More Doublespeak

It looks like TicketMaster is now taking lessons in doublespeak from Netflix.

I guess the word "improvement" now means "piss off the customer" and "convenience" means "pain in the rear".

Amazing!

The Chronicles of My Computing

My fellow blogger at Matty Reigns Supreme decided to document his computer journeys over the years and did a superb job. It is a fun read and worth the time to reminisce about the fun and simpler days gone by.

Since I enjoyed reading his account, I decided I'd do the same. Hopefully you'll enjoy it too.

The Early Years

My journey started way back around 1976 or thereabouts. My father was working at IBM in the test equipment group at their Federal Systems Division. He got to see a lot of really cool stuff (things young boys like such as Space Shuttles, fighter jets, and bombers) and consequently, so did I (well, at least I saw some of the computers that went into that stuff, which WAS cool). I was interested in computers from the moment I saw them. In particular, at an open house or maybe a "bring your kid to work" day, I got to lay my eyes on a Tektronix vector graphics terminal. I was in the 2nd grade then and it was mesmerizing. There were some really cool programs for it for drawing things and some neat programs people had written to put art on the screen.

The interesting thing about this display was that it was a persistent phosphor vector display that allowed something to be drawn on it but it wasn’t necessary for it to be refreshed constantly for it to stay on the display. Of course, this had its pluses and minuses. If you drew something you didn’t want, the display had to be cleared and redrawn from scratch but it was very cool watching it do just that. I recall being fascinated with a program that was written for it that would draw flowcharts automatically of code that was sucked into it (don’t ask me what kind of code, APL was big back then but so were a lot of other languages, it might have even been some pseudo machine code or assembler). It was one of two applications that throughout my younger computing days, I always wanted to write.

When the TRS-80 Model I was released in 1977, I picked up a copy of the manual which, at the time, read more like a programming guide than anything. I think it looked like this but I seem to recall the cover being a different color. Maybe it wasn't the manual and really was a programming guide, not sure. It was a long time ago. The one thing I recall was dreaming about owning one and I would write programs on notebook paper and then bring them to my dad to check them and see if they would work. I’m sure I drove my dad nuts with this.

Fortunately for me, my father had a friend and his friend had a son about my age. My friend's father tinkered (that is an understatement) with computers and designed them at work. He had their entire house's heating system controlled with motion sensors or IR sensors (not sure) using a huge rack full of equipment. They had a very large house (mansion size) and it was expensive to heat so I guess it was worth the trouble. His father seemed to collect these "toys" and it wasn't long before my friend got a CompuColor Computer. For some odd reason, I seem to remember the design of the CompuColor I but the II had a floppy disk drive and I remember that specific feature more than just about anything because, as some people may remember, floppy drives were not that common particularly at home. This thing had a HUGE display and it was color. What more could you ask for?

Of course, the best part of any computer, particularly a color one like this which amazingly had dot addressable graphics (also nearly unheard of), was the games. There were very good versions of Chess, Checkers, Star Trek, and Risk. The game I recall having the most fun with was I think called Swarm. Around this time, people were saying the killer bees were going to migrate from the south into the US and kill us all so this was a popular theme in some games and movies. I recall always getting to the point where the bees were out of control and you had to nuke the bees. (Yeah, nuke'em, you heard that right...Nuke's were all the rage then and could solve any problem.)

It is amazing how such memories can become engrained into your brain in a way that you can recall them like they were yesterday. I can recall the seat we sat in and the two of us taking turns at the keyboard. The beige boxes of floppy disks with the handwritten labels. On the right were racks of equipment (presumably more than just the heating controls but who knows, computers took up a lot of room back then) and circuit boards spread out all over the place. Soldering irons and collections of chips and empty breadboards for IC’s. How anything got done in that room is beyond me but I spent a lot of time in there. It was always frustrating how my friends younger brother could come in and run circles around the chess game on the PC while we were taking a break. He was several years younger and was frankly, a genius. When he was in elementary school, he made the high school chess team so I think that qualifies as smart.

