Category Archives: Nostalgia

My true path in life, finally diagrammed

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It’s my birthday. What better time to reflect upon where I’ve been, and what I’ve become? Thankfully, Curiosity Counts (formerly a Maria Popova joint) has today linked to a flowchart, courtesy of Fast Company, that may explain it all.

A few of the details miss the mark: I taught myself BASIC, not Pascal (although I did try to make sense of Pascal while tinkering with my uncle’s IBM 5150 when I was 8), and I specialize in PHP, not Perl (distant cousins). But the lower left corner pretty much covers that, and also explains away the fact that I am married, for good measure.

Going back earlier in time, it even captures (and I’m being quite serious here) what might be the ultimate pivot point in my life: being massively obsessed with Atari but not getting into the next-generation game systems that followed it. It wasn’t for lack of interest; my parents simply refused to buy me an NES, and got me a Tandy computer (not a TRS-80, but close enough) instead. So thanks, Mom and Dad, for making a decision 25 years ago that set me on the path of lucrative uses of computers, instead of fantasy baseball and MMORPGs.

Here’s my version of the flowchart, with my path highlighted in yellow. Click the image below to see the full version, and be sure to check out the source, Taschen’s massive tome of infographics, while your at it.

Rod Hilton saves Star Wars

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I linked to this on Twitter this morning, but it’s cool enough (and, dare I say, to the extent that Star Wars can be considered “important,” important enough) to link to here as well, just so it doesn’t vanish into the social networking ether.

Rod Hilton has devised an ingenious viewing order for the complete Star Wars saga. OK, actually not the complete saga, but what could come to be viewed as the definitive saga. He makes a compelling case for shuffling up the order a bit, and for removing The Phantom Menace entirely.

The ultimate sequence he devises is as follows:

  • Episode IV: A New Hope (or, more properly, Star Wars)
  • Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back
  • Episode II: Attack of the Clones
  • Episode III: Revenge of the Sith
  • Episode VI: Return of the Jedi

I’ll leave it to Hilton to explain in detail how he arrived at this solution, along with its (mostly) pros and (few, minor) cons. The whole post is definitely worth reading and I look forward to watching the “complete” saga in this order soon.

Air (and Georges Méliès) fly us to the moon

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Earlier this month, the French electronica/rock band Air released an album of soundtrack music to accompany the restored color (yes, color) release of the legendary 1902 Georges Méliès silent film, Le voyage dans la lune (A Voyage to the Moon).

Spoiler alert, I guess: This is the film that plays a central role in Martin Scorsese’s brilliant 2011 film Hugo. It is great to be able to see the film in its entirety, especially accompanied by Air’s brilliant soundtrack.

An excerpt is available on YouTube:

I purchased the album, which includes the full-length (15-minute) video, on iTunes, but it’s also available as a CD/DVD set from Amazon. I’m considering buying the CD/DVD set anyway, as the music is that good and the download version of the video contains some annoying compression artifacts (horizontal stripes that appear whenever something fast-moving appears, which I have to assume were a result of the process of compressing the video for download, and are not inherent to the version on the DVD).

I watched the full video last night, and found myself more profoundly moved than I would have expected from the film’s light and fantastical story. I’m not sure if it was because the hand-coloring brought the film to life in a way that black-and-white couldn’t, but there were two thoughts I just couldn’t shake as I watched it, which I don’t normally think about when I’m watching very old film footage:

1. Everyone involved with this film is dead.

This is not a profound revelation. But again, I think the color brings the film to life in a unique way. There’s nothing realistic about the color, so it’s not seeing people in color that makes it more vivid. I think it’s the simple fact that it’s in color, and the way it was colorized. That the creators of the film put in the incredible effort of hand-coloring each frame of the film. That they imbued it with their personality. And, beyond all of this, that it conveys a sense of frivolity and wonder that I don’t often associate with the early 1900s.

Grainy, black-and-white film of the era feels dark and dismal. Since that’s how we’re accustomed to seeing it, that time period, for me, exudes grit and grime, the ugliness of early, soot-choked industrial cities. This color, literally, casts these times in a new light, and brings out a joy and humor I would not have seen or felt otherwise.

2. We have learned so much about the universe in the last century.

It is obvious, I think, that Méliès was not attempting to create a realistic depiction of a journey to the moon, or of what people would find there. If Ben Kingsley’s portrayal of him in Hugo is accurate, his goal in filmmaking was to explore realms of fantasy, to bring dreams to life. And that’s just it: in 1902, the idea of traveling to the moon was pure fantasy. But just 67 years later, people actually walked on the moon for the first time. (And, 70 years later, possibly for the last.) The amount of scientific knowledge humanity gained during those intervening years is hard to comprehend, and as someone who was born after those final moon landings of 1972, it’s something that for me has always been and forever will be in the past. But for those who worked with Méliès on Le voyage dans la lune, it was still the distant future, one most if not all of them never even lived to see.

