Trundling out of the loading bay in the early morning, its trailers stuffed with square white boxes squeaking with Styrofoam, the trucks hacked and coughed their way along routes leading to commercial zones, none of them — not yet — boasting hulking retail monoliths or other white whales of consumerism. Instead, there were a variety of department stores, RadioShacks, gadget shops and Active Surpluses; maybe a stereo branch breach-birthed into the modern age. An employee with a blue shirt and striped tie blandly stoned and already dreaming of lunch looked at the watch his grandmother had bought him for graduation and, knowing it was time, entered the stockroom smoking a cigarette while walking to the grille at the back of the building, which he groaningly rolled up before waving in the haulage. The truck braked — an awful screaming sound that portended more than just ear ringing and the inevitable I-should-really-get-my-s–t-together employee soul-searching — and the trucker, a clipboard under his arm, climbed from his seat. He walked the length of the loading dock, disappeared into the trailer and started lifting. A transistor radio duct-taped to the wall — not yet infected by the invention of open-line programming — played “Owner of a Lonely Heart” for the third time that day as a sweep of wind moved through the bay, swooshing an old newspaper folio along the floor. Somewhere a phone rang; the chime of its bell finding the two men. The trucker passed the boxes to the employee: five, maybe six, maybe seven, stacked just outside the stockroom. “Better not take too many, eh?” said the trucker. The personal computer. Expensive. About two grand. Besides, who knows what use anyone is going to have for them?
Looking back, the first Macintosh Apple rig — the 128K, born as a consumer thing on Jan. 24, 1984 — didn’t exactly arrive wreathed in the pure beauty of light. Instead, like the spore that it was, its poetry lied in its blockish, unassuming café au grey; mundanely alien, as muted a portal as C.S. Lewis’s wardrobe or what happened when Abbot and Costello accidentally leaned on that sculpture on the bookshelf in that room where they weren’t supposed to be.
It had a small screenface and a mouth open to one side, which is the expression one makes when uncertain about whether to do what someone else has suggested. It looked like a small television for fear of looking too much like anything else. One sensed that its designers — Jef Raskin, Bill Atkinson, Burrell Smith, Steve Jobs and others — had as much of an idea of the exoticism of its impact as those who tried selling it. Even that Ridley Scott commercial that trumpeted the personal computer during Super Bowl 18 seemed to fetch for a vision of the future like two hands reaching to find each other down a dark hallway. There was a woman in red shorts, a hammerthrow and a sea of drones in Potemkin grey drooling in their fold-up chairs. All of this at a time of Night Court and Hulk Hogan and Madonna. A few days later, Michael Jackson was burned on set while filming a Pepsi ad, and people worried about what life would be like if anything ever happened to the King of Pop, proving that, as a species, following the right story has never been our strong suit.
DataWind, a wireless manufacturing company started by two Indian-born, Canadian-raised brothers, Suneet and Raja Tuli, has produced what The Wall Street Journal calls the world's cheapest tablet computer.
The Aakash Tablet sells for $35. It has a basic touch screen and can be used for functions like word processing, web browsing and video-conferencing.
Aakash has a seven-inch HD 2.2 touch screen and an Android video co-processor. Last year, the company signed a contract with the government of India, which intends to deliver 10 million of the tablets to students across India.
Founded in Montreal and now headquartered in London, U.K., DataWind has offices in Amritsar, Dallas and Mississauga.
What exactly do you get in a tablet that costs just $37.99 before taxes and shipping?
The Ubislate 7Ci — which is billed as the "world's lowest-cost tablet" by its maker Datawind — has a seven-inch screen, is assembled with outdated hardware, and not surprisingly runs on Google's Android platform, the common denominator of most ultra low-priced tablets.
But does it work?
Certainly there's no comparing the Ubislate 7Ci to one of Apple's iPads or another higher-end tablet. And it doesn't even come close to rivalling Google's Nexus 7, a cheap but very capable device designed to undercut the tablet market at $229.
But for a device that costs just over $50 all in, there's a lot to like about the Ubislate 7Ci — assuming a buyer has very realistic expectations about what they're getting.
A multi-institutional team of new-media artists, computer experts, and museum professionals have discovered a dozen previously unknown experiments by Andy Warhol (BFA, 1949) on aging floppy disks from 1985.
The purely digital images, “trapped” for nearly 30 years on Amiga® floppy disks stored in the archives collection of The Andy Warhol Museum (AWM), were discovered and extracted by members of the Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) Computer Club, with assistance from the AWM’s staff, CMU’s Frank-Ratchye STUDIO for Creative Inquiry (FRSCI), the Hillman Photography Initiative at the Carnegie Museum of Art (CMOA), and New York based artist Cory Arcangel.
Warhol’s Amiga experiments were the products of a commission by Commodore International to demonstrate the graphic arts capabilities of the Amiga 1000 personal computer. Created by Warhol on prototype Amiga hardware in his unmistakable visual style, the recovered images reveal an early exploration of the visual potential of software imaging tools, and show new ways in which the preeminent American artist of the 20th century was years ahead of his time.