Being at my friends place over the years was like being at a computer store sometimes. At different points they had some other S-100 based systems like the Altair (I don't recall the model) and his father bought an Apple I at an auction but we never got to play with it. (I wonder if he still has it...) I recall looking at BYTE magazines all the time and seeing all the stuff the S-100 based systems had and later, when I had my own computer, I always thought it would have been cool to have an S-100 system so that I could get all these cool gadgets. Of course, we know where the S-100 systems ended up now don’t we?

Just thinking of BYTE reminds me of all the cool magazines of the day and there were so many. Besides BYTE there was my favorite, Creative Computing. I always devoured this magazine as soon as I could get my hands on the next issue. I sort of regret not taking a rather large collection of these off the hands of an old friend. I was offered at one time to take his entire Creative Computing collection and I’m pretty sure he had almost every one (he was a lot older than I was so had more time and money to collect them) and was only missing a few issues. My mom didn’t think that was a good idea (hmm, wonder why) and so I had to pass. Looking through those now would really bring back some memories I bet. It was a sad day for me when I found out they were going to stop publication. I wonder if they would be worth anything now??

Eventually, my school got a TRS-80 Model I. For some odd reason, it ended up being in our middle school instead of the high school. I think this was because the middle school math teacher is the one that pushed for it. At that point, I ended up spending a lot of time after school plugging away at it and doing exactly what everyone that had a computer at that time did which was typing in programs to see what would do. Invariably, you’d spend more time figuring out where the typos were and debugging it than you did actually using the program you typed in. It didn’t stop us though. There would be marathon sessions of typing, sometimes playing tag team with it, to get the stuff into the system as fast as possible. Unfortunately, I had to compete with the high school kids to get time on the thing and as you know, middle school kids will always to the older (and bigger) kids.

Home Arcade

The Atari 2600 was released about this same time (1977) and changed video games forever. This made video game playing something everyone could do at home. We eventually ended up getting one but I remember being mildly disappointed I didn't get one of the Fairchild video game systems called the Channel F. If you'd ever played one, you'd have remembered the controller on this thing because it was pretty neat with a joystick control that could be pushed up and down and I think you could twist it too. Probably a good thing I didn’t though because I don’t think they lasted very long.

I recall the summer parties my parents would have at our house for friends and co-workers where a good deal of people would be hovered around the TV in the living room playing the Atari games Combat or Basketball. The room would be packed and everyone would be cheering each other on. If you were to go back and play the basketball game now, it is almost laughable how simplistic it was. However, it captured everyone’s attention then and a lot of people spent a lot of time playing it. With two people it just was plain fun but the computer sucked. Pitfall and Megamania were two of my favorites for the old Atari and who can forget River Raid too.

Of course, anything that would let you play games from the Arcade at your home was hot. There were a lot of games made for the for the various systems that tried to capture the same game play (or ripped it off) that you got in the arcade. Arcade’s were HOT then and I can’t even begin to imagine how much money I pumped into game systems during the times when the arcade’s were big. I was in the fortunate (or maybe unfortunate) place of having a small restaurant across the street from my parents and a bar down the road that had arcade games in it. Many times, it was the hang out when school was over. The restaurant was one of the first places around that I ever played an original Pong machine. Later it was Space Invaders, Pac-Man, Ms. Pac-Man, Gorf, Wizard of Wor, Defender, Centipede, and many other greats. At one time there was a competition on Pac-Man to get a high score and win a cheeseburger. I ate well for a few weeks while another kid and I battled it out to best each other’s scores. Eventually, the restaurant realized it wasn’t such a good idea any longer and we went hungry again. One of these days I’ll go visit a classic arcade place and take another trip down memory lane with my kids in tow.

My First Computer

I spent a great deal of time at this point at the only area computer store. They were about 40 minutes away so any time my mom had to go shopping at the mall, I'd have her drop me off so I could hang out and pester the guys that ran the place for 3-4 hours at a time. I have to give them a whole lot of credit as they never kicked me out. I suppose they were rewarded at some point as eventually I did get my very first computer from them. They were Apple resellers but also had the Atari series like the Atari 400 (with the crappy keyboard) and 800. I had my first exposure to the Atari series and Star Raiders there. I think I played it for 2 or 3 hours straight one day at the store. I have to hand it to Atari for their cartridge based system of expansion. This is the way it should have been done from the start and from there on should have remained that way. To add an option or any type of expansion, you just popped the lid and inserted the expansion. There was something to be learned from the simplicity of this scheme and what was used in the Atari 2600.

