Replay, and the Game Genie? Is it a good or bad thing?

This reminds me of a psychic parlor trick.

The Sony-designed 3.5″ floppy drive (1982) first made waves in the mid-1980s with its use in the Apple Macintosh, released in 1984. The format quickly gained popularity in the PC market and overtook the 5.25″ floppy disk in overall usage by the early 1990s. PC clone manufacturers, many of whom had supported both the larger and smaller floppy formats, eventually stopped including 5.25″ drives in their machines.

Today, 3.5″ floppy drives are rarely found in new PCs thanks to more capacious CD-Rs, removable flash media (especially USB thumb drives), and nearly ubiquitous computer networking. However, that hasn’t stopped Windows XP from requiring @#^$ RAID drivers on a floppy disk when it’s being installed.

Discussion Topic of the Week: Do you still use 3.5″ floppy disks regularly? What for?

Last Sunday, PC World published my last slideshow of the year, The Ghosts of Christmas Games Past. It examines twelve retro Christmas video/computer games from the dawn of time right up to ten years before the present.

Sorry I didn’t tell you guys about the article earlier this week; it slipped past me and I didn’t know it was up yet.

Once again, Merry Christmas!

“No more Mr. Ice Guy.”

It looks like Kickle Cubicle visited much of the Eastern U.S. coast over the weekend with a nasty snowstorm; hope you guys are digging out all right. Here in NC, some of us lucked out with a light dusting and a lot of rain.

Kickle Cubicle itself is a fun, Lolo-esque NES puzzler with a silly name that hints at both kicking and modular office partitions (thankfully, cubicles do not actually appear in the game). If you run across it, I highly recommend picking it up.

Merry Christmas from VC&G!

Discussion Topic of the Week: It’s Santa time once again. If you could magically (and freely) have any one item for your classic computer or video game collection, what would it be?