The impetus for the investigation came when Arcangel, a self-described “Warhol fanatic and lifelong computer nerd,” learned about Warhol’s Amiga experiments from the YouTube video of the 1985 Commodore Amiga product launch. Acting on a hunch, and with the support of CMOA curator Tina Kukielski, Arcangel approached the AWM in December 2011 regarding the possibility of restoring the Amiga hardware in the museum’s possession, and cataloging any files on its associated diskettes. In April 2012, he contacted Golan Levin, a CMU art professor and director of the FRSCI, a laboratory that supports “atypical, anti-disciplinary and inter-institutional” arts research. Offering a grant to support the investigation, Levin connected Cory with the CMU Computer Club, a student organization that had gained renown for its expertise in “retrocomputing,” or the restoration of vintage computers.
For those who grew up as the personal computer was beginning to make its first appearances in homes and classrooms, the words "Commodore 64" have special resonance.
The early version of the personal computer was fun, educational and affordable and put digital technology in the hands of many, for the very first time.
Jack Tramiel, the founder of Commodore and the man who helped popularize the personal computer, died on Sunday at the age of 83, his son Leonard Tramiel has confirmed.
"Jack Tramiel was a larger than life character whose motto was 'computers for the masses, not the classes,'" Brian Bagnall, author of "Commodore: A Company on the Edge," told CTVNews.ca.
"He was instrumental in getting computers into the hands of millions of teenagers, families on tight budgets, people on low incomes -- people who would later become famous such as (Linux inventor) Linus Torvalds, whose first computer was the VIC-20."
The Polish-born son of Jewish immigrants, Tramiel survived the Auschwitz concentration camp before moving to North America where he became an entrepreneur, inventor and businessman.
He began his career in the U.S. in the late 1940s maintaining typewriters for the U.S. army, before eventually moving to Toronto in 1955 and starting his own typewriter company, Commodore Business Machines International.
Tramiel, at the vanguard of the electronics movement, then shifted his business to California's Silicon Valley in the late 1960s and began manufacturing calculators.
He eventually launched the Commodore 64 in 1982, after first releasing the PET in 1977 and the VIC-20 in 1980. The precursors never achieved the popularity of the C64, which still qualifies as one of the most popular PCs ever made, having sold over 20 million units.
In the ad, Shatner asked parents why they would waste their money on a gaming device for their children when they could learn and have fun with a Commodore.
"Why buy just a video game from Atari or Intellivision? Invest in the wonder computer of the 1980s for under $300," Shatner says in the futuristic looking commercial.
"Unlike games it has a real computer keyboard. With the Commodore VIC-20 the whole family can learn computing at home."
Just before Christmas, Commodore teased us with an Intel Atom based Commodore 64 — a regular all-in-one Ubuntu PC in the shape of the classic C64 home computer, which could also boot into a game-playing C64 emulation mode. Now, finally, you can buy one, and you’ll soon be able to get the C64’s little brother, the VIC-20, in the shape of the VIC Pro and VIC Slim.
The C64x can be had in five confusing configurations. The Barebones model is nothing more than the case and keyboard with a card-reader and costs $250. The cheapest working version is the C64x Basic at almost $600, and to get luxuries such as Wi-Fi and a DVD drive you’ll need to cough up $700. If you’re in for that much, then you may as well jump all the way and spend $900 on the Ultimate edition, which puts in a 1TB hard drive, a Blu-ray drive and 4GB RAM.
[. . .]
And anyway, the real nerds will be waiting for Commodore’s next big project: The resurrection of the majestic Amiga, albeit in the shape of a DVD player. These machines will use PC hardware but run “Commodore OS”, a mysterious operating system that will either be awesome or awful. I can’t wait.
I get the nostalgic impulse to resurrect the old design as something fresh. Buying the new Commodore 64 is, though, like buying a custom car kit. What you really want is that sexy chassis—what's inside is immaterial. In the case of the new Commodore 64, which ranges in price from $250 to almost $900, the most expensive model stuffs a terabyte drive and a Blu-ray drive inside the classic-looking computer/keyboard.
Interesting and entertaining as this new Commodore 64 is, I'm not buying. I feel about this computer very much the way I do about any replica—disappointed. Replica classic cars, toys, signs, etc. always feel like a cheat. You see them out on the road or in a store and for one fleeting moment are excited: You marvel at the preservation and wonder if it still works. Then you find out it's just a simulacrum of the real thing. Anyone can build a PC with powerful insides and a retro-looking body. I have an old 8088-class PC in my basement. Perhaps I'll gut that, put in a Core i7 motherboard, an Nvidia GTX 590 graphics card and three 1TB hard drives in a RAID array (hey, that's not such a bad idea…), but to what purpose? People will marvel over the case, but know that the insides are brand new and work just the way their own new PCs do. Similarly, I think this new Commodore 64 overlooks all that was special about these early PCs.
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zarq for linking to this classic commercial featuring William Shatner promoting the Commodore VIC-20.
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