In what amounts to the geekiest of stories, I had my first crush that I can remember on the owner of the store’s daughter. She and I had worked on a BASIC program on the Atari 800 one day at the store together. It was very short lived as I was quite young and only could hope she’d be there when I went to the store which wasn’t nearly enough of course.

The thing I remember most about the place though is the walls lined with zip lock bags full of tapes with programs on them you could buy for the Apple. All the bags had a tape and typewritten instructions and a typewritten label. Everything was very homebrew back then. There were a lot of Scott Adams Adventures on tape including Adventureland. These were the original text only versions too. If you’ve ever played them or go back and check out an emulator, it’ll amaze you at how simplistic they seem now with their [verb] [noun] commands and just basic text. They were quite popular though and I certainly played my share.

I also remember spending a great deal of time horsing around with the brand new Apple Graphics Tablet they got that hooked up to the Apple. This thing was outrageously expensive ($1200 seems to pop into my head) but man it was cool.

The two guys that ran the place were great (as you can tell if they let some little kid run around the store all day) and they were truly into computers. The business was just a way to fund their hobby. It was a sad day when the one partner left for bigger and better things but I can’t say I blame him, he got a job at Apple and moved to Cupertino. What more could you ask for!!!

My very first computer was an Apple ][+ and I ran the thing into the ground. I was in the 6th grade and it was something I dreamed about and it finally became a reality. My very own computer. Of course, you couldn't do much with it and the few tapes that you got with it had to be loaded and reloaded several times in a trial-and-error process to get them to load properly. I spent a great deal of time playing Lemonade and Penny Arcade (by Bill Budge who was my programming hero) and just typing in AppleSoft BASIC code and seeing what happens. The first night we had the computer, my father and I stayed up all night (literally, we saw the sun rise) writing a silly little program that let you draw a line on the screen taking its direction from the paddle controls we had for the computer. Its a program you could whip off now in minutes probably but at the time, it was fantastic and for some reason a whole lot of fun. Eventually I got the Integer BASIC card so I could play the really cool stuff and a floppy disk drive but that didn't come until a bit later.

When I think about how much that system cost in terms of real dollars it blows my mind that we ever ended up with one. The thought of spending that much money on something like that and then putting it in the hands of a sixth grader seems crazy. Fortunately for me, my parents did and I'll forever thank them. (I think...sometimes I really hate computers now and perhaps should have been an astronomer or mathematician or something...) Eventually I would graduate to an Apple ][e system and do even more with it. It was a mainstay for a very long time and saw its share of programming and game playing over the years. Of course, my ultimate gaming experience on the Apple would have to be Ultima IV. I probably invested just as much time in Robot Wars (my dad and I were always trying to beat each other) and Flight Simulator (I spent a lot of time flying over that stupid grid) and Zork too (check out the bottom of that page link as it is the original artwork used for the TRS-80 and Apple versions). I even have an original parchment style map for Zork that I sent away to Infocom to get.

One cool thing was that at about the same time as I got the Apple system I ended up being part of a small group of kids that got to do a several week project at a local community college working on their computers. This was kind of neat because they were all TTY terminals (printers with greenbar paper and a keyboard) and were hooked to, if I recall correctly, a DEC PDP-11 but I could easily be wrong about this. I just remember being struck by how antiquated the interface seemed however after having spent time on the new home computers of the day.

One thing I relished about the Apple was how accessible everything was. Making modifications to the system or programming whatever you wanted was simple. I learned how to code in 6502 microcode and did a lot of coding directly with peeks and pokes. Eventually I think I managed to get a hold of an assembler for 6502. My father even went so far as to help me design an adapter card to hook an old tektronix terminal up to what amounted to a special serial interface we put together on a board with some wire and IC's. I had to write the code to interface to it in 6502 and we eventually got it to work and could "talk" to the Apple via the terminal and even use it as a replacement for the real keyboard and display sans any graphical ability. Oddly though, it was a bit anti-climactic as once we got it working, it was like, "Now what?"

