Whilst chatting over lunch about films and kids being trained by the US military regarding flying drones into war-zones we some how indirectly got onto the topic of 'the last star fighter' and i thought i would drop the trailer i found on youtube on here. again, if you have not seen some of these classics i suggest you add them to your viewing or downloading list today.

plus, anything that has a weapons system called 'death blossom' has to be ftw.

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a pure classic. not strictly a geek film but has lots of computing/office situations that any 'computer operator' can understand. set in the land of initech and the cube village, keep ya eyes out for the red stapler. oh and do not forget to get your coversheet done on the tps report. ;)

a funny, classic film that i can watch over and over

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Had to add this one in seeing as @subwolf had managed to purchase/find it mastered on pal dvd. amazing! - the copy i had was grainy and was ripped from vhs and was pretty poor. i watched this at the weekend on my laptop in bed when i was tired. took me right back to the vloggies of 2005 and going out to alcatraz island with a bunch of vloggers. good times. i great 80's computing film with a high level of fromage but will some great snippits of what computing was like 'back in the day' - replace the AI of edgar with our social networks of today and you can see some similar aspects that cannot be far away from being reality in the coming years.

Has a brilliant soundtrack as well. If your based in the UK and want to borrow the DVD just drop me a comment/email/dm.

Oh, and someone sent me a link to the soundtrack on pirate bay - http://bit.ly/8EGgPE

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imdb | http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0168122

pirates of silicon valley must be one of the best explanations of the start of microsoft and apple that you will come across. really opened you eyes to how these two titans of the scene today managed to work their magic into the digital space we have today. some really good advice for startups in here on how, when and what. a great film. if your a geek. ;0

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Something about antitrust, the fact that it clearly aims itself
directly at the time when microsoft was trying to take over the world
with their browser has heavy overtones in this movie. Very early
signs of startup culture, ethics and then this fantastic vision of
'synapse' this universal broadcast system that will work anywhere. we
race towards this today. oh, and slight spoiler, fibre installed in
each geeks house capturing what they are working on from their screens
via hd cameras. what! ahead of it's time. ;0

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I'm not sure how i found out about real genius. i guess i just went
digging around for geeky films to do with tech and when your a kid a
film that has a laser in it always hits the spot. what i actually
ended up finding was a very young val kilmer, a great 80's soundtrack
(comsat angels ftw) and a pure geeky storyline. I love real genius.
You know what, i think i should organise a geek movie meetup - a day
of oldskool movies and snacks and beers in the evening with some of
the more up to date geeky/tech movies.

If you have never seen real genius. grab it, ignore the fromage.
it's a classic.

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First on the list - the ATI Mach32, circa 1992, with an impressive 2MB of DRAM, 100% compatible with IBM 8514/A and featuring basic DOS support, I believe extending into Windows, but not that far. Used exclusively by dad, I had other cards in my own computers, at one point an Orchid Technology Farenheit card, running the dinky 15" monitor at 1024x768 at 60Hz interlaced. Windows 3.11 never looked so good.

Next, the Quantum ProDrive LPS, I'm given to believe from 1990, and the model I hold probably didnt exceed 180Mb. This was from the day when Windows running in '386 Enhanced Mode' was something new and exciting. My memory is a bit hazy here, I remember when dad had a Victor PC with an 'impressive' 40MB of disk space. Disk space was a common problem back in those days, what with games like Team Yankee, and later Apogee's Commander Keen happy to take up disk space, requiring you to offload from time to time. I remember playing Cartooners in 1989 with floppy disks, chuckling as the mouse made his way across the screen with a speech bubble overhead. Oh, memories.

Finally, an old 5-1/4" floppy drive, likely from the early 80's, if not earlier, I'm not even sure if this one supported double-density (360K) or high-density (720K) disks without trying to boot it up, highly unlikely without a floppy controller to talk to it, and those dont exist any more.

Next time I hope to speak of old software, really need to go through my old drawers for photos to scan in.

See the full gallery on Posterous

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omg. i just found and remembered this that i just had to post it.
Ok, it's not that old skool compared to some of the other stories but
it reminds me of some crazy times with subwolf in roswell, new mexico.
so much has happened in three years. I really need to start
pulling some of this older content together and out into a better
system to present it. roll on posterous allowing us to use
javascript. i haz ideas! :)

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imagine living in a town of 68,000 people and not knowing anybody else
who does what you do. then imagine that you seem distant from
everyone else and have been exposed to information and ideas that
others do not.

It's quite strange how me and rob met, i'm not sure exactly how. I'm
not sure if the BBS (bulletin board systems) came first or if we met
through working at the council at the time. either way, we were geeks
- the nerds that fixed stuff. experimenters. this photo on this
entry is from a train track in roswell, new mexico when rob lived
there for a time in 2006.

Rob ran the 'suburban lair' and i ran 'fundemental' - we were the only
two people in the whole of our town to run bulletin board systems. in
fact most of the time i think most of the sysop chat was between rob
and myself on each others boards as we went digging around in each
others 'computers' for stuff. i've known 'subwolf' for over a decade
and in that time lots of things have happened and have changed. I'm
hoping that rob will find some time to put keyboard skills to digital
paper and write some of his own digital memoirs and memories over
here. I'm sure he has loads.

