Month: March 2024

I was discussing various old computers with some folks online, and the topic turned to ‘what did screens look like in the 80’s?’

I dug around online for some examples and came up short, so I figured I’d make some based on the machines I have here in my home-office.

Fair warning, the image compression I use here is pretty brutal to get 20+ years of images to fit into a relatively cheap hosting platform, but these should be close enough to give you a feel for how things progressed. And clicking the images will open them separately for a true 1:1 experience.

First up would be the 1986 Macintosh Plus with its 9-inch monochrome monitor:

I remember when the Mac Plus was basically alien technology and the screen on it was awe inspiring. 🙂

Next up we have the 1993 PowerBook 165c – one of the first color laptops ever made:

Having 256 colors on the screen, at the same time, on a laptop, was mind blowing back in the day…

Now we move on to a high-end graphics machine from a year later – 1994 – the PowerMac 8100/80AV. Out of the box the 8100/80AV had enough video memory (2MB) to do 24-bit “TrueColor” at 800×600, but where it really rocked was being able to push 1024×768 at 16bit color:

I maxed out the video memory in mine (4MB, which was hundreds of dollars in the mid-90’s), so my 8100 could do 1024×768 in 24-bit in 1995.

And lastly we have the circa 2000 PowerBook “Pismo” which was an incredible machine in its day; 500Mhz PPC G3 CPU and an ATI Rage Mobility 128 video card with 8MB… Things haven’t really gotten much better than this over the years – just more and more pixels using more and more ram.

My current video card, an AMD RX 9700 XTX, has 24GB of ram (a mere 3000 percent more than in Y2K) and can push the same 24bit at up to 8192×4320 – which is 5.5 times taller and 8 times wider than circa 2000’s screens – or roughly 16 times the data per frame…

Living in the future is pretty cool.

Listening to "Sing Me Away" by Night Ranger

Back in the before-times, comics were a big deal. And accordingly I spent an inordinate amount of time perusing my local comic shops when I was younger.

The first comic I really got into was “Cerebus the Ardvark” back in the late 70’s as it was was both edgy and witty enough to catch my ten-year-old interest. Cerebus was so edgy and witty in fact that it had no choice but to be an independent (indie) comic, and that kinda started my appreciation of the non-Marvel / non-DC comics as well. So stuff like 2000 AD’s “Nemesis the Warlock” in the early 80’s was also a favorite.

Unfortunately my mom was slightly overprotective of me and tended to put the kibosh on anything she felt was too edgy and / or witty – and the comics I tended to like were on her burn-list. So, I had to purchase and read my comics on the sly.

Eventually I escaped and joined the Navy in 1986, and my duty station in Groton Connecticut was a fairly easy drive from Newbury Comics in Worcester Massachusetts. This, plus having a bit of discretionary income, meant I acquired all kinds of comics – but mostly the aforementioned edgy witty stuff. 🙂

It was 1988 when the comic shop got in some stuff from an indie publisher called “Thoughts and Images” and I stumbled over Vicky Wyman’s “Xanadu”.

This chance encounter kinda cemented my appreciation of anthropomorphic characters as a story device, and elements of “Xanadu” have been present in most of the roleplaying games I’ve run both private and public ever since.

In 1994 the second story set in the Xanadu Universe came out, and I – of course – had to have that too…

There is a third installment set in the same Universe, but unfortunately “Into Golden Skies” was never published outside of a fanzine before Vickie’s passing in 2018.

I was fortunate enough to run into Vickie at a couple of conventions, get a couple of commissions, and talk to her a bit about her art and her comics. She was an extremely nice person and an amazing artist and storyteller, and she is missed.

The last collectable comic I’ll show off today is much more recent, and you only get to see the first two, because they are duplicates and the signed six issue set is in storage.

These sell for hundreds of dollars now, but very few have a set dedicated to them by Peter Beagle himself. 😉

One could say I’m something of a fan of The Last Unicorn – have been since I first read the book back when I was seven (that would be 1976 by the way). And over the years I’ve managed to chat with Peter on several occasions at conventions and a couple of times back during the 2015 movie tour. He is another amazing storyteller and all-around great human being.