Back before I even got my first Apple computer, I had the distinct pleasure of being a founding member of a local Apple’s User Group that got started. We’d meet once a month and swap stories and tips and we’d line up people and businesses to do demos for us. It was a fantastic time when sharing computer stories was as much a part of computing as using the computer. It was a solid group of people and it lasted years eventually having a Mac contingent which survives to this day!! (That means they’ve been around for 30 years now, wow!) I even managed to weasel my way into being the editor of the newsletter for a few years. I was probably a pretty annoying kid back then and I’m sure the adults probably wanted to shove me into a box to shut me up but fortunately they were all exceedingly gracious and allowed me to stay very involved. For me, going to these meetings was a big deal because I got to hang with the adults. Most meetings a small group would go hang out at a Denny’s until very very late and I appreciated my father letting me stick around and participate even though these late nights were school nights.

One of the fond memories I have of that time was a gentlemen who was involved in our club who was also a HAM Radio operator who had setup a method for doing Morse code via his Apple. It would both receive and transmit in Morse code and for someone who didn’t know the code, this was slick. There were even groups that setup times to transmit programs back and forth in a sort of poor man’s torrent system. They’d have designated times to start transmitting certain programs on certain frequencies and then they’d set their systems to receive them and turn them into applications they could save to disk. It was pretty fantastic stuff. I don’t recall what types of programs were being broadcast at the time but they were all small enough that they could send them in short spurts of 30 to 60 minutes I recall. A lot of this stuff was easy to do on the Apple ][ too because it was just so open and accessible. You could control anything in the guts of the system.

Speaking of guts, I got really good at taking floppy drives apart on these old Apple systems and “fixing” them so they could read good and bad disks and, dare I say it, copy protected disks. Most of the Apple floppy drives were belt driven and had to be adjusted periodically to get the spindle speed right so you could read and write to them reliably. If things go too far out of wack you could at best have disks you could only read in your drives and at the worst, write bad data that could never be read again. Fortunately, the drives had a pattern on the bottom of them that would stay still when held under a fluorescent light at 60Hz when properly adjusted with a screwdriver. You could adjust these to be slightly fast or slow to allow a drive to read sectors that would normally have been unreadable. I don’t remember the particulars but these adjustments were sometimes necessary to get program disks to copy properly. I even had a small contingent of people bring me unreadable disks to fix using a hex based sector editor for the Apple since it wasn’t uncommon to have the FAT table or directory on a disk get corrupted. With some handy work and a lot of hours, you could sometimes get the stuff back.

At one point in my programming career, I wrote a program that I tried to get published. I sent it to Broderbund, Electronic Arts, Sierra (I think they were On-Line Systems at the time), and one other I can’t recall. My hopes were slightly dashed when I got them back and was told they weren’t interested. Oh well, it was worth a shot. Now it wouldn’t even make it as a flash game but at the time, it seemed like something I could sell.

Game Time

At some point I did end up with a Commodore 64 and as Matty mentions on his blog it was a real magnet for media and games that were acquired via questionable means. I didn't do a whole lot of programming on this and mostly played games. I don't even recall when in my history I actually got my first one but it was a bit late into the 64’s life (It was replaced with a 128 eventually too). These things, in my opinion, had some great games but when it came to programming in BASIC, were a pain in the rear. Had I cut my teeth on it, I probably would have thought differently but I just could never get very far with writing applications on it. They were popular though and were inexpensive in comparison to other systems. It along with the VIC-20 did a lot to put computers in a lot of homes that otherwise wouldn't have had them.

Sort of related to the Commodore 64 but prior to my having one I ended up visiting a school system nearby that had landed a ton of Commodore Pet computers. Those things were funky and futuristic looking. Unfortunately, I never got to spend very much time on one. I remember though being a bit disappointed that they didn't have dot addressable graphics and instead used character based graphics for everything. I remember very fondly a few games for the C64 though that were so much fun. My quick list would have to be: Racing Destruction Set, Raid on Bungling Bay, Archon and Mail Order Monsters. Of course, there are a lot more.