It is an amazing time to be alive. Not only to immerse ourselves in the technologies of now, but because we have unprecedented access to what it looked and felt like to be alive over 100 years ago, via the motion pictures of pioneers like Méliès. The restoration of the color version of Le voyage dans la lune is amazing, and it’s made even more wondrous by its pairing with some of the best music our era has to offer.

What do Star Wars, David Holsinger’s Easter Symphony, and an episode of The Office have in common?

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A confession. As a kid, I didn’t like Star Wars. You’d think I was in the ideal target market for it. I was 9 when Return of the Jedi was released in 1983, and I saw both Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi in the theater. But for some reason it just didn’t appeal to me. I wasn’t into guns and swords, even if they were made out of lasers, and I found the plots impossible to follow.

As an adult I did eventually develop an appreciation for the original trilogy, however, and in particular I think The Empire Strikes Back is a genuinely great film. But overall, I still felt like they didn’t totally live up to the hype (especially Jedi with those godawful Ewoks).

And then the prequels happened. Lifelong fans of the series were as overjoyed before the prequels were released as they were infuriated after. Even as a kid who didn’t care at all about Star Wars, I remember getting swept up in eager musings on the playground as kids speculated about what the story before the story was all about. And then Lucas went and made the damn things.

The general consensus among Star Wars lovers was that the prequels sucked, and were nowhere near as good as the originals. But here’s the thing: as someone who didn’t religiously memorize every minute aspect of the original trilogy and embed it into the very fiber of my being from childhood, I didn’t really think the prequels were that much worse than the originals. They still had inscrutible plots, hackneyed dialogue, and lots of lasers and weird sound effects. I won’t quibble at all with the hardcore fans over George Lucas and his abominable, incessant tampering with the originals. But I will stand by my argument that the prequels are not that much worse than the originals because, really the originals weren’t that great to begin with.

Band geeks are like regular geeks

Anyone who was a band geek in the ’80s or ’90s (or, presumably, still today) will recognize the name David Holsinger. He’s one of the most famous and prolific living composers of music for band/symphonic winds/wind orchestra/whatever you want to call it. But outside of this arcane world he is largely unknown, as he rarely (if ever) writes for string orchestra, which is apparently where all of the “serious” composers dwell. Whatever the case, his technically demanding compositions are a staple among the more skilled high school and college wind ensembles, and he is revered by band geeks in much the way George Lucas is revered by regular geeks.

For years, Holsinger’s most highly regarded piece of music was called “The Death Tree,” which he composed in 1986 and originally envisioned as the second movement in his three-part Easter Symphony. The only problem was, much like Lucas and the legendary Star Wars prequels, he never wrote it. As with Star Wars, the untold story took on mythical status, and fans of his work built up impossible expectations for its excellence, should it ever come to exist.

My college band director was one such enthusiast, and while I was a student he commissioned Holsinger to finish The Easter Symphony. I was a junior, first chair clarinet at the time, and it was unbelievably exciting to be a part of something so awesome. David Holsinger traveled to work with us directly on the piece frequently during the year leading up to its premiere. I even got to pick him up at the airport on one of his visits, took him to Wendy’s (his choice) for lunch, and picked his brain on the hour-long drive to our small-town campus. He conducted the first public performance himself. In fact, if you can get your hands on a CD of that premiere, you can even hear my own indelible mark on the recording, as I utterly destroyed the final note of “The Death Tree” on an impossible-to-tune E-flat clarinet. (If you’re not familiar, the E-flat clarinet is to the regular B-flat clarinet as the piccolo is to the flute. And just as impossible to play in tune.)

I had never played (nor even heard) “The Death Tree” prior to our first rehearsals for The Easter Symphony. I was well familiar with Holsinger’s work, of course, but this particular piece had been too challenging for my high school band. So I approached “The Death Tree” with virgin ears, rather than with the cherished nostalgia some others had for it, much like how I came to like Star Wars as an adult. I liked it, but I hadn’t embraced the legend.

When the first partial scores for the first and third movements of The Easter Symphony began arriving in our rehearsal room in Minnesota, laser printed and mailed directly from the composer in Texas, there were various grumbles of disappointment. I enjoyed it all equally, but others complained that the new movements were nowhere near as good as “The Death Tree.” The legend had been built up out of all proportion, and it was simply impossible for David Holsinger (or anyone) to deliver a piece of music as mind-blowing as people were demanding. It’s not that The Easter Symphony wasn’t good. People’s expectations were unreasonable.

Just a cookie

On a recent episode of NBC’s comedy The Office, Robert California (James Spader), the intimidating new CEO of Dunder Mifflin’s parent company, is sitting in the conference room with the Dunder Mifflin employees, leading a brainstorming session to figure out ways to increase the company’s profitability. After a number of lackluster ideas from the usual suspects — Ryan (B.J. Novak) especially, in a classic moment of self-absorbed douchebaggery — the affable oaf Kevin (Brian Baumgartner) raises a complaint about the snack vending machine in the breakroom. The comment could be taken at face value, or it could, as Robert California takes it, be a metaphor for a profound insight into improving Dunder Mifflin’s core business.