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Some of you will probably think your already paying a lot for your
internet. Some of you will be on the lowest package as you think
having a monthly cost for your internet over ten pounds is too much.
Let me tell you, you have it easy.

Back in the day, after modems came isdn. This technology effectively
doubled the fastest internet you could get at the time to a mind
altering speed of 64kps - bear in mind today the average broadband
connection is probably 512kps (half-a-meg) to 2048kps (two-meg) and
you can see what sort of speed and time period i'm talking about here.

I remember being 18 and having three phone lines into my house. I
never really used the third normal phone line. But i had the other
two phone lines installed so i could have the option of bonding two
64kps lines together. I was a rare breed, requiring the heady
heights of 128kps at home. I had been exposed to what i could have
access to by having a faster internet connection and going back to
33.6kps seemed like something i could not deal with.

At the time i had a stable job, and an easy job at that - i worked two
shift patterns. two till ten in the afternoons and seven till three
the next week, sometimes i got a good run at it and did more morning
sessions than the nights. i hated the night sessions. maybe i'll go
into that on my main blog here on posterous some other time.

I was a full time gamer back then. spending as much as 5-6 hours
(and more at weekends) playing quake2 mainly - away from the world, in
this digital space squeezing the most out of the digital connection.
i remember that the isdn no longer made a noise and it was quick to
connect, maybe a few seconds. It was not that much of a speed bump
really but the illusion made sense, removing the onboard speaker from
the device/card - a new world was then opened up to me regarding
latency and packet loss. fine tuning your connection to your isp, i
think i used 'enterprise' at the time. in fact i still remember our
team - called [qf] - we had a good team, we pretended to be a girls
team. it annoyed the lad teams to get spanked by girls. it was part
of the ego play of the time. i got pretty mean with that rail.

Oh, and the £800 a quarter phone bills. I nearly forgot. You see
back in the day you had to pay by the minute. 1p a minute. that soon
racked up but it was too late, i was addicted to my connection to this
alternative place. It was the earliest notion that we would not care
in the future how we got things delivered to us in digital format and
that because the transaction was transparent we would be addicted to
the consuming later on. You pay for the now, if you need it now and
you do not have to think about it and you have the linked up assets
you pay - the earliest memory that my reactions would now cost me in
this new world. in the game, and in the bank.

shoutouts to accident and jalissa. oldskool.

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Yes it's true.

See the full gallery on Posterous

Before we had digitally encrypted phones i once played with analog
unencrypted brick phones that could be manipulated via software and an
rs232 serial cable into the underbelly of the phone. It was
mindblowing. Becoming a fake repeater cell station and listening in
on cellular conversations that were happening in and around the cell
you were in was like being given the keys to the new technology
frontier. I'll tell you how briefly how all this came about.

It was a regular saturday, i was to head over to my favorite warez
dude and see what new stuff he had and swap him the latest i had. I
remember driving my green mini through junctions and being overly
confident in the city for my age. I never ever took into account
that i was carrying bags of cds and dvds on my passenger seat. Back
then the police did not search your car for such items anyway not like
today. It was cutting edge stuff, i was part of an underground
network that still exists between the fibres and interconnects of the
internet we know of today.

My contact was new in the city, we had met on a bbs system - could
have been mine might have been through an nfo file i had found and
after many 'sounding' out connections via bulletin board systems he
decided 'i knew the score' and we arranged a meet. He was the
typical closet hacker of the time, a building with a strange entrance,
part of a shop disguising the fact that people might actually live
there. It was part of a shop, i think they sold birds downstairs -
always a constant source of noise from below. It was a good
diversion from the humming noise of the backroom that was filled with
duplicators.

It was a usual exchange, my new stuff for his, back then i was on a
training scheme over in birmingham. my life was weird then, i was off
the grid living with a girl who took me in and i lived on a farm with
her parents. it was perfect cover, i went training every day - i
got dropped at the station in the morning and picked up later on in
the evening - days were long then. the job had a really advanced
computer connection of the time. i think it was a 128k bonded isdn2
connection (it prompted me enough to look at getting it at home
eventually) - in geek terms this was a 'big pipe' - after grabbing
some hacker tools to steal the netware admin password i had complete
control over the connection allowing me to call out on the modem and
dedicate the process to my faked admin account - giving me the ability
to zero time counters etc. I remember the final leaving letter
after they fired me saying 'philip has encouraged us to improved our
network security' it was subtle. i liked that.

So because i had this 'big pipe' at work i was a 'supplier' as such, i
could grab lots of .nfo, docs and some of the best text packs. i had
carved myself a niche out that i could get hold of this stuff quickly.
I remember my life being about 3.5" floppies and compiling these on
cd. I swapped my warez with my contact every saturday evening. We
talked about new kit, never really finding out about each other - just
talking around the edges of a friendship. It was an analog exchange
for digital content.

