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The good old days
The good old days
Dan Ackerman Editorial Director / Computers and Gaming
Dan Ackerman leads CNET's coverage of computers and gaming hardware. A New York native and former radio DJ, he's also a regular TV talking head and the author of "The Tetris Effect" (Hachette/PublicAffairs), a non-fiction gaming and business history book that has earned rave reviews from the New York Times, Fortune, LA Review of Books, and many other publications.
"Upends the standard Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs/Mark Zuckerberg technology-creation myth... the story shines." -- The New York Times
Expertise I've been testing and reviewing computer and gaming hardware for over 20 years, covering every console launch since the Dreamcast and every MacBook...ever. Credentials
- Author of the award-winning, NY Times-reviewed nonfiction book The Tetris Effect; Longtime consumer technology expert for CBS Mornings
The proverbial good old days weren't really all that good--but you already knew that, didn't you? The funny folks over at Engadget have put up a hilarious post, spoofing what their site would have looked like as a 1985 BBS system. If you can remember plugging your telephone handset into the rubber cups of your acoustic coupler--or if you know what a sysop is, you'll feel right at home.
Highlights from the faux 1985 report include a report on the new-and-improved Commodore 128, complete with 128KB of RAM, and the promise of a "tapecast"--basically a podcast, '80s style, recorded on an audio cassette and passed around.
Sadly, they didn't mention the pivotal machines from my youth--my first computer, the TRS-80 Color Computer (hooked up to a TV set, of course) and its eventual replacement, the venerable Tandy 1000.