Let’s Get Serious?

Somewhere in here, I don't recall exactly when, I ended up with an IBM PC XT (probably via the IBM employee purchase program).

I never did get an original IBM PC but a friend of mine did so we ended up going back and forth between his house and mine working between the Apple and the IBM. Our school got a grant from IBM and was donated 15 IBM PC computers not long after they were introduced. When we found out about it, that same friend and I biked the 7 miles one way many days over the summer so we could help set the systems up and hang out all day in the new computer lab in the high school. I was either going into 8th grade or 9th grade at the time. Little did I realize how big a part these computers would eventually play in my life and my time in high school.

An interesting tidbit is that via IBM’s employee purchase program a lot of people purchased these things and eventually they opened up access to the outside via a dial-up modem so that some people could actually work from home. This was really pretty amazing considering when this was all being done. I don’t recall precisely when they did this but the PC XT was out and used for 3270 terminal emulation. There were a handful of people I knew that could actually take advantage of this and being able to work from home was something not everyone could even think about during those days.

Since we had a full computer lab now (before that it was a small contingent of Apple computers) and no one really knew what to do with them, I was able to make up my own classes and actually get credit for them. I even managed to get out of taking Latin and Spanish because I convinced the school that a computer "language" should count. So I spent some time learning Pascal and writing some programs for a project and was able to get credit for it.

The only other computer our school used in any fashion was the Apple /// which, if you know any computer history, was a complete disaster. The business/accounting classes had the unfortunate distinction of being the place the Apple /// was placed and I’m sure they regretted it the day they showed up. I have no idea what happened to them but hopefully someone put them out their misery. It is sort of a shame as the Apple /// did have more colors, an 80 column display, and better audio. Unfortunately, it was very unreliable and gained a bad reputation from the start. The only thing the school could have done that would have been worse was acquiring a bunch of the horrific IBM PCjr’s. A lot of IBM’ers ended up with these and it amazes me the school didn’t get them with the number of IBM’ers on the school board.

The Revolution

Eventually, I got into a Mac 128K system and graduated through to other stages of Mac development with the 512K and Mac Plus. The Mac Plus was when everything changed with the SCSI bus added to the back and with up to 4MB RAM available. I still remember cracking open the cases on these things (you needed a special tool or you'd gouge your case all up) and putting RAM upgrades in them for me and friends. I even at some point did some processor upgrades and RAM upgrades using these clip on kits that some companies produced. Talk about a royal pain in the rear. It was ugly.

Worth noting is that I actually had the opportunity to play on another friends Lisa computer. I wonder how much that thing is worth in working condition. The Lisa was a tremendous example of something that people just weren’t ready for and was just way too expensive. Fortunately, the Macintosh was a faster cheaper machine even though it wasn’t technically a cheaper Lisa. It seemed like it as they used similar conventions though.

As most already know, the Mac really did revolutionize the way people work on computers. From the mouse to the bitmapped fonts to the windows, it was just jaw dropping. However, the one thing that pushed it into the place no man had gone before was the LaserWriter. It was mind bogglingly expensive (@ $7K) but it put desktop publishing on the map. It along with PageMaker was what you needed if you wanted to produce and publish content from the comfort of your own office that actually was of a quality a print shop could produce. Up until this point, it was all cut and paste and many people still had to buy these stickers to lay out type and copy them or have a professional typesetter produce it.

It just so happened I'd found out about someone who lived near my high school that had a LaserWriter and he had it right from the very start of the LaserWriter's introduction. Of course, I immediately had to meet this guy because not only did he have a LaserWriter but he was a Mac guy too. It began a friendship that has lasted until this day.

For those that don’t recall, the big deal with the LaserWriter wasn’t the laser printing (HP was doing just fine with that) but the Adobe PostScript language that was part of the system. Every LaserWriter had a 68000 processor in it , a pretty large contingent of RAM, and PostScript. Postscript was a real honest to goodness programming language albeit based on FORTH. With PostScript, you could produce almost anything you could program and things like PageMaker and other applications like Ready, Set, Go! and eventually QuarkXPress much later. My friend with the LaserWriter used to do all kinds of crazy stuff with his marketing agency and he would call me up and say, “hey can you write something in PostScript that does X” and I’d pour over my Postscript books and come up with something. This seems ridiculously simple now but one of his favorite things was putting text on a curve and with Postscript it was a piece of cake. There simply was no other way to do it then.

