Rubénerd!

Responding to my Compaq Presario post, @dai1313 on Twitter posted a link to the beigetastic PC box he had. I recognised it instantly, a early Dell Dimension tower!

While I wasn't a fan of Dell, there was something understated and clean about those designs. This was the height before everyone desperately stuck coloured plastic panels everywhere in a half-arsed attempted to emulate the entirely new iMac. Then everyone went black, and nobody went back.

Just as 1980s Commodore computers have seen a resurgence in interest because people grew up with them, kids who grew up in the 1990s will have seen these, and I'll bet a few would pay for modern replicas of their old machines. Laugh all you want, but nostalgia can be a powerful force!

What started as a post describing what a really ancient Compaq computer would look like spawned an entire investigation into an embarrassing aspect of my childhood, and even promoted WordPress to publish the drafts before they were finished!

That's an old computer

I have no idea how I got there, but a few days ago I stumbled across the above so-called Ancient Compaq for sale. With a title like that, who could refuse a look?!

It turns out the machine was decidedly less ancient than what I was expecting, but it turns out I had a soft spot for the Compaq Preario towers from the 1990s. These later models were less interesting, but I remember as a kid desperately wanting one of the earlier models that looked looked like a little spaceship. I'd buy one of those and fit it with a modern board quicker than you could say NOSTALGIA, if I could remember the model number.

Tracking it down

At that stage, I was ready to post this silly entry and move on. But a part of me was interested in what model of Presario I wanted as a kid. A few minutes on Google Images turned up which series it was: the Presario 5510! Relesed in 1998, the entry level Presario 5510 had these impressive specs:

• 266MHz Celeron CPU
• 64MiB of RAM
• 4GB hard drive and a
• K56Flex fax modem

The 5030, 5110 and 5520 to 5560 models had higher specs, such as 8GB drives and 350MHz Pentium IIs.

Clearly my 12 year old self had an overly active imagination, looking at that picture now it's embarrassing to think I once thought it looked like a spaceship. I suppose the curved lines resemble fins on a rocket... slightly. Maybe. Oh Ruben, you silly kid!

Still, it stuck with me in my head all this time, and now I must locate one and purchase it, if only to satify that little kid in me. If you couldn't have stuff as a kid, you can get it when you're older, right? And I could replace the internals with a modern board and use it as a file server. This is called justifying frivolousness.

As I've found with a lot of these kinds of searches, it was Japanese sites that had the most information. For detailed technical lists ranging from old computers to mountain bikes, nobody does it better than the Japanese. Their meticulous attention to detail impresses even my German genes.

I'll be mirroring local copies of these PC Watch, InverseNet.co.jp, pc-kaitori.jp pages, just because.

It's sure been a month of anniversaries and milestones, for better or worse. Here's one that I feel compelled (and able) to discuss in more detail, the last revenue passenger flights of the Singapore Airlines 747.

Photo by Terence Ong on Wikimedia Commons.

No more SIA 747s

From Asian Skies on Flight Global:

After nearly four decades of successful operations, Singapore Airlines is about to retire its last remaining Boeing 747s from passenger service. The Boeing 747 has been an icon of Singapore Airlines’ fleet since a pair Boeing 747-200s first landed at Paya Lebar Airport on the 3rd of September of 1973.

Since that date the Singaporean flag carrier has operated several variants of the Jumbo jet, adding its first Boeing 747-300 in May 1983 and later on the 747-400. Its first international Boeing 747-400 service, from Singapore to London, was flown on 31st May of 1989.

According to the site, the type's final scheduled flight will be from Singapore to Melborune and back on the 25th and 26th of March, and that cargo 747 operations will continue. In other worse, unless we're crew on a freighter, no more SIA 747 service for us!

Photo of Singapore in 1998 from here, of all places. It's sure changed a lot since! :O

Nostalgia time!

With the possible exception of Concorde, few airframes are as instantly recognisable to the general public as the Boeing 747. With its forward upper deck (FUD, to you non-IT people) and large wings, it was the first commercial widebody passenger jetliner, and became a household name. We started referring to things by comparing them to the size of a 747.

For my sister and I though, the Singapore Airlines 747 fleet will always hold a special place in our hearts and minds, as it were. Boarding our flight from Brisbane in the mid 1990s, it was the first part of Singapore we saw having been told our father's job was transferring us there.

Aside from transferring us away from Australia and forever changing our perceptions of life, the universe and everything (as well as firmly cementing my obsession with Asian culture, food, history, language, people and living!), at the time what we were most excited about were our seats. My father's company had shouted us business class tickets, which meant we got to sit "upstairs"! Compared to the gigantic cabin downstairs with its rows of cattle class seats and noise, the top section felt cozy. It was small, had few seats, and was tiny!

As my sister said:

That's one of the few flights I do remember... which is weird!

Ironically enough, with my father being transferred back to Australia recently and my sister and I being accepted into UTS, our last flight back from Singapore to Sydney on Singapore Airlines was on one of their brand new A380s, the very plane that most likely lead to the retirement of their 747s. Funny how the world works like that.

Anyway, another aspect of our childhoods flying away. Which reminds me, something else from our childhoods had a massive anniversary recently, I'll need to blog about that soon too!

To test our English proficiency (allegedly to assign us to the right tutorials), UTS asked us to write 200 words on a technology that has profoundly affected us. Given the recent 20th anniversary of the first World Wide Web page, I felt compelled to select it!