Robert California ends up spending the entire day with Kevin, listening to and attempting to decipher Kevin’s cryptic food analogies, until, ultimately, he realizes that Kevin was really just talking about cookies the whole time. No deeper insight, no profound meaning. The Kevin he thought he was spending the day with never really existed.

Where was the failure here? In Kevin, for not living up to unreasonable expectations? Or in Robert California, for having unreasonable expectations in the first place?

I’m not saying that George Lucas and David Holsinger are like Kevin. But I am saying that maybe we’re all a bit too much like Robert California.

Answer: They’re all just cookies.

Happy 30th birthday, PC era

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I may be a hardcore Apple fanatic now (and, well, for about the last 20 years), but back in the ’80s, I lived in the “IBM-compatible” world, as it was called back then, in the days before Microsoft Windows.

IBM-compatible, of course, meant a computer with the same basic architecture, and capable of running the same software, as the (literally) definitive Personal Computer — PC — IBM introduced on this date in 1981. I have so many vivid memories of the ’80s IBM PC experience that I’m at a loss where even to begin to discuss them. So many games. Such terrible graphics.

I never actually owned the IBM PC, the model 5150 (not to be confused with this), myself, but my uncle did. It was always a treat in the early ’80s when we’d visit him and he’d let me go into the spare bedroom where he kept his PC. He was the first person I knew who owned a computer. It was dazzlingly futuristic, and I eventually learned some rudimentary command line skills — just enough MS-DOS to get myself into BASIC, where I loved to write stupid, pointless little programs.

Eventually, in 1987, I got my own PC-compatible computer, the Tandy 1000 EX that I’ve mentioned here before. The Tandy 1000 was an odd beast. It boasted a better graphics card than the average PC, allowing it to display a whopping 16 colors instead of the usual 4, but in almost every other way it was already hopelessly outdated at the time of its release. It was never able to run even version 1.0 of Windows, so we got Tandy’s feeble semi-GUI, DeskMate, instead. But I still thought it was cool.

It all began with the IBM 5150 PC, though. Without that, Apple might have become the world’s largest (technology) company 25 years earlier. But in the end it all worked out OK. The iPhone 4 I carry around in my pocket now is (approximately) a kazillion times more powerful than the 13-pound metal box IBM gave us 30 years ago today.

Still, I have fond memories of so many games I played on that old Tandy 1000 back in the late ’80s. Here’s a list of some of my favorites.

I brought my Tandy 1000 EX to college with me in the fall of 1992, but the campus computer labs were dominated by Macs (except for a couple of the high-tech labs in the physics building that were full of NeXT cubes), and it wasn’t long before I was a convert. I bought my first Mac — an LC 475 — at the college computer store in the spring of 1994 and I haven’t looked back. Except when I have. That Tandy 1000 EX is long gone but my love of those old games I played in junior high and high school lives on.

Takin’ it to 3-2-1 Contact

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I’ve been thinking this for years, but I finally decided to put it to the test. I tweeted the results, but it felt like something worth commemorating here as well.

First, a confession: I am a Michael McDonald fan. Not the latter-years, “songbook”-type crap Paul Rudd’s character made fun of in The 40-Year-Old Virgin. But the classic, late ’70s/early ’80s stuff with the Doobie Brothers, Steely Dan, and countless other backup vocals and solo tracks that inspired Yacht Rock.

As a Michael McDonald fan, I’ve listened to his work with the Doobie Brothers probably more than anyone should. Tracks like “Takin’ It to the Streets.” And another thing I’ve done a lot of in my lifetime — again, probably more than anyone should — is watch shows produced by Children’s Television Workshop for PBS in the late ’70s and early ’80s, right around the time of Michael McDonald’s peak.

So, no, I don’t think it’s an accident that what I’ve anecdotally observed is now, here, for you, concretely proven: the 3-2-1 Contact theme song is almost a direct ripoff of the transitional bridge of the Doobs’ 1976 hit “Takin’ It to the Streets.” But don’t take my word for it… your ears will tell you.

Listen to “Takin’ It to the Streets,” particularly, the section beginning at 0:47 in the clip below.

And now, the legendary title sequence of 3-2-1 Contact, whose music and imagery is indelibly etched in my brain.

A childhood fantasy (almost) realized: 100 Atari games in my pocket

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Owners of 1980s technology intellectual property are in an unenviable position. Their IP has very little value beyond historical significance or nostalgia. No one (well, I hope no one) is going to use an Apple IIe computer for serious productivity work these days, but that doesn’t diminish its importance in computing history, nor the strong positive memories its once loyal users may still hold onto.