Of course, back in those days, the limitations in software were pretty strict. I recall my friend calling me up to help him put together a 150 page document (about...it was more than 100 for sure) in Aldus' PageMaker (the app that basically helped make the Mac synonymous with desktop publishing) one day. We spent the entire weekend on it and that was with the text having been already done, we just had to cut and paste it into Pagemaker and lay it out. Back in those days PageMaker was pretty buggy and you could only do a maximum of 16 pages in one document. Worse, every time PageMaker crashed, it seemed to corrupt the original document. We had floppy disks all over the place with copies of the documents and it was a nightmare but we eventually got it done. When we went to our first MacWorld, I can recall my friend and I having a long conversation with Paul Brainerd about all the bugs PageMaker had in it. Going to MacWorld with my friend was a long tradition that unfortunately ended a few years before MacWorld stopped being held on the east coast.

I really got into the Mac guts too just like I did my old Apple. One of the things that was just absolutely amazing was the simplicity of developing for the Mac. I bought all the developers guides they had out from Apple at the time and bought a decent assembler for 68000 and started teaching myself how to program in assembler on it. It turned out though that writing in Pascal (which used to be the language of choice for the Mac) was far easier in most cases. I mostly played around with the interface and made some simple little programs. My sampling of what the Motorola 68000 processor could do and the simplicity of it forever ruined my taste for trying to learn anything on the Intel processors. The 8088 and 80286 processors were the a mess by comparison and to this day I wonder where we’d be and what would have happened if IBM had chosen the Motorola processors instead of Intel’s crap. I’m sure things would be much different.

An interesting anecdote: Remember the friend I referred to earlier who had the Compucolor? His father was instrumental in the design of the IBM CS-9000, that DID use a 68000 processor, and it was light years ahead of the PC. If only he had been in charge of the IBM PC. The only reason I remember this is my friend had moved to Danbury, CT and my father was offered a job to help work on this project and possibly move the family to Danbury. Oh how my life would have changed had that happened.

I fondly recall many hours spent with MacPaint and Dark Castle. For those that can recall, Dark Castle was one of the early examples of a game using mostly digitized sound effects. In fact, the Mac really excelled at digitized sound and there were a few applications that were absolutely amazing at playing back multi-channel digitized instruments not unlike the samplers of the day. I wish I could recall the name of the program I used to horse around with regularly. The Mac really started a love I had for MIDI and Music. It led me to do what was somewhat sacrilegious in Mac circles but I did it anyway, I bought an Atari 1040ST.

Deserter

I purchased an Atari 1040ST with an absolute ton of software cheap via a CompuServe forum. It was probably near the end of the Atari's life as a marketable product. I bought it for one reason and one reason only and that was so I could install Cubase on it. If I recall correctly, Cubase didn't work on anything else at the time and in my opinion it was one of the best music programs available so I had to get an Atari to run it. The best part was that the person I bought it from really just wanted to dump everything they had and it had so much software with it (real, not pirated) that I was able to sell most of it on Compuserve individually and made enough that the 1040ST was essentially free. If eBay had been around, I'd probably have done even better!

Of course, never one to forget my gaming addiction, I had to play Dungeon Master which, is to this day, one of my favorite gaming memories. There was really nothing like it at the time in terms of presentation, sound, and the interface. Sure, there were tons of RPG's but nothing in 3D and real time. And you just couldn't top the spell casting system either. If you can find an emulator to play this, it is worth checking out.

I kept my Mac and stayed with it for quite some time. I didn't stick it out through the hard times like some but not for the reasons that some might think. I had been involved in reselling PC's for a while and tried desperately to get an Apple Reseller Authorization. I was dealing mostly with schools and it just made sense to be able to sell Apple's. When that fell through, I nearly teamed up with another reseller in another town to become a satellite for them reselling Apple. That didn't work out either and so I had to invest my time in the things that made me money and so I let go of my old Mac (oddly, I don't even recall what happened to it...), my Apple ][e died, and I just became an IBM PC clone pusher. I tried out the Laser (if you can recall what that was) and Power Computing Mac Clone's didn't become available until I actually worked for a publishing/manufacturing company who ended up using them.

