nickt

Or about 3 double-decker buses for the length of 171 footy pitches.

Box. Amateur. Talk to me when you have a filing cabinet full of cables with bags labelled “SCSI”, “IEE-488 (Commodore)” and “DIN”.

At least my past self was good enough to bag and label.

In screen savers, scroll to the bottom - and click on the easy to miss "Show All" on the right side. You should see Afterglow in the expanded list.

The should give a one year window and pop round on some random afternoon. Bet they’d look a bit more like a space where work gets done then.

At the time, Liverpool and Manchester were proper cities, and while smaller towns, the railway that opened five years before this one that connected Stockton and Darlington clearly operated a similar model of moving goods and passengers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stockton_and_Darlington_Railwa...

So I’d argue that they were moving first!

You should probably get a cheap IoT camera to keep an eye on that printer!

In the UK (and a few other places) it’s “Mothering Sunday”, the day you honour the church where you were baptised, or your mother church.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mothering_Sunday

I love this one. I thought it was old when I first read it, and today I realised that was 36 years ago!

I’m optimistic too, but I can’t help wonder if the post scarcity world, like the future, won’t be evenly distributed.

I was around in the 80’s in the UK and this was a real thing:

https://newsthump.com/2026/01/28/uk-on-verge-of-return-to-he...

The ZX81 had that too, at least the UK ones did.

The keyboard itself, er, takes some getting used to. But they are a little cheaper.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZX81#/media/File:Sinclair-ZX81...

Good job the Brits are asleep as they’d be cracking up at these comments.

Not sure if you’re serious but reeks of “you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially”

Like DCC (1992)?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Compact_Cassette

It’s amazing to see this. How good are the transports in these modern units? I seem to remember when cassettes died the first time, the whole ecosystem went away, from Chrome Dioxide cassettes to good quality transports, which took a long time to get right. How do these compare to a good quality unit from the 80’s and 90’s?

Then this one?

https://www.generationamiga.com/2020/05/10/scala-series-its-...

I grew up in South Hylton where the Cretehawser was basically dumped near Claxheugh Rock (good luck pronouncing that if you’re not a Mackem!) Proper fun 70’s and 80’s adventure to be had getting on board at low tide. Can’t imagine the authorities being happy with kids doing this today!

It had lots of stories associated with it and it was a strange thing to see just sitting there in a shipbuilding town. Happy to see it get a mention on the site [1] and there’s an article with better photos here [2].

[1] https://thecretefleet.com/wwi-uk

[2] https://fabulousnorth.com/cretehawser-wreck/

My home town, Sunderland in the UK, is home to the National Glass Centre and has an amazing relationship with Pyrex, until 2007.

https://artsandculture.google.com/story/a-century-of-pyrex-i...

That’s a wild story I’ve not heard before, thanks for sharing.

And right on cue as expected, the push for age verification to use VPNs in the UK

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cn438z3ejxyo

Old, but good mandatory xkcd

https://xkcd.com/612/

Not really.

https://home.cern/news/news/experiments/base-experiment-take...

Not even a cool new hazmat placard.

> * Auto convert all incoming letters to emails. Should save them delivery costs, especially when the sender uses the reverse service.

Back in the 1990’s when I moved away from the UK they had the opposite service. You send an email and the Royal Mail sends it as a letter. I forget the name of the service but it was a good way to “email” someone before everyone had email. I still think it’d be nice to have today.

Wouldn’t that be Fitzenglish?

Alongside the Unix boxen.

http://catb.org/jargon/html/B/boxen.html

The Retro Hour podcast episode 387 has a great interview with Eva Pascoe a little while ago.

https://theretrohour.com/cyberia-cyber-cafe-eva-pascoe-ep387...

I was working in London in 1994 and remember visiting for the cultural experience but work provided a Sparc machine and ISDN at home as I was on call and it felt like slumming it to go to a cafe with a shared internet connection and PCs!

If you’re interested in the backstory of how these sounds were originally made, a recent episode (417) of The Retro Hour podcast has an interview with Sam Dicker who worked at Williams on Defender and Sinistar (and then on the Amiga) which is well worth listening to.

https://theretrohour.com/williams-electronics-and-designing-...

“Secret Fears of the Super-Rich” - related reading, from 13 years ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2364922

I mentioned this last time around [1], Tamiko Thiel worked with Feynman and Hillis at thinking machines and is responsible, amongst many other things, for how cool the CM-1 and CM-2 looked.

Also, the T-shirts! [2]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37688340

[2] https://www.tamikothiel.com/cm/cm-tshirt.html

Thanks for that, I remember watching it when broadcast and being amazed by the possibilities. I hadn’t thought about it in years.