There are few properties from the ’80s whose value is more purely historical and nostalgic than those bearing the brand of Atari. Sure, there’s still a company today named Atari, and it still makes modern video games for modern consoles, but this Atari shares only its name with the hallowed institution founded in Sunnyvale, California in 1972. The name and all of the properties that go with it have been sold and re-sold and re-re-sold so many times over the intervening years that any minute connection to the past, beyond the games themselves, has been lost.

So, what is a modern company that owns all of this (relatively speaking) useless IP to do? Trying to cash in on it is obvious, but doing it right is a huge challenge. The biggest hurdle is the very historical significance and nostalgia that give these games any lingering value in the first place. The only people who are really going to want to play Combat or Yars’ Revenge or — ah-hem — Math Gran Prix on an iPhone are people who either owned (and played the hell out of) these games as kids 30 years ago, or their kids, who harbor a morbid curiosity about this old crap their parents like for some reason. In order to satisfy these customers, the company that now calls itself Atari needs to achieve perfection in recreating the experience people remember. Not just the graphics and the sounds and the program mechanics of the games, but the feel… the essence of what it meant to play video games in the days when Ronald Reagan was president, pastels were popular in men’s fashion, and MTV still showed music videos.

Yesterday Atari released Atari’s Greatest Hits as a universal app for iOS devices. (To the non-nerd[s] in my audience: that means the same app works on iPhone/iPod touch and iPad.) The game comes free with arcade Pong, and 99 other classic (and not-so-classic, but… well… old) Atari games, both from the arcades and for the Atari 2600 VCS, available as in-app purchases. The games are sold in packs of four for 99 cents, or the entire set can be downloaded for $14.99. Let’s be serious: anyone who cares about this at all should just get it over with and download the works, immediately.

So did Atari live up to my unrealistic expectations? Read on after the screenshot gallery to find out.






First impressions

It’s clear from the moment you load Atari’s Greatest Hits on your iPhone or iPad that a great deal of attention and care went into putting this package together. And yet, it just doesn’t quite hit the mark. The graphic design of the menu interface bears plenty of superficial nods to the vintage Atari experience: plenty of use of Bauhaus font (the font Atari used with the original 7 cartridges released with the Atari VCS in 1977), lots of browns and oranges, and of course the carousel navigation that uses the original cabinet and/or game box art to help you select a game to play. But despite fonts and colors, this doesn’t look ’80s, and it certainly doesn’t sound ’80s. The entire time you’re on the menu, loud 21st century techno music booms from your speaker. To be fair, I like this kind of music, and the music they chose is decent. But it’s a distracting anachronism.

I compare this to the Williams Pinball Collection that came out a few years ago on the modern consoles. Its interface looks like an arcade, with the pinball tables lined up along the wall, and over the din of a dozen pinball machines blasts licensed ’80s popular music. (The song that stands out for me is the quite-possibly-perfect Loverboy hit “Workin’ for the Weekend.”) This is what I would have liked (if not downright expected) in a properly executed Atari collection.

Lamentations about “what could have been” aside, it is truly great to see the original game box art and arcade cabinets on the menu, and the menu itself is intuitive and fun to navigate. And it’s great that each game also includes a full high-resolution scan of the original instruction manual, which also explains why a collection of 100 games, most of which were only about 4 KB each on the original cartridges, could add up to a 68 MB download on iOS.

The sound and the fury

There was almost no question for me which game I would try first: Yars’ Revenge. I logged hundreds of hours (sometimes in a single game, it seemed) playing this game in the ’80s, long past the date when I should have moved on to the NES or PC games. Any true Atari retro experience needs to deliver a perfect rendition of Yars’ Revenge for me to consider it a success.

I started the game, picked my favorite game variation (Game 6), and then… WHAAAAA!!! Playing the game on my iPad, I was assaulted by hideous distorted grinding noises. I tried a few other games and confirmed that all of the 2600 games had horribly distorted sound. (It also didn’t help that Yars’ Revenge gets most of its intensity from a constant droning buzz, making this quite possibly the worst game I could begin this experience with.)

Fortunately, later in the evening I loaded the game onto my iPhone 3GS, and found absolutely no sound issues with the 2600 games, even Yars’ Revenge. So I’m not sure if this is a general issue with the game on the iPad, or if it was an isolated problem that could have been resolved with a reboot. I’ll follow up on that when I know more.

Playing the game

With my worries about sound allayed, I was able to focus my attention on the quality of the game experience. All of the games are presented in a relatively small area of the screen, with ample space above and below devoted to on-screen controls. There have been some complaints in App Store reviews about the games not using the full display, but I think those complaints are misguided. These Atari games in their original form were so low-res that even when shrunk down to a little less than half the size of an iPhone screen, they’re still easily viewable. Plus, displaying the games in full-screen mode would mean you’d need to obscure part of the display with your fingers in order to control the game. Unacceptable.

