Tag: nostalgia

Pressing Vinyl

The saying goes “what’s old is new again” and that really applies to vinyl records. The music format went from the only game in town to a decline with cassettes and CDs to death’s door in less than two decades. The late 90s to early aughts were a time when getting an album on vinyl was near-impossible. Funny enough, it’s also the time when records produced during those days are highly collectible due to the low production runs. The resurgence of records crept in slowly, aided by Record Store Day and a growing interest in the format from people who…

30 Years of Mortal Kombat

If a singular game made an impact on the arcade scene in the 90s, it is undoubtedly Mortal Kombat. This game could be the pure definition of Right Place at the Right Time. Arcades were thriving, fighting games were hot thanks to Street Fighter II, and this new game was using digitized actors instead of cartoon characters. Oh and it was gory AF (though tame by today’s standards). MK spawned a ton of sequels and was a key component in the case to form the ESRB. From Nintendo’s decision to remove blood from their port of the game to the…

The Game Preservers

We tend to think that in this age of digital entertainment that things will always be accessible. But what about things such as video games that were all created before the internet? That’s where two ambitious people come in. Kelsey Lewin and Frank Cifaldi are the heads of the Video Game History Foundation, and these pair are single-handedly working to save games from being lost to time. Bijan Stephen at The New Yorker has more of their herculean efforts. The oldest video games are now about seventy years old, and their stories are disappearing. The companies that created early games left…

SEGA Shamone

One oddity of 90s video gaming is Sega’s clandestine work with Michael Jackson. It was rumored for many years that Jackson composed the music for Sonic The Hedgehog 3 along with Sonic & Knuckles. Even more incredible is recently-found footage of Jackson’s work with an unknown Sega simulator game where all the footage has been found. Matt Gardner at Forbes has more. Previously unseen footage of Jackson as the lead actor in the largely unknown Advanced System-1 (AS-1) motion simulator game Scramble Training has finally been made public by a pair of Sega enthusiasts, following the chance discovery of a seemingly forgotten…

The First Name Club

The internet is a place where people make connections for a variety of reasons. None more odd & interesting was an unknown-to-me way was group chats for people who had the same first name. Incredibly, many of these groups that formed a decade or more ago continue to endure and live on today. Annie Rauwerda at Input has more of these unique groups. Around the world, people are maintaining multigenerational, global friendships with their same-named counterparts — Jake Wright, William Hodgson, Jordan DaSilva, and Josh Brown, to name a few. Sometimes, name twins commiserate about shared experiences: a sixteen-member Council…

It Looks Like You Need a Sweater

Does anyone like Clippy? For anyone who’s initial response is “Who?” let’s rewind. Back in the mid 90’s, Microsoft introduced an assistant into Word named Clippy. It was an animated paperclip with eyes. It would monitor what you were doing and interrupt your work with suggestions. It was… annoying. Dipping into the nostalgia well, Microsoft is bringing Clippy to life in the most Everything-Old-Is-Cool-Again way: an ugly sweater. Tom Warren at The Verge has the story. This year, Microsoft has turned to Clippy, which is more Office-inspired than Windows itself. Born in Office 97, Clippy was resurrected in 2019 for Microsoft…

Evernote’s End

One of the longest-running and successful apps on iOS has been Evernote. This note-taking app was an amazing piece of software in the early days of the iPhone. From OCR to web syncing to a complete organizational method, Evernote (for a time) was *THE* note-taking app to use. That road seems to be over in its current form. Last week Evernote announced they’re being acquired by a company named Bending Spoons and the deal will close next year. Kyle Wiggers at TechCrunch has more. [Evernote CEO Ian] Small, the former CEO of platform-as-a-service company TokBox, came on in 2018. Under…

That’s Miss Jackson, if You’re Crashy

Leave it to a mega star like Janet Jackson to create a cyber security situation back in the mid-2000s. The pop singer of yesteryear released a song called Rhythm Nation which happened to emit some frequencies that would legit crash a nearby computer. Rob Thubron at Techspot has more of this odd tale. Jackson’s track would crash certain models of laptops when it was played within proximity of the device. It was discovered that the effect could be replicated on other laptops from multiple manufacturers, all of which shared a common feature; the same 5,400 RPM hard disk drive was…

Notepad of Doom

Doom is one of the most well-known and earliest entries into successful PC gaming. Id practically invented the FPS (First Person Shooter) genre with Wolfenstein and then Doom. For years, the joke is asking if a piece of technology runs Doom. Now, we get the ultimate Doom: running in Notepad. Chris Kerr at Game Developer has more of this incredible feat. In a video uploaded to YouTube and shared on social media, creator Samperson showcased just under one minute of footage that feels like a flickering, greyscale fever dream.  Although they didn’t break down their process, Samperson explained the footage isn’t sped…

Hobbyist Weather Project

The Weather Channel has been around since the beginning of cable television. One popular portion of their offerings has been Weatherscan channel. It’s a 24/7 feed of local weather without any anchors, meteorologists, or interruptions. It’s just weather set to jazz music. And now weather lovers are saving it before the official shutdown. Benj Edwards at Ars Technica has more. The Weather Channel amassed a large fan following over the decades, and that community maintains a wiki filled with intricate details about beloved on-air talent, discontinued programs, and the back-end tech that pulls it all together. It’s that deep lore that inspires hobbyists like Bates to…