The good thing was that I was immersed in Mac's all day every day at that job and so I got my Apple fix while I was at work. I even had the opportunity to get involved with Avid non-linear editing systems for a short while and with direct to plate and press publishing via the Mac. It was a fun time. Ironically, I found out later, I’d actually gotten the job at this company primarily because I knew Mac stuff.

Of course, none of this ends with the Mac but it seems appropriate to stop here because of the rest of it would be boring PC stuff. The last really fun computer I owned was probably the Mac (although I did enjoy the Atari). To this day I still regret not having experienced the Amiga to the fullest when it was available. It was also a revolutionary product with some fantastic capabilities such as NTSC output and thousands of colors and real multitasking OS. Unfortunately, Commodore didn’t know how to properly market it and it eventually died a slow death. I did get to play around with one at length for a while as part of a Video Toaster system. The Toaster revolutionized the video industry and probably is the only thing that allowed the Amiga to last as long as it did.

The Next Generation

Hopefully you’ve enjoyed reading this as much as I have enjoyed writing it. Reliving the past is always fun (and for old farts like me, a too frequent habit). It’ll be interesting to see what I think of as revolutionary when I might write a piece like this again in perhaps another 25 or 30 years. I’m quite certain we’ll still be talking about the Mac and we’ll be remembering the revolution the iPhone started. Unfortunately, we’ll still remember the Newton too but not for the same reasons. (Don’t laugh, my friend who had the LaserWriter STILL has his!)

The NEW COKE of the internet

My friends, witness a great marketing blunder of epic proportions here:

Netflix Profiles feature going away

Netflix has lost its head. I realize it probably isn't really as big a deal as the NEW COKE fiasco but I have to believe this is going to be a costly blunder. I've been a member of Netflix since October of 1999 (wow it'll be ten years next year) and I've never seen them do anything so moronic. Even their removal of email support (they allow phone support only) wasn't this stupid.

If you use Netflix, you may have used their profile feature which allows you to setup sub-accounts under a main account with its own separate queue for movie delivery and, just as important, its own separate rating history. I lot of people use these to divide their movie shipments into an adult category and a kids category so that kids always have a movie to watch and so do the adults. There are a lot of other uses of course such as a husband and wife queue or queues for roommates, etc.

Netflix has decided, because it is good for the user experience (not sure how), to remove this feature. This would be bad enough but they are also not preserving ANY information that was contained in the sub-account either. There is no export feature and no ability to merge info into the main account. Some people have spent a very long time building up their queues and rating history.

Fortunately for me, I don't use this feature but judging from the reactions on the Netflix community blog and on other sites, Netflix is getting nothing but very bad press and a lot of irate users. It'll be interesting to see if they really do remove this feature on September 1st or if they have to back down.

Either way, this is a perfect example of a major marketing blunder. If you take something away, you have to explain why and/or give something return. If they are doing this just to get additional revenue from extra accounts or purge their growing database, they should have made darn sure they candy coated this service change somehow.

At a time when the movie rental business is poised to change so dramatically, Netflix really can't afford any bad press. Its almost as if they WANT to hand this business over to Apple and Amazon.

TIVO Inc = Stupidity & Laziness

I just recently purchased a new TV that has a built-in HD tuner. As a bonus, I received a new Tivo HD box for free with the TV purchase. At first, I was going to sell it. I don't receive HD channels and I don't pay for any. I have the basic lifeline service from Time Warner Cable which only provides about 7 or so channels for $5/month.

Imagine my surprise when I had the TV do an Auto Scan and I found out that I receive my local HD channels in the clear over my cable. As it turns out, this is normal and it is supposed to be that way. Of course, I got pretty excited as I didn't think I'd be getting ANY HD stations at all unless I messed with an antennae and where I live, it is doubtful an antennae would work. This was great or so I thought.

