Digital Fossils

In a Telegram conversation, I remarked that the 7" Kindle Fire tablets that Amazon is selling for the price of dinner for two at Applebee's would have been props on Star Trek: The Next Generation.

Marko replied "If the Fire had existed when TNG was still running, it would have been the most powerful computing device on the planet by a fair margin. Weird to think about."

He's not wrong, either.

I remember back in the days of dialup and BBSes, call it 1990 or so, one of the rotating sig lines in my SLMR (Silly Little Mail Reader) file was "And you may tell yourself 'This is not my one gig drive'."

My boyfriend at the time had a 386DX 33 with an HDD that was so huge that it had to be partitioned into virtual drives. Like eighty whole megabites or something like that!

Coincidentally, the SD card slot on my computer right now is occupied by a 64GB card from an old Nikon D7100. Each 24 megapixel RAW image file takes up over 30MB. 

My wristwatch has higher screen resolution than a Sega Genesis.

.

Atari!

Spent the day playing Galaga on the 7800. More later.

It's a baseball off day...

But across the room, the 1996 World Series is happening all over again on an old Sega Genesis playing in demo mode.

The newest generation of sports titles tend to feature eye-popping graphics that make it easy to forget that... well... real baseball on TV doesn't really have graphics that are all that eye-popping. There are no worm's-eye view, panning, Matrix-effect slo-mo jump shots of Jeter firing to first when you're watching the real thing; the cameras are all in the stands. From across the room on a Sylvania 19" tube, this archaic game looks pretty much exactly like I remember the '96 Series looking. From across the room. On a 19" tube.

Only better, because there are no commercials and the Braves are leading two games to one. :)

A package has arrived...

...full of fun and games and goodies. A Sega Master System and a Sega Genesis. An Atari 7800. A GameCube. (Although it's form factor appeals to me, it's not super fossil-y. Yet.)

I've managed to get an extra TeeWee for the museum. A space cleared off on a table to get stuff set up...

Now to set the dial on the Wayback Machine to 1986, when Kurt Cobain was just barely old enough to buy a shotgun, Def Leppard were still employed, and 256 was a lot of colors.