Ideas from Mark Stout

Other old time PCers from the early 80s might enjoy my reminisces of computer magazines in that era in my latest Substack newsletter (free).

Remembering Paul Allen, co-founder of Microsoft, who passed today. While I never met him, I did enjoy how he spent some of his money. This post from 2015.

A few weeks ago I toured the EAA's B-17 when it visited the Manassas Airport . Of course I took our 360 camera. Post from RICOH THETA. - Spherical Image - RICOH THETA Post from RICOH THETA. - Spherical Image - RICOH THETA Post from RICOH THETA. - Spherical Image - RICOH THETA Post from RICOH THETA. - Spherical Image - RICOH THETA I'd previously flew on the EAA's Ford Tri-Motor .

Interesting note from Engadget .  It was 25 years ago today that Tim Berners-Lee   put up the first website. It wouldn't be public for a few months, but was the genesis of the World Wide Web. That first site simply described the web and how to create your own pages on it.   You can still read it today . I find these kind of anniversary's intriguing.  They remind us how fast we are moving.  And considering how change seems always to be speeding up, to ask ourselves, where will we be in 25 more years?

Jared Eno s' wonderful colorized edition of Wilber Wright at Kitty Hawk in the 1903 Glider just three days before the first powered flight.  The colorization is amazing. Wilbur Wright clings to his damaged flying machine after an unsuccessful trial on December 14, 1903 (note how white his knuckles are from gripping the machine). Taken in the Kill Devil Hills, Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. Photo licensed by Jared Enos under Creative Commons /

Two days ago, January 24th, was the 30th anniversary of the now famous 1984 ad during the Superbowl announcing the first Apple Macintosh. According to news reports from last Friday, the Mac then hit the stores two day later, or thirty years ago today. It was on that day I had my geekiest moment in my long life and career in technology. Steve Jobs saw me demonstrating the Macintosh. I was recently at a tech meeting that had many Apple faithful in it.  We were asked to go around the room and each tell one interesting them about themselves. I told this story. I wrote a blog post about it five years ago on the 25th anniversary.  The link is here.

Like many people, I spend a lot of time in the car.  Unlike many, I do not find music soothing while driving--I'm missing the music gene I guess. Anyway, I enjoy the time in the car to catch up on Podcasts.  There are many out there, but I tend to favor the ones done by Leo Laporte's Twit.tv .   Leo is a professional broadcaster of many year's experience.  He has started an awesome online tech news network.  His professionalism makes for great programs. I tend to listen to two shows primarily.  " This Week in Google ", broadcast live on Wednesdays, with podcasts available for download on Wednesday nights.  And " This Week in Tech ", broadcast Sundays with podcasts available later that night. However, I spend more time in the car then the duration of those two shows.  Twit's other shows are excellent, but not as compelling to me as those two are. However, they do have one show I hadn't paid much attention to until recently. ...

The Manassas area was all about honoring the 150th anniversary of the First Battle of Manassas in Sunday's paper, so for my column I intended to talk about the tech in the home in the 1860s.  Alas, there was not much, so my thoughts instead went to the awesome changes in technology veterans of the Civil War might have seen in their lifetimes. Family Tech for July 24, 2011 And if this is a topic you enjoy, I also wrote a piece on the technology used during the war .

What is old is new again.  Just took a look over the website for the reborn Byte . Byte magazine was one of the first computer magazines.  If you were in to computers in the 80's and 90's, you read Byte. One of the highlights back then was Jerry Pournelle's column .  Jerry is a science fiction author.  Back in those days he had the money to have more gadgets then most of us and a tinker's delight at getting them all working. I believe he wrote one of the first books ever written on a computer, and that computer is now in the Smithsonian. His Chaos Manor columns talking about his never ending tribulations of getting 20th century home computing to work were always entertaining.  I learned a valuable lesson from him, Pournelle's Law, to check cables first when there is a problem. He always struggled to to get things working, that a wag once suggested Apple sponsor his columns and send them by mail to every Windows PC owner. Started this in G+, and reali...

Prince William County Virginia is remembering the First Battle of Manassas next week.  The paper that carries my column published an article today I did on the technology of the Civil War .

For most people their sole knowledge of giant, rigid airships is the Hindenberg and the fire that destroyed it. How many know that the US Navy once had a small fleet of these giant cruisers of the air?  They are all gone now. The one tie we have had to this unique facet of aviation history is a few former hangers.  I had the pleasure a dozen years ago to go inside Moffett Field's Hangar One.  Before that I loved driving by on 101 and seeing it standing open. Now sad news that it is being torn down .

For those of us who saw the beginnings of the Apple vs. Microsoft battle in the 1980's, what we are seeing with the nascent tablet market seems awfully familiar.  Except this time, Microsoft is played by Google.   This is the topic of this week's Family Tech column . Thanks to my brother Jim for his memories of this time.  This column started as a conversation with him at my parents home.  And thanks as usual to Mom for her grammar and punctuation suggestions!

