1980s Archive

  • Flash ported to the iPod Touch, in a manner of speaking

    Flash ported to the iPod Touch, in a manner of speaking

    Sure it looks horrible and the video is awful, but believe us when we tell you that the same guys who created the Spirit jailbreak have ported Flash to the iPhone. The video, apparently taken through the pinhole camera truck the Bloodhound Gang built back in the 1980s to see where they were [...]

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  • No joke: There will be a Top Gun game for the PS3

    No joke: There will be a Top Gun game for the PS3

    Check your calendar. Mine says May 21, 2010. Just making sure, since Paramount has announced that there's going to be a new Top Gun game. You know, the 1980s movie with Tom Cruise and the guy from "ER." /me pinches self

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  • Tech world mourns the loss of Jerome York

    Tech world mourns the loss of Jerome York

    Jerome York - Jerry to the folks at Apple - joined the Apple board in 1997, the board that voted Steve Jobs back into the CEO position after a decade in the wilderness. York died of an aneurysm. Apple dedicated their entire front page to his memory:
    Jerry joined Apple's Board in 1997 when most doubted the company's future. He has been a pillar of financial and business expertise and insight on our Board for over a dozen years. It's been a privilege to know and work with Jerry, and I'm going to miss him a lot.

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  • Nostalgia week continues with Apple ][, Pascal, and old-fashioned newsletters!

    Nostalgia week continues with Apple ][, Pascal, and old-fashioned newsletters!

    Hot on the heels of our celebration of the BBS, here's a pair of retro stories to ease your transition into the weekend. First up is "Pascal Spoken Here", by Ian Bogost about the subtle shift over the years in how we view computers. Back in 1977 the advertising clearly identified the connection between using, exploring, and learning a computer in ways that you simply don't see any more. Next up is a blast from the past on Slashdot with a wonderful scan of a computing newsletter from the 1980s.

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  • Pitch a perfect game in MLB 2K10, get a million bucks

    Pitch a perfect game in MLB 2K10, get a million bucks

    Kids! Who needs school? Why sit in class learning about nothing important when you could be at home trying to pitch a perfect game in MLB 2K10? If your parents get all bent out of shape about you dropping out of school to play video games, kindly refer them to this post and direct their attention to the following statement: The first person to pitch a perfect game in MLB 2K10 gets a million dollars.

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  • Daily Crunch: So This Is Christmas Edition

    Daily Crunch: So This Is Christmas Edition

    Barnes & Noble Will Ship Around 60,000 Nooks This Year The next logical step for both bacon and popcorn is bacon-flavored popcorn PyramidTalk: Seiko updates their cult clocks from the 1980s

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  • PyramidTalk: Seiko updates their cult clocks from the 1980s

    PyramidTalk: Seiko updates their cult clocks from the 1980s

    Some of the older CrunchGear readers will surely remember the Pyramidtalk, a clock that verbally announced the time and other information. Seiko started selling the clock in 1984, and it turned out to be a big worldwide hit, with sales ballooning to 200,000 units per year at its peak. And now, just in time for Christmas, consumers (in Japan, at least) can lay their hands on an updated version [JP].

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  • Effectology: No Quarter on git-fiddle

    Effectology: No Quarter on git-fiddle

    Are you ready to watch Bill Ruppert's honey drip? Don't answer that. Bill recreated the sound of a Fender Rhodes electric piano with a guitar and some EHX pedals.

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  • Windows startup and shutdown sounds through the ages

    Windows startup and shutdown sounds through the ages

    Look at these early Windows start-up sounds. They look primitive now but imagine being a young man in the late 1980s and your parents have just brought you home a new Packard Bell x86 machine. Back in those days sound cards were premium items and to hear an operating system sing to you when you start it up was a really big deal. The vast majority of computer users during that time would have never heard most of these sounds.

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  • How Sony can beat the Kindle, provided it can find its shoes and its glasses after it wakes up

    How Sony can beat the Kindle, provided it can find its shoes and its glasses after it wakes up

    Farhad Manjoo has a nice "what-if" story up on Slate about what Sony can do to beat the Kindle. Sadly, what Manjoo is doing here is akin to helping a little old crazy lady across the street - at best his advice will be ignore and and worst he'll be cursed out. He basically writes:
    Anyone looking to beat the Kindle, then, should look to the iPod: Study everything that Apple's rivals did, and do the opposite.

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  • Pioneer sells another batch of Laserdisc players, in Japan

    Pioneer sells another batch of Laserdisc players, in Japan

    Remember Laserdiscs? Those large-size video mediums almost no one outside Japan bought in the 1980s and 1990s? I never thought I would write another post on LDs after the one in January this year in which I reported about Pioneer stopping the production of LDs players forever. But yesterday the same company (which manufactured the best hardware) issued a new press release [JP], saying it still has some players in stock, the DVL-919 ($1,000, pictured on the left) and the CLD-R5 ($400, pictured after the jump). The main difference is that the R5 only plays LDs and CDs, while the 919 also can be used for DVDs (region 2).

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  • Apple presents the Lisa

    Apple presents the Lisa

    Wait, there was Internet back in the 1980s? via MacMag.br

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  • Slab-Like iPhone Case Hewn From Solid Metal

    Slab-Like iPhone Case Hewn From Solid Metal

    Every morning my inbox is almost full of pitches for various iPhone cases. Gel skins and anodized pictures of sock monkeys are today’s offerings. They are almost always humdrum, and usually virtual clones of one another, probably all starting life in the same Chinese factory. But the Exovault is different, and not just because no PR [...]

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  • Michael Jackson’s sad, sad toy barn

    Michael Jackson’s sad, sad toy barn

    These panoramas show the remains of MJ’s secret toy lair complete with C3-P0, Batman, and Darth Vader dolls along with some bikes, some Bruce Lee stuff, and a few lumpen Power Rangers. This is the detritus of an overgrown kid with attention disorder. It jumps from cool thing to cool thing and even includes an arcade [...]

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  • One of our interns makes it big by carrying a Walkman for a week

    One of our interns makes it big by carrying a Walkman for a week

    Wee Scott Campbell of Aberdeen, Scotland is 13 years old and sent us an email last week asking if he could write for us. What he lacks in physical age he makes up for in chutzpah. And so, much to my surprise, I wake up this morning to discover young Campbell on BBC comparing an iPod to a Walkman with his mum and generally impressing the heck out of us. The bairn writes:
    My dad had told me it was the iPod of its day. He had told me it was big, but I hadn't realised he meant THAT big. It was the size of a small book. When I saw it for the first time, its colour also struck me. Nowadays gadgets come in a rainbow of colours but this was only one shade - a bland grey. So it's not exactly the most aesthetically pleasing choice of music player. If I was browsing in a shop maybe I would have chosen something else. From a practical point of view, the Walkman is rather cumbersome, and it is certainly not pocket-sized, unless you have large pockets. It comes with a handy belt clip screwed on to the back, yet the weight of the unit is enough to haul down a low-slung pair of combats.

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