When I was a small boy, we only got to see where our parents worked every two years. These were boring times; they generally stressed all the parents out because their offices were a mess and full of all sorts of things we weren’t supposed to know about.

But sometimes, I’d get to go to work with my father. I wasn’t supposed to.

Once, one of my father’s friends showed me a golf game he’d written for the computer they had. It was the first time I’d seen a monitor; I’d played Adventure before but you needed a printer for that, and the paper was this strange white and green stuff that you only ever saw boring stuff on. Sometimes you’d get long pieces of it to draw on and sometimes you got to make little worms out of the side pieces by folding them over and over.

So the monitor was exciting. There were two green dots on it, nothing else. The dots would appear at random. And my dad’s friend told me it was a game of golf – which, at my age, was about as uninteresting a game as I could feasibly imagine. However, it was on a computer, and it was somewhere I wasn’t supposed to be, so I was game.

The way you played “golf” was to tell the nice man where to hit one dot and how hard so that it merged with the other dot. This was how you “sank the putt”, another phrase that meant nothing to me. “Where” was a number from 0 to 359, and “how hard” was, apparently, supposed to be a number from 1 to 10.

I asked the nice man what happened if we hit it harder. He looked at me thoughtfully and said “I don’t know! Let’s see!” So I had him hit the ball at twenty – a large number, but conservative by my five-year-old imagination – and the dot became a line that bounced off the edges of the screen. I was ecstatic, despite the fact that I had not “sank the putt.”

The man was very nice – he let me try again. I asked him just how hard the “ball” could be “hit” and he said “let’s try a thousand.” And lo and behold – that dot became a line that rapidly and angularly turned the black monitor white. It made me feel incredibly powerful, little five-year-old me.

It took me many years to realize that I was hanging out in a classified area and using a mainframe designed for thermonuclear yield simulation to play golf. Wargames, as you might imagine, was an immediate favorite of mine upon its release.

So yes, young man. I’ve seen floppy discs. I have a synthesizer that still takes 3.5″, used to have a sampler that took quickdisks, loaded files into my Timex Sinclair 1000 using a boom box and cassettes, and eaten my cheerios off of crashed 10MB ceramic hard disk platters. So, I reckon, have many, many people here.

But also remember when it took a goddamn Cray YM-P to play “golf.” And then I contemplate the advances we’ve made so that I can now say “museum with the chimera of arezzo exhibit” into my phone and have it immediately give me directions, from anywhere I am, to the Getty Villa… and account for traffic.

And that’s “bonus points” for me. I can barely imagine what sorts of stories my kids will tell in this vein.

Via Reddit user kleinbl00.

It always fascinates me reading things like this, because it blows my mind to think of what sort of things I’ll be able to tell my kids in twenty years time. Hell, I’ve been using computers all my life. 15 years may not seem like much, but the archaic stuff I used to do still amazes me. There was a time when I installed Microsoft Office over a parallel cable onto an old Intel 486 machine. It only had a floppy drive. The install would take over three hours.

And I still remember setting up AOL for the very first time, probably when I was about 7. My parents finally caved, what with the spindle of AOL CDs now sitting on our desk. I actually know what Gopher is too, and used it extensively at the Ryerson Library in the late nineties when my mum went back for her Masters. I don’t think anyone actually misses it.

I’m one of the last to ever hold a floppy disk. I once used Zip drives. And the weird thing is, my kids won’t know what the hell I’m on  about.

If you don’t already know of Archive.org, I’d suggest you get yourself acquainted. The site essentially serves as the internet’s equivelant of archivial storage, with a goal to catalog most, if not all of the Internet’s vast amounts of information. An impossible goal? Definitely. But it’s still a valiant one nonetheless, and the amount of information the site has gathered over the years is staggering.

Chances are, you’ve already use the Wayback machine in some way or another. As you can imagine, constantly trawling the internet for data reveals a great number of revisions for certain articles, sites or portals. The Wayback machine takes all of these revisions and organizes them neatly, by date, into a virtual timeline allowing users to see exactly how a site may have looked at any given date. In case you’re too young to remember – or in some cases, would rather forget – the Archive has some pretty interesting artifacts from the nineties, and oftentimes with looks we wouldn’t necessarily expect.

But while gathering textual information is all fine and good, what really struck me was the size of their video archive. What many people don’t realise is that, for many older films, and even certain recent releases, the copyright info on particular pieces of media has expired. Without any active copyright license, the film becomes free to share, distribute and watch, without fear of such lovely organizations as the MPAA. A few of the sections more notable selections…

• Attack of the Killer Mushrooms - A masterpiece of Japanese cinema
• The Last Man on Earth – The *original* I am Legend
• Being a Teen in the 1950′s - Awesome and inadvertently funny videos on being a teen in an era past
• Charlie Chaplin – Lots of Charlie. This one in particular is his 23rd film.

And that’s just a small selection of what the site has to offer. Check it out, and tell me if you find anything interesting!

I’m not entirely sure how I missed this story over the Christmas holidays, but alas, I’ll forgive myself. After all, I was spending ample time indulging upon foods and deserts. Yet, it appears the same could not be said for one particular boy this Christmas holiday, who found himself denied a custom cake from the local supermarket. And the story gets better.

The boy’s father, Heath Campbell, had gotten custom cakes for his 3 year-old son’s previous birthdays from a nearby Wal-Mart. This year, however, choosing to purchase a cake from the local ShopRite instead, the store refused to adorn the cake with name of Campbell’s son. Honestly, can you blame them?

“Happy Birthday Adolf Hitler!” it would have read.

To say Mr. Campbell is an admirer of the Nazi party would be an understatement. Campbell’s daughter is conveniently named JoyceLynn Aryan Nation Campbell. Meanwhile, the entire affair has exploded into a two separate issues, no-doubt spurred by intense media coverage both nationally and abroad.

Firstly, there is the issue of whether the cake should have been printed in the first place. Spokespeople for both Wal-Mart and ShopRite in a a number of newspaper articles have stated it’s their position to refuse the creation of cakes that are either illegal, or deemed inappropriate. Of course, what exactly is deemed “inappropriate” is a very large blanket indeed. For instance, if someone had simply requested a cake inspired by Nazi leader Adolf Hitler, most would probably consider the creation of such a cake to fall into this category. Yet, in this instance, the cake is being requested by someone who clearly posses the same name, but is not an infamous war criminal. By that logic, should ShopRite reserve the right to refuse Osama and Hussein cakes too?

Of course, the obvious problem here is that, as much as Mr. Campbell would like us to believe, young Adolf has clearly been named in memory of the Nazi leader. He’s stated in a number of papers and interviews that it’s “just a name”, and that nothing should be construed from it. Yet, this is coming from a man who’s house is adorned in Swastikas, and German Nazi paraphernalia. Not to mention the unfortunate naming of his daughter.

So you can see where this story is going. What originally began as an issue of free speech rights – or would that be free icing rights? – has now snowballed into the legitimacy and implications of naming one’s children after remnants of a Nazi past. In my opinion, when covering such a story, there needs to be a very clear separation of the two While I obviously agree that it’s probably not the greatest idea to name your child Hitler, Mao, or Stalin – but that’s your prerogative. Whether he should have named his children based on such horrible historical blights in the first place is another matter entirely. So, as a Journalist, while I may not agree with what you have to say, I will support your right to say it.

Or, in this case, ice it. If only cake artists agreed.