It was 1983, and I was in gadget lust like I've never known. No matter it cost about 1/20th of my annual salary then, and I had no real need, I had to have it. It was the lightest computer around.  It weighed about 1/8th of the other hot, portable computer at the time did.  That's a better ratio than an iPad to a laptop! It had a state of the art non-CRT display, like the iPad. It had connectivity. It ran for a long time on batteries.  Unlike the iPad, the batteries were easily replaceable AA batteries.  And it could get 20 hours to a set of batteries, not the iPad's paltry-by-comparison 10 hours. It had a real keyboard, not an on-screen one. It could print.  Try that on your iPad. It had arrow keys.  You won't find those on your iPad. It had the iPad's cool factor.  I'd use it on BART and draw a crowd. Reporters loved it.  It was the first PC they could carry with them on stories.  Globe trott...

This is pretty Cool.   TechVert blog has the top gadgets of the 1960's , 1970's and 1980's . Makes you wonder what the display for the 2010's, 2020's and 2030's will have.

The goal was to point out the advantages Mac's offer, pay homage to Steve Jobs for his contributions to the tech industry, and give my first impressions of the iPad.  That's this week's Family Tech column in the News & Messenger.

Looks like E-Bay has managed to sell Skype , or at least 65% of it. Never did make much sense to me why they bought them in the first place. I guess there was thinking at one time it would give buyers and sellers a way to communicate. They never really implemented that. I know a lot of people swear by Skype. I know people in the US with family and business contacts oversees. Skype makes it affordable for them to stay in touch. Several years ago while my family did an archaeological dig in England, it cost me $2.48 a minute via AT&T to talk to them. With Skype, today, it would be twenty-one cents a minute. In March a study showed Skype handled 8% of international calls. That is more then AT&T. Think about that a moment. A piece of software has seriously undermined the bread and butter of what was once one of the predominant corporations on the planet. This internet thing is sure causing some upheavals, isn't it? One thing I could never understand was why Skype di...

Last night Google finally admitted they were planning a PC Operating System. I have a note for a future blog post (in Evernote, of course) on the inevitability of Google coming out with an OS. Really, I did. Of course, like many, I thought they'd be expanding on Android. Tonight, reading over today's traffic, I see there was a lot written about this today. Some trying to say Microsoft is now dead, while others say it isn't a big deal . The product is a year out. A lot happens in this space in a year. All I can say is, we'll see. My first thought was that turning the browser into an operating system was inevitable. Marc Andreessen , the founder of the Mosaic browser which begat Netscape, Firefox, and even Internet Explorer, was moving in that direction back in the 90's. It is what forced Microsoft to move to "cut off Netscape's air supply" as one Microsoft executive wrote in an email later subpoenaed in the Microsoft anti-trust action. Microsoft ...

I have a whole Saturday to geek out. Have a bit of real work to do, some personal finance, some filing, and some fun projects to work on. So a little rambling here as I go. Gave some thought to how a 10 digit phone number can support just shy of a billion people. There are are 303,824,640 in the US now. We each may have 3.29 phone numbers. Let's see, I have a landline, a cell phone, a Google Voice number, and a personal efax number. I've exceeded my share. Interesting article from PCWorld (via Digg ) about how the cell phone is changing the life of children on the planet. Did you know there are onl y 1.27 billion landlines, but over 4.1 billion cell phone subscriptions? Better connectivity is thought to improve education, healthcare, political organization, and can reduce fraud. When I was in Journalism School in the late 70's theory then was that the then looming satellite TV technology would bring news across borders and help eliminate totalitarian regimes . I ...

It was on March 13, 1989 that Sir Tim Berners-Lee presented a paper on how scientists could share information via a computer network. In January of 1990, he implemented his idea into what became the world wide web. Considering all the industries disrupted by his invention, Dr. Berners Lee should be grateful there is not a time machine. The list of industries eager to send executives back in time and stop him would be long : Recording industry newspapers television movies travel agencies book publishing magazine publishing retail airlines business travel telephone cable tv Which ones have I missed?

I suspect a lot of this blog is going to about my adventures, and misadventures with technology. Technology is moving so fast that a persons point of view is skewed by their age. Therefore it is important I think to give readers an idea of where I am coming from technology wise. When I graduated from high school, there was but one telephone company. You couldn't hook up any equipment to the phone lines unless they sold or rented it to you. Video games had just come out. They had plastic overlays that went over the tv screen to make the borders of the game. Video tape recorders existed only in TV stations, not in homes yet. A few years before, a TV series that ran for only a couple years forecast days when we'd have communicators in our pockets, video stored on small silver disks, devices that could stun someone, engines that would propel us faster then the speed-of-light and teleporters. A bright future we figured we'd never see. The first three on that list are her...