The developers and designers who worked on this collection put considerable thought into translating the original game controls to on-screen counterparts that do not necessarily mimic the original feel, but that usually (but not always) contribute to a satisfying game experience.

A good pair of games to consider in reviewing the merits of these control systems are the arcade versions of Asteroids and Tempest. Both games translate quite well to the iOS experience. They look fantastic (all of the vector games, in particular, come through well here), and are just as fun to play as ever. With Tempest, the original control mechanism was a flywheel-like spinner. That is replaced with a thumbwheel that reminds me of the volume controls on old transistor radios. It’s way different from the original control, but it feels surprisingly natural and it’s very easy to adapt to this type of play.

Asteroids, on the other hand, does not benefit from this new alternate control mechanism, at least for the way I like to play the game. (I should probably note that I own an actual Asteroids cocktail table, so I’m very accustomed to the arcade controls.) The default control mechanism is a combination rotate/thrust “disc,” not unlike the disc controller on an old Intellivision. (Intellivision controls on an Atari game? Blasphemy!) Some people may prefer this, but I found it absolutely unusable, mainly because of my preferred Asteroids playing style: I don’t thrust all over the screen. I stay in one spot and just rotate, and I move around only when absolutely necessary. The disc control makes it nearly impossible, for me at least, to rotate without thrusting. Luckily, Asteroids (and apparently most of the arcade games, though I haven’t tried them all yet) offers multiple control schemes, including the original arcade-style five-button configuration. This worked well for me on the iPad, but I didn’t try it yet on the iPhone, and I imagine size could be an issue there, not to mention just holding the iPhone while fiddling with five on-screen buttons at the bottom of the display.

A few other miscellaneous game notes:

No licensed games. This was a no-brainer for me, but apparently (based on reviews on the App Store) it’s confusing to some users. This collection only consists of games Atari owns the rights to. That means games that were licensed for the original Atari 2600 won’t show up here, not even if Atari developed those games. You won’t find arcade classics like Pac-Man, Space Invaders, Defender or Berzerk, and you won’t find licensed movie properties like Superman, Raiders of the Lost Ark or E.T. And you definitely won’t find games that were originally released by other game companies like Activision, Imagic or Parker Brothers. Although… one wonders. Atari licensed Pitfall! and River Raid from Activision for inclusion on the plug-and-play Atari Flashback 2 console a few years back. Maybe a similar license could be in the works. It wouldn’t be difficult for Atari to offer additional in-app purchases of more games in the future.

I think the funniest instance of licensing issues popping up here though is the matter of Pong Sports. Back in the ’80s Atari manufactured the 2600 and a number of its games under special branding for sale at Sears stores, and there were three Sears exclusive titles (Steeplechase, Submarine Commander and Stellar Track), all of which are included here. And then there’s Pong Sports. Atari released this game as Video Olympics, and sold it as Pong Sports in Sears stores. But here it’s called Pong Sports, presumably because they couldn’t get the rights to use the word “Olympics” this time around.

Unreleased and homebrew games. If you’re not a hardcore Atari fanatic, you probably don’t realize that in recent years a number of unreleased prototype games have come to light as downloadable ROMs to play in computer-based Atari 2600 emulation software. And a rabid homebrew community has developed as well, creating brand new games for the system. This collection includes a few of these prototype and homebrew games, such as the Atari 2600 version of Tempest and an unreleased game called Save Mary. I find it funny that Atari had to, of course, come up with box art for these games for the menu interface, and they went with some really low-quality homemade art for most of them. But Save Mary is the weirdest… it uses the cover art that originally went with the Atari 2600 BASIC Programming cartridge.

It’s also funny… and probably an intentional joke… that for these games, the manual scans that are displayed are not for the games (since they don’t have instruction manuals) but for the Atari 2600 console itself. Somewhat of an Easter egg, I think.

God (or is it the devil?) is in the details

Atari got a lot of things right with this collection, but there is definitely room for improvement. Here are a few things that come to mind, some of which I’ve already mentioned.

License some great ’80s music for the menu. The aforementioned Loverboy hit would certainly be great, but really just about any music that was in heavy rotation on MTV circa 1983 would work. Personally I’d love to hear plenty of Duran Duran and Men at Work.

Alternate control schemes for the 2600 titles. Here’s the one thing that I think would make the biggest difference in creating an authentic Atari 2600 experience: position the on-screen controls to better mimic the feeling of holding an old CX-40 joystick. The space is already there; they’d just need to rearrange the controls. Move the fire button to the upper left where the pause button is; move the d-pad to the lower right where the fire button is; and move the pause button to the lower right where the d-pad is. Holding a square-ish device in the left hand and pressing a button with one’s left thumb while using one’s right hand to control movement is the natural way of the Atari 2600 experience. Ideally the d-pad would be tweaked a bit as well… it’s a little too restrictive feeling. A lot of iOS games with a virtual d-pad allow you to place your thumb anywhere in a general region of the screen and that instantly becomes the “zero” position of the d-pad. I suspect (or at least hope) that, given the nature of iOS apps, Atari will continue to refine the controls in future updates.

