Phoebe and Her Unicorn by Dana Simpson for January 06, 2013

Shoot.I remember Atari…

Shoot.I played the first Pong.That was AMAZING!

We had an Edsel, and I can certainly remember the Beatles. I obviously can’t remember the /invention/ of the phonograph, but I’m old enough to have had a phonograph with a large supply of spare needles and an infinitely-variable speed control, and another that could cut its own records; and I’m also old enough to remember when cheap phonographs for kiddies had a diaphragm and cone instead of electronics, though the cone was inside the case. (The kind with the big cone outside the case had been obsolete long before electric pickups, amplifiers, and speakers.) And my elementary school was still using a wind-up phonograph.

I also remember the Western Electric 202 telephone, where most of the works was in a box the size of a dictionary bolted to the wall, to keep the bulk of the desktop part of the telephone under control.

I also remember when IBM’s most popular mainframe maxed out at 16,000 characters of main memory, and their most popular disk drive held 2,000,000 characters and was the size of a washing machine.

Heck, what about the Commodore Pet computer with the cassette tape drive? Or the Trash (TSR) 80? Yep, I’m old.But I do remember my NES. Some bad games (Fester’s Quest), but then there was the first Final Fantasy. Good times.

I loved my Atari 2400, and I had the original 2XL “robot” toy – he ran on 8-track tapes at the time. I also had an 8-track tape player. I’m only 42…could I really be that old? ;) Well, I am in terms of technology! I love watching kids play games on their iPhones or the like – I have an iPhone too, so I know they would likely be amazed at the “old” technology I used when I was their age. Oh, and does anyone remember Speak and Spell? :)

When I started working as a computer professional, all the computers in the world put together added up to approximately one iPhone, and the biggest, fastest computer in the world didn’t have the raw power that’s built into any HDTV.

What about all them old fogies that were born when years still started with 19?

….. and we thought that by this time everybody would be flying around in their own spaceship, living on the moon, et cetera et ceteray.

Is that a wii Dad is playing with? Still hooked on Nitendo?I just spent a weekend riding my horse in the snow filled woods. So why is Phoebe not riding outside with Marigold, in some stunning winter scenery?

I remember the hills and the sea.

I remember HST.I worked on computers that had vacuum tubes.Cute cartoon.

I can remember all those. When I was in Paris my French Resolution was 1024×768

I remember feeling old when ever people talked about Star Wars or Ghostbusters being “before there time” or having been just a kid when Super Mario 64 came out. You know what sucks, I should have a kid Phoebe’s age and I don’t. I have yet to meat some one but I could totally be exactly like her dad, right down to the beard and pony tails and portable gaming system. I always wounder what the world will be like when the 80s kids finally take over. To have a president who is also a gamer, to be a parent who made his kids go Trick Or Treating as Wily Kit and Wily Kat, to be the director who buys the rights to makes a movie of and does justice to ALF. Call me old if you want but YOU are young and I can STILL kick your but in Super Mario World. I say bring it Phoebe. Also love the 8-bit banner.

I still have a phonograph, and listen to it every day. Frequently I listen to the Beatles on said phonograph.

…and now we know that Marigold’s scarf and leg warmers are hot pink!

/I/ have an NES!

Also, I love the pixely logo. Looks very authentic!

I remember 5 cent stamps, penny parking meters, four digit telephone numbers and Dragnet, The Lone Ranger and comedy shows on the radio. Although running boards on cars were long gone, tail fins were all the rage and cars still had wind wings. Ask your dad or grandpa if you don’t know what those were. The first transistor radios were bigger in their day than iPhones are today – amazing! An entire radio that could fit in your pocket! Little Orphan Annie, Dick Tracy and Lil Abner were the hottest cartoon strips. Only rich people could afford color TVs but that was okay because most of the programs were still in black and white. People still sat out on their front porches of an evening and gassed with the neighbors, and we kids ran wild and free. You could just go out and play and be gone the better part of the day and nobody worried. People never locked their doors if they were at home. It was a different era in more ways than one.

Oh, and a friend of mine nearly got expelled for bringing a transistor radio to school and listening to the Beatles – and that was before their psychodelic phase…

Game Over sir!

Hi – pixel artist here. Thanks for the comments – I had a lot of fun designing that. As for authenticity, it’s 32 pixels tall and uses only the NES’s color palette. I tried to be as close as possible to an actual NES game font, too, but it turns out there are dozens of almost-identical looking ones (no one could agree on how to draw a capital R, apparently) so I just went with what looked good.

Love this comic so much. Just coming out of my rocking chair to mention the manual typewriter I learned to type on back when girls were expected to be secretaries if not wives. My first job was running a billing machine which was fed paper punched tape that held the prices of the products being billed. Also used an adding machine, where you punched in the digits and pulled a lever to enter a value. We had a television, black and white of course. The first record I ever bought was from the Ben Frankin 5 & 10 store and it was a 45 of Hey Jude by The Beatles. When did I become part of the older generation? Yikes! I’m still 18 in my head.

My first console was a ColecoVision, but I remember playing my family’s Pong console before that.

Let’s see… the first “computer game” I encountered was one I wrote myself, a baseball simulator that ran on a GE-400 time share system in the fall of ‘69. The first really interactive electronic game I met was a simple moon-landing simulator at the Huntsville space center, in the spring of ’73. I took a peek inside the cabinet, and when I returned to engineering school after spring break, I built my own using an EAI TR-20 plugboard analog computer, three switches and an oscilloscope. I think that earned me my “A” in the “Analog and Digital Computation” course.

It’s fun to remember the world before all these things we now take for granted. Even more fun to have been a part of birthing them: in 1977 I went to work for a company that had just gotten a contract from the government, to design and deploy a proof-of-concept system to demonstrate the commercial feasibility of a new technology called “wireless cellular telephony.” You may have heard of it…

Wowsers, that title page alone is terrific! I’d love to see a REAL “Heavenly Nostrils” game one of these days.

The Safeway our family went to still had wind-up mechanical cash registers right up until the time they switched to laser scanners at about 1983. My high school classroom had a flag with 48 stars on it. It was hanging from a staff and nobody else noticed that it was not up to date.

I remember the Atari 2600; but before that we had a machine the could play four variations on the Pong theme.

1948. 3-cent stamps. Truman. My first “personal computer” was in the GENIAC family (you can look it up in Wikipedia). The first real computer I worked on was the IBM 7070, IBM’s first computer (1958) to use transistors instead of vacuum tubes. It was as big as my house and roughly equal to an Apple ][.

I still have my NES!

It was the best!

My childhood is filled with fond memories of playing Kirby’s Adventure, Super Mario, Dragon Warrior, and other awesome games on the NES.

my dad remembers the beatles

what’s a Nintendo Entertainment System? Was it like the Nintendo Switch?