The Happy Meal for Adults

McDonald’s is doing what a lot of other companies love to do: cash in on nostalgia. Many things from the ’80s and ’90s are back these days. Now “Mickey D’s” has done something pretty cool: an adult happy meal. It’s a collaboration with a secretive streetwear brand called Cactus Plant Flea Market. Even better, it still comes with a toy. Nicholas Vega at CNBC gives us the details. The Cactus Plant Flea Market Box is a collaboration between McDonald’s and the famous streetwear brand, and will roll out to participating stores starting on Oct. 3. Unlike the smaller menu items…

That S We All Drew in School

If I were to ask you “Remember the ‘S’ from school?” I bet more than a handful would answer “absolutely.” If you don’t know what I’m talking about, it is an angular letter S that is drawn with six vertical lines and then connecting them with some diagonal lines. But where did it come from? Over on YouTube, LEMMiNO has gone down the rabbit hole to find its origins. I loved watching this. The “Universal S” is a really interesting design because anyone can draw it. I, who is not artistically skilled in any way, used to draw it all…

Jaws Bites the Box Office

You can’t keep a good classic down. Leave it to the Spielberg movie that made everyone afraid of the water to make big bucks in a limited return to theaters. Recently national theater chains held a National Cinema Day event and movie tickets were a cool $3 to see a movie. Jaws ended up being a big draw. David Pierce at The Verge has more. Playing in theaters around the country, the movie made about $2.6 million over the three-day weekend. That put it 10th for the weekend. On a per-theater basis, Jaws actually outperformed every other movie in theaters…

Internet Power Explains the “World Wide Web” in 1995

The early days of the internet lasted a long time. Notably, the start of people getting online differed from childhood, to something teenagers tried out, to people only getting a computer in the home past 2000. It wasn’t like the iPhone where people all got it within a compressed timeframe. Because of that long time, the “wild west” of the internet remained so for nearly a decade. At the time this new technology was beginning to creep into our homes, this time capsule of a video, Internet Power, was created. And thanks to Andy Baio, it has been digitized and…

Not Quite Boomin’

The phrase “OK, Boomer” is nearly played out, but still makes a point to an older generation about the way to do things. Playing on this, Bronwyn Petry at MoneyWise makes a list attempting to equate “old things” with “don’t do this anymore” or “this is a good skill to have”. The weirdness of Petry’s list is that it tries to ride a line between “things we don’t need” and “things you should still know how to do”. However, it is lobbed into a single list. Many of these are things modernized by current technology while others are things that…

An Atari Lookback

Atari was a fascinating company, responsible for both the rise of home video game consoles in the US and also the market crash of the same industry. The legendary 2600 was everywhere in the early 80s and there was certainly no shortage of software. The company may be a shell of itself these days, but Ben Edwards at How To Geek has a great interview with its founder Nolan Bushnell. When it came time to develop and release a more advanced home video game console with cartridges (the 2600), Atari needed capital, and Bushnell sold his company to Warner Communications.…

Alternate Eating

Weird Al is one of those national treasures of incredible talent. The man has been making parody music for over four decades and he hasn’t stopped. Most musical eras contain clever parodies of his and original music that easily gets stuck in your head. Recently, there’s a video has hit YouTube with an entire alternate take of his Eat It music video. The three-and-a-half-minute song is here in full, but you can see the camera work is a continuous take. It is obvious that this film would be cut and spliced with other takes and scenes used in the music…

We’ve Gotta Go Back

On this anniversary of TimeMachiner, I wanted to highlight a few of my favorite stories of the past year. There have been many random happenings I’ve written about that I think are still funny, insightful, and interesting today. The archive has filled up nicely since I started and I want to share with you the stories I think are the best. Let’s dive in. “Best Sellers” Trailer Gives Entire Movie Away (8/21/21) – A true pet peeve of mine is when you can watch the preview for a movie and then not even bother with going to see it because…

Eight Years of Concorde Testing

Once considered the future of aviation, the Concorde is now a notable part of flying history. However, it doesn’t stop the fascinating impact it had on air travel. Over on YouTube, the Imperial War Museum channel has a great video going over the history of the Concorde’s testing phases. The video interviews some of the original engineers of the airplane. Originally it was supposed to need a year of testing. It ended up taking eight before it was ready for commercial use. In that span, the cost and environmental blowback led to only Air France and British Airways taking their…

Egg Freckles

One of the most infamous Apple products to hit the market in the first Non-Steve-Jobs Era was the Newton. This PDA (remember those!?!?) was Apple’s attempt to make a device that could be portable, useful, and have some amazing technology in it. The Newton was an absolute failure for Apple. Now, 30 years later, Jeremy Reimer at ArsTechnica looks back at this device with so much wasted potential. The Newton MessagePad 100 went on sale for $900 in 1993 dollars, or about $1,800 today. For that money, you received a device that was absolutely innovative and different but which still…