Better “cabinet art.” I have to be honest… I can live with the graphic design of the main menus, but the graphics framing the game itself while in play are downright ugly. Better to have it look like an actual vintage TV set like VH1′s (yes, VH1′s) Intellivision collection for iOS. And I’d prefer that the on-screen buttons look exactly like the real buttons on the arcade cabinets and console controllers, without the unnecessary added visual junk. It also seems like they phoned in the design of the on-screen slider for the paddle-based games. (Why doesn’t it at least look like the control they developed for Tempest?)

Final thoughts

I could nitpick details only an OCD Atari junkie will notice, much less care about, but in the end there’s only one thing I can say about this collection. Back in the early days of the App Store, Atari released a few of its classic arcade games as standalone apps, each consisting of both the original and a new version with modernized graphics and sound: Centipede, Super Breakout, Missile Command. Then they disappeared, and were gone for ages. A month or two ago, they reappeared, but with only the modernized portions. For ages I’ve been speculating that Atari had a massive collection app in the works, and finally yesterday it arrived. I was absolutely giddy. And while it will probably never fully live up to my expectations, it’s damn close. I’ve dreamed ever since I first got my Atari 2600 console in 1982, when I was 8 years old, that one day I’d be able to carry the experience around in my pocket. And now I can… almost. It’s not perfect, and it couldn’t be. But I’ll take it anyway.

Private Eyes are watching you!

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I don’t normally post links to music videos on this blog… that’s typically reserved for one of my other blogs. But… well… any way you slice it, Hall and Oates are not prog rock, so it just didn’t fit.

But I got this video in my head (yes, I can get a video in my head) and I felt compelled to share it. It’s a cool song, and a humorously low-budget video, but the main reason I remember this video so well and love it so much is that it’s intricately woven into the fabric of my early childhood memories. This song was huge right when we first got MTV in 1982, and it was on heavy rotation. I was at a critical age—8 years old—where a lot of things seem to start to gel in your mind. You understand the world in new ways… your horizons expand… and those things you enjoy most at that time seem to leave a permanent impression on who you are.

For me, in 1982, it was MTV and Atari. So hearing this song—and, even more, seeing its video—triggers a flood of memories. Maybe it does for you too. Maybe not. Anyway, enjoy…

There are so many things I remember vividly about this video. Daryl Hall’s green jacket. The trench coats. John Oates and his bug eyes. The white flashes when the hand claps come in. The list of minute details permanently stored in my brain goes on.

But there is no way I can let this pass without commenting on the one thing that drives me mad: that the video of the drummer’s hands at the beginning is “off.” He’s shown hitting the snare drum when you hear the bass drum. I’m not sure if that was a deliberate joke or if the director of the video was just too clueless and/or lazy and/or in a big damn hurry to get the video finished before they burned through the $200 budget.

Anyway, this was something I was acutely aware of and bothered by as an 8 year old, watching this video. At the time I had a tendency to point out any minuscule error anyone around me made, as if the universe assigned me the job of trying to fix all of the small faults within it. So, yes… oh yes.. I noticed this.

What would you have needed to carry with you in 1986 to match the utility of an iPhone today?

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I’ve always been into electronic gadgets. I’ve also always been into carrying a bunch of crap that I “need” (or perceive that I need) around with me. My dream since I was a kid was always to be able to carry “everything” with me at once, in a convenient way.

It’s hard to get more convenient than a thin piece of glass, metal and plastic that fits easily into a jeans pocket. That’s the iPhone, and that’s today. My iPhone is almost unquestionably my most prized possession. Probably not just now, but of all time. It seems like it can do almost everything, which got me thinking.

25 years ago, I was a 12-year-old burgeoning tech nerd. I loved the Atari 2600 (yes, still) and was just a year away from getting my first computer. I had hundreds of cassette tapes and was already on my third or fourth Walkman. If you’d given me something like an iPhone back then, I probably would have died of ecstasy on the spot. But what 1980s stuff would I have had to lug around in my satchel back then to (roughly) approximate the functional capabilities I now (almost) take for granted in this one little device? I decided to compile a list.

1986 device: Sony Walkman portable cassette radio

In the mid-’80s, the Sony Walkman was the symbol of portable technology. As CDs overtook the popularity of cassettes in the ’90s, and Sony finally figured out how to make a portable CD player that didn’t skip if you so much as breathed on it, the Walkman was gradually replaced by the Discman.

And then along came the iPod, which itself has, ten years later, essentially become an iPhone minus the phone.

2011 app: iPod

1986 device: Microcassette recorder

As cool as the Walkman was, you couldn’t actually record with it (at least with most models). You could always lug a full-sized cassette recorder around, but if you were going for the latest and greatest in portability, that would be a microcassette recorder. Microcassettes never could match the audio fidelity of their full-sized siblings though, and were eventually replaced by digital devices that stored audio on a small hard disk and later on flash ROM. But why bother with one of those today?

