code & carrot
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Liminal Christmas
Back in the 1960s and 70s, before everyone and their uncle had Christmas lights and inflatable eye candy – the electrical holiday treat was animatronics at the mall. Our mall was no exception. There were animals and small human-like creatures who might have been dressed in Victorian clothing that populated the winding path to Santa.…
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Chickens in the Eternal City
The world is, and was, a scary place. Humans long for a glimpse of the future. Something to help keep the dark waters at bay. Today people crunch data trying to dig out signals in the noise. Back in the ancient world, folks asked the gods. Well, they asked oracles or seers to help out. One did not…
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Stacks & Stacks
When I was eleven, there was a big Monet show at the Art Institute of Chicago. I was part of the tsunami of school kids poured into yellow buses and shipped to the big city to see it. Our art teacher talked up the Monet paintings. A new one had been acquired and it was quite…
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Genesis Incunabula Exordium
I’m thinking about taking my blog in a different direction. It’s been a really big deal for me to step out and toss my scribblings out into the ether. I’ve been writing on and off since I was a kid .I liked writing papers back in my college days. I love researching and learning. I’ve…
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TOPO talk to me
The summer I turned ten, I went to a week long computer camp at the high school. The computers were Apple IIe and the language was LOGOS. It was super fun. There was something special at the end of camp. It was a robot. A REAL robot!! When I was a kid, robots in my…
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Leisure Suit Larry
Our beige computer sat in the corner of the TV room on the desk that ran the width of the room, butteressed on the left end with a refinished lovely wood file cabinet. It sat in the corner just shy of the front windows. The beige computer replaced the TI-99. I thought it was an…
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Prodigal Sears
In a prominent location facing out from an end cap sat a TI-99 display at Sears. My brother and I always got sucked into its gravitational pull. We’d play games then badger whichever parental unit was with us to purchase said game. The mall was a decent distance from our house and we didn’t go…
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My Aunty Bell
As I said before, my dad worked for Western Electric at Montgomery Works. It was a wholly owned subsidiary of AT&T until the divestiture in 1984. His location manufactured telephone parts and data transmission equipment. He tested equipment during his tenure there. I remember visiting him at the plant once during a strike. I…
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Sturdy construction and great conversational sound quality
As I mentioned in my prior post, my dad worked at Western Electric in Montgomery Works back in the day. Before the great divestiture of Ma Bell, Western Electric was a wholly-owned subsidiary of AT&T. It was a long-lived electrical engineering and manufacturing company founded in 1869. While Montgomery Works evolved to focus on data…
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Radio Shack …
As I’ve dug around in my memory banks, one thing eluded me. I didn’t remember where my dad bought his tech supplies from. I remember the Computer Shopper catalog. I remember playing games on the TI display at Sears at the mall which was about a 30 minutes drive from our house. I…
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