I immediately unboxed the Tivo I was planning on selling and hooked it all up. I did the channel scan and it found the HD channels. I'm home free, right? WRONG.

As it turns out, the tuner finds the HD channels on these subchannels such as 85-13 and 85-14, etc. The Tivo has no way of knowing what the channels are on Time Warners channel guide/list. Is it channel 100, 120, 240, what is it? No biggie I thought. It's been this way for a while so they probably just have a way to go into the channel listing and say 84-13 = X on the channel guide and it will download the channel info.

I guess I was asking too much. According to Tivo and forums online, I need a cablecard to plug into the TV so it can tell the Tivo what channel is what. It won't be doing anything else. It won't get me more channels, it won't decode encrypted channels, it will do nothing but take the 4 HD stations I get (yeah, that's right, there are only 4) and tell it what they are on the channel guide.

At the moment, I'm not even sure if TimeWarner will provide a cablecard to me at all. If they do, I get to spend $3-5/month to RENT the cablecard. So essentially, I'll double my cable bill so I can do nothing more than what the most simple of software development skills could take care of for me in a pinch. According to the Tivo propaganda the cable companies can change these frequencies at any time so the cablecard is the only reliable way to get the channel mapping info. Who cares? If it changes once every couple of months I can change it. I do have the mental capacity to handle this myself. Point of fact is that the channel mapping hasn't changed in over 2 years according to friends who have had HD over the lifeline service.

So is Tivo being paid off by the cable companies or do the fear their ire if they add this feature? How can such a simple thing be left undone after a year or more of this problem. It seems to underscore a trend in music and movies and entertainment in general. Screw the customer and refuse to listen to them. I can guarantee if Tivo didn't have a virtual monopoly on this market, this wouldn't be happening.

I'm still not sure what I'm doing with the Tivo. I can't decide if I should sell it or keep it. Frankly, I don't feel like paying $5 more per month just for the HD channel guide info when I'm already taking the Tivo hit. I had a ReplayTV before this that cost me $7/month (I still have it, it works) and the Tivo is going to be $12-$13/month or somewhere around there. If only Replay had stayed in the market, I'm sure they would have addressed this issue and made this simple and painless.

Tivo, if you are listening, you are a bunch of lazy blankety blanks. Looking at forums, customers have asked for this feature for over a year and you've not delivered. Did you forget who pays your bills????

ill advised

• Don't burp after drinking a big glass of grape juice.
• Don't tie your shoe while walking.
• Don't try removing your jacket while driving with your seat belt on. (or off for that matter)
• Don't try pinching your nose with really strong magnets (Neodymium) if you have a mustache.
• Don't open your mouth at high speed on a motorcycle.
• Don't leave your car in reverse and get out while it is on.
• Don't ask the guy driving the tanker full of gasoline for a light.

You can thank me later!

Tivo: More ways to piss off the customer

I saw this the other day and couldn't believe what I saw. Is Tivo serious? Are they really trying that hard to piss off PAYING customers (remember, people PAY to use the Tivo) and drive them away? It is no wonder I chose to watch Lost on DVD. I couldn't imagine having to subject myself to something like an AD pausing my playback and making me watch it. It is pretty unbelievable.

The sad part is I just got a Tivo HD for free and I'm now contemplating selling it. I was kind of excited not for the HD part but the dual tuner feature but if this is what I've got to look forward to, you can count me out.

Wii Fit: Still going strong!

After almost a week with the Wii Fit + Balance Board for the Wii, I'm happy to say that there has been no less enthusiasm for the game. It is incredibly addictive and there is a certain amount of satisfaction when you come in and see your son doing push ups because he thinks it is cool on the Wii.

On top of that, my wife has found it a whole lot of fun too and has been using it faithfully every morning before the kids get up for school. She's actually disappointed when she has to quit because a lot of the games and exercises have a "just once more" element to them as you try to better your score from the previous try.

If you happen to pick one of these up, I'm sure you'll enjoy it. Just don't be surprised if your calves hurt after a long bout with the balance games.

I'll be sure an update again on this in about a month. We'll see if it is still as compelling then as it is now.