2011 app: Voice Memo

1986 device: Nintendo Game & Watch LCD handheld

When I went into writing this post, I really hoped to at least give 1986 the original Game Boy, but my research says it wasn’t actually released until 1989. I never had one, so I didn’t remember. Yes, it’s true… if you wanted a handheld video game device in 1986, the best you could do was one of Nintendo’s single-game “Game & Watch” devices. As rudimentary as they seem today, their design was a clear inspiration for Nintendo’s current line of DS portable game devices.

I’ve owned two Game Boy Advance systems and three DSes over the past decade, but these days my DSi gathers dust in a cabinet while I carry over 50 video games in my pocket everywhere I go… thanks to my iPhone. iPhone gaming is still young, and in many ways the control schemes have yet to be perfected, but considering the significant price difference ($10 or less for almost all iOS games, vs. $30 or so for most DS games), the lack of a need for physical media, and the iPhone’s superior technical specs, it’s hard to see much of a future for the DS. (We’ll see what impact the soon-to-be-released 3DS has.)

2011 app: Angry Birds… or any of the 100,000 or so other iOS games

1986 device: Casio calculator watch

Calculator watches were so cool (at least, if you weren’t) in the ’80s, it’s hard to believe they would ever fade into laughable irrelevance. They were pretty impressive technology for the time though, and were irresistibly futuristic. It’s no wonder Marty McFly conspicuously sported one on his journey back to 1955… it bolstered his “future boy” cred in a way no nylon vest ever could.

2011 apps: Clock and Calculator

1986 device: Portable alarm clock

If you were too cool for a nerdy calculator watch back in the ’80s, your only option when traveling was to purchase a dedicated travel alarm clock. Some of these were pretty well-designed, but such a single-purpose device is anathema today. Besides, I’m sure the sight of one of these in a carry-on would raise a TSA eyebrow or two.

2011 app: Alarm Clock

1986 device: Pocket calendar/datebook

Pocket calendars have come in countless variations for almost as long as printing has existed, some more useful than others. Wallet card calendars like the one shown here are about as useless as they get, but that didn’t stop me from having at least one of them in my wallet at all times as a 12-year-old… especially since I didn’t have any money to put in it.

Now, not only does the iPhone’s calendar provide all of the capabilities of even the most overstuffed datebook, it can update automatically and even beep to remind you that you’re running late for that important business meeting.

2011 apps: Calendar and Contacts

1986 device: Pocket compass

I admit, I’ve never really had much use for a compass. I don’t spend a lot of time out in the wilderness, and I think a compass would only confuse my natural sense of direction in the city. But I recognize the importance of these devices, and thanks to the iPhone’s various internal sensors, all of the capabilities of a real magnetic compass can now live in software.

2011 app: Compass

1986 device: Mead memo book

Ah, the trusty Mead memo book. My dad wrote a thousand grocery lists in these while I was growing up, and the little bits of paper that tore off the spiral binding over repeated openings and closings were everywhere. These days there are more sophisticated alternatives if you still like to put pen to paper and then stuff it all in your pocket, but I prefer not to have to try to decipher my own handwriting.

2011 app: Notes

1986 device: Minolta Talker point-and-shoot 35mm camera

Sure, there were plenty of pocketable point-and-shoot cameras back in the ’80s, and of course the venerable Polaroid instant camera was still going strong. But no camera — truly, no device of any kind — epitomizes pointless ’80s novelty technology better than the Minolta Talker. I wasn’t able to verify that the Talker existed in 1986 — I think more likely it dates to 1987 or 1988 — but we had one, and I’ll never forget such helpful photographic advice as “Load film” or the classic “Too dark… use flash.”

Even at that credulous age, I wondered, if it can tell you need the flash, why can’t it just turn the flash on automatically?

2011 apps: Camera, Hipstamatic, Instagram, etc.

1986 device: JVC camcorder

Ah yes, the JVC VideoMovie. That distinctive red and black camcorder, immortalized by my hero Marty McFly. We owned one of these. It was the stuff of legend. It also, despite its considerable size, used the bizarre VHS-C format tapes. These were about 1/3 the physical size of a regular VHS cassette, but the tape itself was the same width and was compatible with regular VHS VCRs… with the help of a VHS tape-sized adapter that the VHS-C tapes would snap into. Unfortunately, since the cassettes were so small, they only had enough room to hold 20 minutes’ worth of tape. I hope Doc packed a couple of cases of blanks along with his plutonium.

(And, yes, übergeeks, I know Doc forgot to pack the plutonium. What, you think you’re the only ones who’ve watched the movie 500 times?)

