Category 1980s

Re-clamping the 52/10

Thirty years ago my mother bought me a (now vintage) Faber Castell 52/10 ‘Sharpening Machine’. To the 10 year old me this was a very welcome gift, that has adorned all of my desks ever since and helped sharpen hundreds of pencils throughout my life.

A Very British Coup (1988)

“‘A Very British Coup’ is a 1982 novel by British politician Chris Mullin” according to Wikipedia. But this post is not about the book. At least not directly. It is about the ‘original’, 1988 TV mini-series. I love mini-series as I find them to be perhaps the most appealing film-making format of our times, the […]

Happy 25th!

Macintosh 128kToday is the birthday of the Mac. And while Steve Jobs may not care about the past, a quarter of a century after its introduction, the paradigms made popular by the original Macintosh (and, arguably, the Lisa before it) are still very much relevant in the present and there's very little proof that they won't be in the near future. The original Mac suffered from the same deficiencies so many Macintosh computers suffered over these 25 years since its introduction: low specification hardware (viz. 128KB of RAM), few upgradeability options, a closed ecosystem. Yet it also kickstarted an era of intense innovation and competition, perhaps the golden era of personal computing and marked the beginnings of the Mac's role in personal computing. While Apple's focus has drifted away from the Mac as its sole strategic product in recent years, the platform is today as important as healthy as ever. Happy Birthday Macintosh! Image used under the GFDL licence. Originally by Wikipedia user Grm_Wnr.

Technology and The End Of Capitalism

The recent financial crisis brought back memories of ‘Black Monday’, October 19th, 1987, the day of the greatest financial crisis of the late 20th century and the day the concept and practice of automated trading entered the consciousness of millions of people around the world. “Imaginary Wealth”. In Search of An Ethical Justification The ethical […]

Oh the Irony [2]

Time for a humorous break. Check this 1980s French Apple Computer Inc. television advertisement. It shows an old wealthy businessman showing his company's assets to his son (?) in their luxury automobile while explaining that all this will become his, but he should make the decisions alone because his workers should not think, but only execute as they cannot handle making decisions and should just stick to following orders. The ad ends with the narrator saying that "this is one way to run a company, but fortunately there are others", at which time the apple logo fades in. And this is why for so long so many people thought Apple was an elitist, out of touch company. For many years its products were mostly appealing (in terms of price and marketing strategy) to people exactly like the old man: elitist and wealthy. If the ad were from the late 1970s/early 1980s (before Jobs left), it'd probably be a snipe at IBM --- the 'evil' giant of the time that only had mainframes and micros and dismissed personal computers as toys. Or equally, those that didn't think personal computers could increase the productivity of their workers. In which case it'd make some sense, but still be be laughably ironic, for Jobs' own managerial style is probably more authoritative, selfish and hierarchical than any (based on what's been written about him in numerous books, articles etc.) and would probably make the old man look like an egalitarian-supporting socialist running a cooperative business and making as much as everyone else. But, according to Gruber, the ad came out after Jobs left. It makes little sense: the alternatives to the Mac in the mid to late 1980s, a time of so much competition and so many different architectures and offerings, were more affordable, generally equally productive (at least given the software that was out for a significant part of the tasks people performed at the time) and were definitely accompanied by less arrogant, more pragmatic marketing campaigns, while IBM was clearly far from the all-mighty player in the industry it was half a decade earlier. [via daringfireball.net]

Screwing up the Classics, "Straight to Video".

It may not be a cinematic masterpiece, or even a particularly good movie, but WarGames (1983) was one of the few Hollywood flicks on the contemporary 'hacker' subculture set in a quasi-realistic environment and one that has since become a 'classic' of the genre. It's also one of the few movies by Lasker and Parkes (another being Sneakers from 1992 --- notice the similarities?). It's a shame then, that --- as with countless other films --- the studios chose to pick up the franchise once again. But even if this might make some sense to some, what certainly doesn't is following a movie like WarGames with a B-grade, straight-to-DVD release. I guess expecting the studios to get a clue is a bit too much...

The Secret Government

It's fascinating to see how public tolerance of government abuses and downright violation of the law and constitution has increased over the years. Follow the link for the 90 minute PBS documentary from 1987 that deals with how the U.S. sold weapons to Iran, despite its embargo and used the funds to support the 'contras' in Nicaragua (the Iran-Contra Affair) before going over the history of U.S. government abuses and illegal clandestine operations in the name of national security post WWII. Now, compare this to the relatively low public reaction to legislation such as the PATRIOT law (and its equivalents in Europe), the reaction to the Iraq war and the minimal buzz in the European press on the matter of the alleged CIA flights transporting illegally detained muslims post the 11th of September of 2001 from Europe to places where they could be interrogated and indeed tortured. No matter what you think of Moyers and PBS, Reagan and US policy in the 1980s and the 2003 Iraq war one thing is clear: people today seem much more apathetic to the abuses by the 'secret' governments in both the United States and Europe, even when these affect their own rights, privacy and freedoms, not 'just' the fate of some other country or people.

Has Satch lost it?

I first listened to Joe Satriani when I was in high-school, in 1995. At first I found his music pleasantly different from either the hair-metal 80s kitsch (even though some of his early stuff are clearly influenced by the æsthetics of the time) or, the fashionable genre of the time, grunge. Much of Satriani’s music can […]

Diesel and Dust

Σήμερα άκουσα — μετά από πολύ καιρό — το Diesel And Dust. Ίσως επειδή — όπως πάντα συμβαίνει με τη μουσική — έχω τόσες πολλές αναμνήσεις, κυρίως καλές, που καλύπτουν το μεγαλύτερο μέρος της ζωής μου, ίσως επειδή η μουσική είναι εύπεπτη (αν και όχι ξεχωριστή) αλλά παράλληλα τόσο διαχρονική (η σχέση μου με τα […]

The Knowledge Navigator

In 1987 Apple was a huge force in the personal computer industry. First of all the industry was ALIVE. Thriving. Evolving. Competing. Apple still had loads of money from the success of the Apple II, the Mac was creating the DTP sector, the now 30-year old desktop paradigm was relatively new and there was no […]