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Journalists Cover Microsoft, Using Macs

It’s not an easy time for Microsoft — with Steve Ballmer having to field questions about being “buffoons” and an “evil empire”  at the shareholder’s meeting (.doc) — so when they get together “the world’s most influential technology pundits and online writers” (nb: we weren’t invited) for Mobius to discuss super-secret mobile tech you’d think [...]

Guide To Black Friday Apple Bargains: Cheap MacBooks, iPods and Accessories Galore

Here’s a guide for finding the best bargains on Apple-related gear during the infamous Black Friday sales on November 27. We’ve compiled a comprehensive list of gear from leaked photos of sales flyers and descriptions of sales.
The bargains include a 2.26 GHz MacBook + $150 gift card at Best Buy for $999.99 ; a 32GB [...]

Review: Voices Is Today’s Best Thing Ever, Grab It Now While It’s Cheap

New on the App Store is Voices from the clever folk at Tap Tap Tap. You can guess what it does.

Open it up, pick a silly voice. Helium is pretty silly. A microphone appears and the app even clears your throat for you (try it, you’ll see what I mean). Now speak your brains, and [...]

Review: Sony Walkman S540 Series Video MP3 Player

Press releases, you will hardly be surprised to hear, are rarely very interesting. But one arrived in my inbox a couple of weeks ago that made me double-take.
“Sony’s S Series Walkman,” it chattered, “is a serious challenger to the iPod Nano.” Gosh, really? Perhaps the Cult had better have a look at one, then, despite [...]

History Lesson: How Dad Used To Save Files

Big thanks to raneko on Flickr for creating this delightful video reminder of what life used to be like.

Yes kids, back in the Dark Ages, before the Coming of the Internet, your mums and dads used to use computers like this. Before your cloud-based storage and your Dropbox accounts and your Evernote applications and your mythical GDrive – before all of that, we used floppy disks.

They were awful, awful things.

This video shows you why. And also demonstrates quite nicely why, on his return to Apple after the years of exile at NeXT, Steve Jobs ditched floppy drives as soon as he possibly could. The rest is history, and in some cases, rodent cages.

About the author

gilest

Giles Turnbull is a freelance writer in England. He is a columnist for PA, and has written for the BBC, Guardian, Daily Telegraph, MacUser, Macworld, and The Morning News. He has a blog you can ignore and a Twitter account you needn't follow.

Email the author | Read more posts by Giles Turnbull.

8 comments

    don’t laugh. I still have one. it’s a fish tank (perfect size for a betta)

    I love my old 512KE. I turn it on whenever I have the chance. My beloved SE/30 departed years ago, giving into the random-bars error. I asked my parents to get me another for Christmas once, but according to them a girl shouldn’t be playing with computers.

    Waddyamean “my dad”? I used one them Macs – and and IBM 8086-based PC before that! We’re not all young geeks!!!!!!

    God bless the hard drive! LOL!
    Anyway, despite the saving and operating process, I still want to have one of these. Seriously, the Macintosh Classic is a state of the art product. And I think it’s really beautiful, even for today’s standards.

    Pfffff. Before that, we used to save everything to AUDIO CASSETTES using a Radio Shack cassette recorder. Disks. WhatEVER.

    Back in the old days, we used to call this flippy/floppy action “Making toast”.

    I agree with Gene.

    The Spectrum’s SAVE command was so unreliable (or more precisely, the tape was), that we also had the VERIFY command, to check whether the BASIC program you copied from a magazine the whole weekend was properly saved to tape.

    These days, sometimes I stop to think about how ubiquitous Cmd-S is. You just, well, SAVE! And that’s that.

    Back in 1986, it was a very different story.

    And those were the snappy small sized ones! We used two 5″ disk units under the monitor (black with green text) with the Mac 2e back in the 1980s.

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