Jeremy Garcia, Bryan Lunduke, Jono Bacon, and Stuart Langridge present a special non-specific winter holiday version of Bad Voltage, in which we channel the spirit of notable winter holiday personage Ebenezer Scrooge by examining the ghosts of generic winter holiday Past, Present, and Future:
PAST: How did we get started with technology? A tale of Nintendo robots and Acorn and Commodore battles. Let us know how you got into tech on community.badvoltage.org (2.00)
PRESENT: At the beginning of 2014 the team gave predictions for what could happen in the technology world over the course of the year. How did we do? We take the opportunity to review the success and failure of our attempts to be technology Nostradami, and give you the chance to vote for the biggest loser on the forum (19.18)
FUTURE: Where are we going to be and what's going to be happening in technology ten years from now in 2024? (49.43)
The Bad Voltage Holiday Gift Guide: what should you get for the geeks in your life? (62.10)
I think @bryanlunduke has just won my vote in the poll, based solely on his C64 and Amiga usage @jonobacon sealed it by sneering at me (indirectly, an Amiga owner) – suck it, mate
@jonobacon nearly recovered it with his C64 credits but any naysaying of Amiga… Tsk.
Also, @sil has much respect for Acorn – first machine was a BBC Micro Model B. Loved it immensely! Still a functioning Amiga and Spectrum demoscene!
You utter expletive deleted you have just ruined my Christmas. You released the show early and I couldn’t resist opening it. Great show guys but how can Christmas match up now?
My first computer was a Commodore VIC20 then the Acorn Electron then my first IBM clone running DOS 3.3 and later Linux.
@sil Acorn isn’t completely dead it lives on in ARM Holdings who make ARM processors used in lots of embedded systems.
I think people are more concerned about privacy now than they were a year ago but I don’t think we are any closer to getting any.
Acorn is, sadly, dead. Element14 lived on for a bit, and you can still get RISC OS (and indeed, run it on a raspberry pi!). ARM just goes to show how good the Acorn team were; they decided to design their own chip while having not much idea about anything to do with chip design, and Sophie Wilson designed a chip which now runs the whole entire world.
If they hadn’t decided to limit themselves to education sales, the world would be so much better now…
Element14 (and Sophie Wilson) ended up being borged by Broadcom (of “used to employ me” fame). My boss there was the main IT bod at Element14, and quite a few E14 staff are still at Broadcom in Cambridge.
I really liked @sil recommendation of getting a pair of mics and talking to people. It brought up a regret that I have myself. When I was young, Uncle Ben was this cranky old man. He was probably cranky because I happened to be in his presence. Now I wish I had taken some kind of recorder, or even just a notepad and asked him all about his youth in the later 1800’s and how he felt about ____________ event in history, what was he doing at _____________ date. There are many others I wish I could have done that with and now they are gone.
I recommend, especially the younger you are, is to think of some relevant questions and find your oldest family member or friend (or any person for that matter) and get that history recorded. You won’t regret it!
Totally agree with @oldgeek. You could have, for example, had Uncle Ben explain to you that with great power comes great responsibility, and that would have been an inspiring message!
My Uncle Hugh (my mum’s brother) was retired from the RAF when he got his Sinclair ZX Spectrum 16K (later upgraded to 48K, dk’Tronics keyboard, Interface 1, Microdrive …). I used to love going round, playing Psion’s Flight Simulator, messing around with Sinclair BASIC, and that led me to get given a ZX81 by my parents for Christmas in 1983 (complete with blu-tac-required-for-continued-use 16K RAM pack). That led to a ZX Spectrum 48K+ in 1985 (and much hacking away on weird and wonderful stuff when not playing games), then a ZX Spectrum +3 in 1989, and after brief forays into Sega consoles at home, and BBC Micros (both Model Bs and Masters) and Mac Pluses in Computing Studies classes at high school, I took up Computing Science at college, and then university. Once I realised I was more interested in the “Computing” part, rather than the “Science” part, I began my (currently) 18 year stretch working in IT.
Were it not for Uncle Hugh and Uncle Clive, I’d probably not be typing this at all. And without Uncle Clive, neither would all of you, most likely (Linus hacked away on the Sinclair QL in the '80s before moving on to PCs).
AT, not on. Like “e-mail us AT”, not “e-mail us on” … Gah!
Absolutely not. I talk to my friends on Twitter. My daughter talks to her friends on Facebook. I find links to web games on reddit. And you tell us about how you got into tech on community.badvoltage.org.
Oh what a great little present right before Christmas!!!
Great show guys!
Well I explained a lot already in a previous topic, but a few years after the Amstrad PCW, I got into video games by the Amstrad GX4000 (basically a CPC shaped like a video game console that miserably failed on the market because it arrived just before the Megadrive and Super Nintedno 16 bits console were released), then a very classical Gameboy, then a Super Nintendo.
Funny thing: I tried no longer than yesterday to emulate a GX4000 using MESS on my Linux desktop and it was very disappointing (like 3 frames per second, totally unplayable thing)… Any good Amstrad CPC/GX4000 emulator there?
You guys mentionned the fact that we may all have a memory unit inside our house to store all our data. I already have that, and it’s called a NAS! Alright, it’s not a brick built into my flat (fortunately, since I’ve moved 4 times in the past 5 years), but I’ve actually been using it for 2 years now and I’ve been pleasantely surprised at how easy it had been to install and how many services it provides (Dropbox alternative, Google music alternative, Evernote alternative, music player, Download station, video library for my OpenElec device, Web server)… maybe I should write a review!
@sil, you discussed about microphones. I own a Zoom H2n which has the feature of recording in “surround” mode and in two separate files, and it’s not extremely expensive (I got it for around 150 USD). Could this help you in your interviews?
Happy whatever, people! And don’t worry, you could have been a month late, there would still have been one holiday to go: Chinese New Year (it’s due mid-February in 2015).