I have tons more collectable stuff squirreled away that I should post here someday. Unfortunately it’s only about half, as a lot of my personal collectable crap was lost in the great storage unit debacle of 2002… But such is life.

Listening to "Deepest Blue" by KRISTINE

I try to avoid the “when I was a kid” posts because they don’t really serve much purpose outside of illustrating that time does indeed pass.

But on my walk over to the local mall this morning and looking at the dismal state of things in my four-years-ago-this-was-an-upscale-neighborhood; graffiti, piles of trash everywhere, freshly broken windows in one of the stores – and then watching a roving herd of kids toss leftover McDonalds all over the parking lot while I was waiting for my breakfast burrito, it got me thinking…

Back in my school days, which for those keeping score at home was the mid 70’s to mid 80’s, a lot of the time we spent at school was instilling a sense of there being a world full of people outside of ourselves – and that we were, in part, responsible for their lot as much as our own. And there were things like civics classes, which were a requirement, and those introduced us kids to the social aspects and obligations of living in a country full of other people.

I get the impression this doesn’t happen anymore, or if it does the scope has turned inward.

In my “old man yells at cloud” point of view, pretty much anyone under the age of 20-something is a narcissistic prick who’s entire universe ends about three inches past their fingertips… Everything is about ‘me’, ‘do what makes me happy’, and ‘what the world owes me because I exist’.

An entire generation of self-centered assholes.

Where we used to get constant admonishments of “think of how that appears to other people”, now seems to be “do whatever you want, everyone else’s opinion doesn’t matter”. Where we used to have a sense of community, we now have kids tearing stuff up because “they have insurance right?”

There’s also the lack of accountability thing… Back in my day we were taught that we were responsible for our actions and how they impact other people. Now it’s all about how nothing is your fault, it’s always the fault of some nebulous group of others so you’re automatically absolved of any responsibility.

It all makes me glad I grew up when I did, and somewhat explains why the 80’s and 90’s were so awesome I guess.

Listening to "Sunset Paradise" by Killstarr

Been busy trying to keep the ship afloat and haven’t really done much more than work-stuff in a while now… It happens.

There have been a few noteworthy events though, for example my experiment with “Factor” only lasted two weeks before I cancelled it. It’s good food, but $600+ a month for lunch and dinner during the work week would still leave another $400 a month for the occasional breakfast and weekends – and a thousand dollars a month for food is simply too much right now.

Monday I had to drive down to Walsenburg and back – 300-ish miles – which was the furthest I’ve driven the car since I bought it. The car did great though; nice ride, really quiet inside even at 80+ so the stereo was a real treat, and having 500 horsepower on tap made the whole event effortless. And I was pleasantly surprised that the car got about 28mpg even with dodging closed sections of highway in Pueblo, rush hour traffic through Colorado Springs, and boosting around the perpetual octogenarian going 55 on a 75mph highway.

I figure the car would get close to 30mpg if I made the drive at night / early morning while the dregs are asleep. Which may become important information given the way things are going.

Anyway, the reason for the Walsenburg trip was to sell my property down in Gardner back to the friend I bought it from…

Back in 2016 things were looking pretty good for me so I started a “ten year plan” to acquire a place in southern Colorado to fix up / build and then retire to when the time comes. I chose Huerfano county as the place to do this because the Spanish Peaks area is beautiful country and it’s cheap to live there – and when I retire I expect to have almost nothing to my name.

I acquired the property back in 2018 as payment for helping out a friend with some emergency funding, and then fixing up a few things around the property such as burring an old trailer and installing new fencing. All told I spent a little over $10000 on the project, and almost a year later the bureaucracy was finally over and I actually owned the land…

But that was all back in the good old days before pandemics and regime change, and since 2020 my income has simply not kept pace with how much things cost… For example, the last estimate I got to run utilities 30 yards and pour a slab of concrete was a quarter million dollars.

Back to the point though, the friend I bought the property from had right of first refusal if I wanted to sell the property as he’s not really interested in neighbors if it’s not me. So last week he agreed to buy it back from me for what I spent, and Monday afternoon we arrived at the title office in Walsenburg to do the deed.

Unfortunately everything takes longer and is more expensive these days, so our spit and a handshake will actually take a week and about a thousand dollars to complete – for legal reasons.

Listening to "Los Angeles" by FM-84