This particular saturday my contact decided that i had earned enough
cred for me to see what else he dabbled with. He was the typical
geek of the time, worked for a massive company as IT manager and has
plenty of income to buy random things on a whim and take them apart
with no concern if things worked or not after. It was an
experimental landscape and taking some of this information from .nfo
files and testing the examples out made you another class of elite.

He reached under his desk and bought up a brick of a mobile phone. A
motorola unit, back then they were called the 'brick phone' - i
remember noticing it has a thin skinny rs232 cable underneath with
poorly soldered connector on the end. A rush job. It looked dodgy.
If he got raided they would go straight too it. He knew he would
never get raided. He was low profile. He had a small network, he
liked it like that - to give him time to solder things up at 2am in
the morning and not worry about leaving the items on the desk till
lunchtime the next day when reheated pizza would be the order of the
day.

He fired up a program in dos. It has a basic graphical interface at
the top, it was like looking at a real life wargames system. It had
power, signal and flashing unique string names in hex shapes along the
top showing calls that could be 'listened in on' - this was hardcore,
my life was about to change and my whole concept of privacy was just
about to be destroyed and show me that this digital age meant that we
were now nameless and the balance of power had shifted. It was like
witnessing something that you never questioned. You assume access to
this was for powers a lot higher than the little spreader/warez dude
who drove around in a beat up mini. It was like being exposed to a
shipment of uranium. You knew what it was but you could not believe
you were seeing it first hand. You had heard about it, but you
never expected in your lifetime to have access to it.

He pressed a few buttons on the phone, suddenly the unit went into a
handsfree mode. I could hear voices in the phone, he flicked a few
buttons and then the sound was coming out of the speakers, i think it
was a crude lineout hookup from the phone to the computer at the time.
I remember that call clear as day, a lady ordering a pizza - as my
eyes widened my contact was quiet, i was quiet like if i spoke they
could hear me. I felt like a digital fly on the wall of this persons
conversation. my mind was racing, my contact pointed at the screen
in a number of locations. signal strength, phone number called,
phone number they were on, part of the phones imei exposed - i was
looking at a digital dashboard of this analog phonecall.

He pulled out some more mobile phones, things just got a bit darker
after that - i really cannot go into those things here. It had gone
from this technology discovery that things were insecure further than
i had every imagined and that every digital device would have in some
way have a backdoor, undiscovered and open to inspection. I remember
driving home that night wondering about my place in the cosmos. From
then on my requirement for knowledge was based on the importance of
being aware rather than being informed. It was a huge shift for a
young mind to deal with.

I was 18.

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Ask any old skool geek and they will remember dialup. Not only will
they remember the tones of that modem with glee (sad?) but they will
remember the day that they got hold of the latest and greatest
compression protocol that would allow them to squeeze more bandwidth
connection out of their phone line.

Yes kids, it was never like the broadband we have today. It was
narrowband, dialup - you had to wait up to a minute to connect 'into'
the network - was never always there and your computer made a series
of cryptic noises to be able to communicate with the outside world.
The musical interlude was a constant reminder that you were connecting
to somewhere exciting, you were becoming a node on a bigger world
ourside of your room. You were going out onto the world wide web of
'things'

I remember the day my US robotics 33.6k arrived. Mine was black, not
white like the photo i put on this blog post but i liked the
perspective of the shot on this one. I think i had an internal card
at some point as well. Yes kids we used to have things attached to
the outside of our computers that made noises that did nothing but
provide us with a gateway to another place. The weirdest thing
about the modem was how you started to get used to the way that the
modem made a connection. You could tell when you would get a solid
connection or not. After a while i could predict if i got a solid
33.6k connection or not. Back then you were connecting to a bank of
devices and you sometimes never managed to connect to a unit that
fully supported your new all singing latest firmware with new
compression modem.

It was all about the compression back then, a new modem with a new
standard came out - now we just upgrade to provide the connection and
have forgotten how that devices gets us there. as long as it gets us
there. It's the way social media is going, like making a phone call
- you never question that the phone call might not get through, we
assume it will. Social media will become as second nature as
connecting via broadband as we do today. It will just work and
you'll not know the work that went into getting that message to you.
transparent hardware. We have come a long way.

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What will the future in the next few years look like with touch
screens and easily faked information with 3d modelling and social
media having the ability to create cause and effect in seconds. who
controls the flow of information when information itself is being
reformatted and shaped creatively by the hive social mind.

then i stopped thinking about it because it was starting to freak me
out. Instead i decided to setup this blog, unstyled for the moment
called 'oldskoolretro' which was going to be a crowdsource journal of
your entry point into technology. I think remembering where you came
from and your 'entry' points into technology will be as those journals
that store the worlds information within them. capturing your
memories of how that technology made you feel, how it shaped your
world or indeed how you utilised it to shape the world around you.
I'm opening this up to the world, be a regular contributor or just
post us an email and as long as it is not spam we will make sure it
goes straight up on the site. I'll be posting memories of my entry
points into computing and they will be as random as the memories
themselves as they hit me. I have some crackers! :)

Simply email your story (and pictures/video/youtubelinks) to
post@oldskoolretro.posterous.com and we will take care of the rest.
expect a design and style in the coming weeks.

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