2011 app: Camera

1986 device: Motorola DynaTAC mobile phone

When you look at early cell phones, it’s a wonder the devices ever caught on. Of course, they didn’t really catch on when they were the size of a small refrigerator and emitted enough radiation to make your head glow in the dark. But the fact is, you could own a cell phone back in 1986 and, well, that’s saying a lot right there, isn’t it?

OK… I really can’t come up with anything to justify the existence of this monstrosity. Incidentally, the guy in the picture is Martin Cooper, inventor of the modern cell phone. Depending on your definition of “modern.” Note his seeming reluctance to get it too close to his head.

2011 app: Phone

1986 device: Rand McNally pocket road atlas

I recently watched the classic 1964 James Bond movie Goldfinger, and was amused by the GPS-like device Bond had in his car. (GPS was just becoming available to civilians in the ’80s, and it looked like this.) As far as I know, not even Her Majesty’s Secret Service had anything approaching this kind of technology in the ’60s. In many ways it seemed as futuristic (or more so) as some of the stuff that would appear on Star Trek a couple years later. And yet, it’s now something that is not only common in a lot of ordinary cars, but we even carry it in our pockets.

Back in the ’80s, though, the only way to carry road maps in your pocket was with a little book like this, which was only useful if you were willing to limit yourself to freeways and a lot of guessing.

2011 app: Maps

1986 device: Newspapers, magazines, books

No industry is reeling from the iPhone (and the iPad) the way publishing is. Newspapers, magazines, books… publishers of all kinds are trying to discover viable business models in the world of paperless publishing. (And here I thought we’d already worked all of this stuff out with the web over the past 15 years.)

One thing is certain, though: however you like to get your news, information and entertainment, with an iPhone it’s already in your pocket.

2011 apps: Reeder, Instapaper, newspaper/magazine apps, iBooks, Kindle, etc.

1986 device: Citizen portable LCD TV with 2-inch B&W screen

Yes… a portable LCD TV in the mid-’80s. Don’t believe it? I had one of these, exactly as shown. It had a 2-inch black-and-white screen. And, strangely, the screen was in the top of that flip-up lid. The bottom part had a mirror, which was what you looked at to view your program. Why? Well… backlight technology was feeble and battery-sucking. The lid was translucent, and if you were in a bright enough environment, the ambient light would shine through, illuminating the screen. There was also a bulky snap-on backlight attachment for use in dimmer surroundings, but if this was in one of your pockets, the rest of them better be filled with AAA batteries or you wouldn’t be watching much.

True, TV tuner technology doesn’t exist in the iPhone. But what the iPhone has is better… with iTunes, Netflix, PBS and more, you’ve got on demand TV… in full color, backlit, no snap-ons or AAA batteries required.

2011 apps: iPod, Netflix, PBS, etc.

1986 device: Flashlight

OK, OK. This flashlight is from the 1960s. But my grandparents had one exactly like this when I was a kid in the ’80s. The big black thing on the side had magnets in it, allowing it to stick to the side of the refrigerator, which is where they always kept it.

If you don’t have an iPhone 4 (which I don’t, but which has an LED flash for the camera), the only source of light is the screen itself. Pretty dim for a flashlight, but it works in a pinch. There are flashlight apps out there, but unless it’s one that powers on the camera LED, I think just turning the thing on so the screen lights up is as good as any of the dedicated apps.

2011 app: Any one of the countless flashlight apps

1986 device: TRS-80 Model 100 portable computer

It’s a bit of a stretch to call the iPhone a portable computer, at least when compared to modern portable computers. But considering the capabilities (and perhaps I’m using that term ironically) of the portable computers that existed in 1986, the iPhone is like having a Cray supercomputer in your pocket. A 3.5-inch touchscreen is never going to replace a full-fledged computer for serious work, but still, if you really have to, you can get some work done. I’ve managed to do some emergency sysadmin work from my iPhone sitting in a gas station parking lot while traveling.

2011 apps: Documents To Go, AirSharing, iSSH, etc.

All of this just barely scratches the surface, of course. But I think it demonstrates the huge impact the iPhone has had on me as a manifestation of all of my childhood fantasies about futuristic technology. You can keep your flying cars. Just let me keep my iPhone.

Image sources:
Marty McFly with JVC VideoMovie camcorder and calculator watch
Sony Walkman portable cassette player
Aiwa microcassette recorder
Nintendo Game & Watch handheld LCD video game
Casio calculator watch
Braun travel alarm clock
Coca-Cola pocket calendar
Pocket compass
Mead memo book
Minolta Talker camera
JVC VideoMovie camcorder
Cell phone inventor Martin Cooper with a Motorola DynaTAC
Rand McNally Pocket Road Atlas
Time magazine cover featuring Space Shuttle Challenger explosion
Citizen portable LCD TV
Rayovac 1960s flashlight
TRS-80 Model 100 portable computer
1980s GPS equipment

Addendum, April 2, 2011: If you’re hoping to truly recreate that 1986 experience on your iPhone, check out this Game and Watch-inspired iOS game, Monkey Labour!