Screenshot is of Rubenerd.com rendered in Netscape Navigator Gold 2.02 on Windows NT 4.0... because I could! Despite some unicode issues and a lack of CSS, it rendered surprisingly readable given my insistence on using <hr /> and image replaced <h1> elements! Well, it was mostly for lynx/links/elinks/dillo, but the point still stands! ^_^

My GeoCities neighbourhood was SiliconValley

When my family first moved to Singapore in the mid 1990s, we registered for a dialup plan with Pacific Internet. We paid a small fortune for a 56k fax modem over the midrange 33.3k models, and even registered a second phone line to separate the high pitched squeals from... modem signal noises. We felt so advanced and modern connecting to the World Wide Web for an hour or so to check the weather, update our GeoCities pages and play NeoPets.

Fast forward to today, and the World Wide Web is everywhere but the kitchen sink. Unsatisfied with being constrained to our desktops, it can be accessed from our laptops and tablets in coffee shops and airports, in our smartphones from anywhere with a signal (that rules out Earlwood, NSW) and from cars to aeroplane cabins. I can't help but wonder if Sir Tim Berners-Lee from 1991 could travel to 2011 what he'd think of the pervasiveness of the WWW, and if he'd be surprised the protocols and hardware were handling everything so well!

In its meagre 20 years existence, arguably the World Wide Web has facilitated the spread of more knowledge than the Gutenberg press, and has enabled more affordable communication than any phone companies or; perhaps by a logical stretch; airlines.

While I use it to do practically all my research, assignments and work now, what initially drew me to the web wasn't what I could glean from it, but rather the opportunity to contribute. I was more excited than a Yui with a graduating Ui that I could update a page and have my relatives back in Australia see it instantly. If we grant ourselves another fast forward (wasn't that a TV show?), today I have two blogs with thousands of entries, tens of thousands of tweets, hundreds of photos and dozens of domains.

Given my dad was mostly out of the country on business trips and my mum spent much of her time in hospitals and chemo wards, the WWW was fantastic escape. Netscape-sensei never mocked me for my disparate electronic and science fiction interests, never laughed at my innocent childhood questions about sexuality, and didn't marginalise me when I started questioning organised religion.

Calm down, Ruben

That's not to say the World Wide Web isn't without its challenges. Much as it took a while for books to spread to all corners of the globe after Gutenberg, much of the world still doesn't have [reliable] internet access. Internationalisation is not only a needlessly lengthy term (and i17n ranks among the world's dumbest abbreviations), but along with accessibility is still poorly covered. The web efficiently spreads malware in ways floppy disks can only dream of. We're running out of practical addresses. Internet Explorer still exists.

Then there are the legal challenges. Governments and businesses are rapidly realising the WWW's potential to expose corruption and malpractice, and aren't willing to cede this power to us without a fight. Industries too lazy to adapt to emerging technologies are punishing their customers with lawsuits and digital restrictions. ISPs are threatening to challenge net neutrality upon which the WWW thrived in order to throttle their customers and give preferential treatment to sponsors.

Still, as with every scientific and technological advance since we evolved and learned to rub two sticks together, it has the potential for Good and Evil. Ultimately, I'm confident the World Wide Web easily delivers the former in excess of the latter.

I couldn't live without it... could you?

Speak of the devil, Wikipedia has a photo of an AdLib sound card from 1990, in all its ISA glory!

Granted it was merely an interface and vessel for a general PC to use the Yamaha YM3812 sound chip, but for the time it must have been pretty exciting to hear that level of detail on a PC. Home computers like the Commodore 64 already had sophisticated MOS synthesiser chips since the early 1980s, but Big Blue made work machines!

ComputerWorld is reporting the US Department of Justice's supervision of Microsoft ends today; this ends the case that started in 1998. Slashdot has a thread.

As many of us have said: remember when Microsoft used to be scary? They're still abusing their market clout (OOXML), but a combination of irrelevance and incompetence has blunted the knife. After commanding the direction of the industry in the 1990s, they've either missed the boat or played catch up to most of the important tech trends of the 2000s.

Granted I was a primary school kid at the time, but I said breaking up the company wouldn't make much difference. This was when I was a Visual C++ developer though ;).

Hard hitting stuff.

I know you all love my pointless milestone posts, so here's one celebrating a new achievement here on the Rubénerd Blog: the publishing of my 2222nd post! Not only is that number greater than 2221, but the same digit is repeated four times! The next time this will happen is 3333 which is 1111 posts away from now, wonder what it'll be about? What am I talking about, it'll probably be about the fact I reached 3333 posts, which not only would be an achievement because that number is greater than 3332, but the same digit is repeated four times!

The photo of the four 2's above holds some significance beyond merely being a companion image to a pointless blog post because it was taken from a Malaysian Geocities site which will cease to exist by the time I wake up tomorrow morning. It's a crying shame that one of the most prolific and iconic websites of the 1990s ended in this way (The end of an era: no more GeoCities); I still want to know why Yahoo couldn't just freeze current accounts and serve the site as a form of museum instead of wiping it out. I read somewhere a while ago another group of people were mirroring GeoCities but they shouldn't have had to.

As of tomorrow, nobody will be looking at this map of KL anymore either.

Right about now,
Ruben wrote a blog post;
Check it out now,
Ruben wrote a blog post.

Right about now,
Ruben wrote a blog post.
Check it out now,
Ruben wrote a blog post.

Post post post post...
Post post post post!
Post post post post...
Post post post post!

Right about now,
Ruben wrote a blog post.
Check it out now,
Ruben wrote a blog post.

My solicitors advised me to disclose that this post has not been endorsed, supported or written by Fatboy Slim, though he is more than welcome to take credit for it, and to praise me like he shouuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuld. Thank you.