Every SNES Manual Permanently Archived

One thing I love about retro gaming is the efforts to preserve history. There are many instances where someone stumbles upon a prototype or unfinished game and the community jumps on it to copy the code. Game preservation is super important because this software can be lost to time. Equally important is the literature surrounding those games. Now, thanks to Twitch streamer “Peebs”, every single English manual for the SNES has been scanned and archived for preservation. Luke Plunkett at Kotaku writes more about this achievement. I’m happy to report that, as of July 2022, the project has now completed…

29 Years of Popular Websites in 2 Minutes

I came across this fun video last week that visualizes the most popular websites using data going back to January 1993. In only two minutes and thirty-seven seconds, James Eagle’s video shows how much the web has changed in 29 years. Some notable items that caught my eye were just how dominant Yahoo was for a LONG TIME after it was considered subpar to Google. Yahoo held the top spot starting in July of 2000 when it overtook AOL. It took six years for Google to unseat Yahoo in May of 2006. I also love seeing the variety of search…

BlackBerry Meant Well

There is a fascinating time between January 2007 and January 2010 in the world of smartphones. This short 3-year span was one where Apple was blazing a trail with the iPhone and other manufacturers responding in kind. One standout is the BlackBerry Storm phone. It was a revolutionary failure. Rewinding to Steve Jobs’ unveiling of the iPhone, we were told something we’d never considered as consumers prior: the buttons on a phone were set forever. The iPhone could change or hide buttons whenever. At this time the BlackBerry line was THE smartphone to own. Many came for it and it…

The Witch Of Sesame Street

One of my favorite parts of writing TimeMachiner is finding things that should be on the internet but aren’t. Those little things that fall through the cracks. This video certainly is one of them! Back in the mid-1970s Margaret Hamilton, who played the Wicked Witch in The Wizard of Oz, reprised her role on Sesame Street! Thanks to the incredible efforts of people who unearth these things and put them online, we get to see this amazing footage. According to the poster’s description, this was aired only once but was deemed too scary for children. It was shelved and never…

Wave G’bye to HoJo

It’s 2022 and incredibly it is only this year that we see the closure of the final location of Howard Johnson’s restaurants. Once sporting a thousand locations, “HoJo’s” as many called it, is really gone for good. The final location resided in Lake George, NY which is a popular summer destination. Many visit the area to camp, fish, and boat along the massive lake. With a captive group of vacationers, it makes sense that this location was able to stay open well past the years of all the other HoJo’s. Ed Mazza at HuffPo has more on this and how…

Cowabunga! TMNT Shredder’s Revenge Is Finally Here

Fresh from the sewer and re-emerging from any late-80’s / early 90’s kid’s heart, comes the long-awaited TMNT game for modern game systems. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder’s Revenge is a modern-day take on the classic TMNT video games we saw in the arcade and on home consoles back in the day. Game publisher Dotemu announced the game all the way back in March of 2001. A trailer and some gameplay hit the internet in August and it showed how much effort was going into this game. Emulating a 16-bit style, Shredder’s Revenge takes pieces from all the different Turtles…

Windows 95 Launch Video Reminds Us How 90s the 90’s Were

Tech events unveiling new software, gadgets, and services are pretty common nowadays. However, back in the earlier times of computers, it was still a nerd’s paradise. Computers were a niche product, existing mostly in professional settings or schools. The Internet was still in its infancy. So, to say that Microsoft’s Windows 95 was a big deal, it’s all true. The Blue OS Museum YouTube account has unearthed and posted the full 90-minute video showing Microsoft’s event. It has everything you could ever want from a company flexing its semi-might at a pivotal point in computing history. From the clothes, to…

Perpetually Updating

Later, later, later. That’s what we always say to those annoying popups. They hound us. They implore us to act on them. In the end, we find them supremely intrusive and frustrating. But it’s the world we now live in. It’s a place where nothing is produced in a Final version and we constantly have to live with those decisions. We live in a world of the software update. It Ships When It’s Done Before the internet was ubiquitous, it was commonplace to purchase software of any sort in one form. That was it. Whether you were purchasing a copy…

This Sucker’s Electrical

It’s impossible to write TimeMachiner and not talk about the reveal of the “New Delorean”. For a few months the Delorean Motor Company (no relation to the original DMC) has been teasing something new. A couple of silhouettes were put onto their homepage and that was it. Some rumors were floating around on whether it would be stainless steel, how powerful it would be, and what it would price at. Now we have our answers. This new “delorean” is dubbed the Alpha5. It’s a fully-electric car sporting a 100kWh battery pack, a 2.99 second 0-60 and a $175,000 price. From…

NYC Removes Final Payphone

The march of time and technology never stops. The latest item to be reduced to the trash is the final payphone in New York City. In a place where payphones were on every single corner, the city that never sleeps now relies on wireless technology to keep New Yorkers connected. The bank of two phones was on 7th Avenue and 50th Street in Midtown Manhattan. And, as you might expect in Manhattan, graffiti was scrawled on it. The city began removing payphones in 2015 and replacing them with public Wi-Fi hotspots. The removal marks the end of the payphone era…