Whilst chatting over lunch about films and kids being trained by the US military regarding flying drones into war-zones we some how indirectly got onto the topic of 'the last star fighter' and i thought i would drop the trailer i found on youtube on here. again, if you have not seen some of these classics i suggest you add them to your viewing or downloading list today.

plus, anything that has a weapons system called 'death blossom' has to be ftw.

a pure classic. not strictly a geek film but has lots of computing/office situations that any 'computer operator' can understand. set in the land of initech and the cube village, keep ya eyes out for the red stapler. oh and do not forget to get your coversheet done on the tps report. ;)

a funny, classic film that i can watch over and over

Had to add this one in seeing as @subwolf had managed to purchase/find it mastered on pal dvd. amazing! - the copy i had was grainy and was ripped from vhs and was pretty poor. i watched this at the weekend on my laptop in bed when i was tired. took me right back to the vloggies of 2005 and going out to alcatraz island with a bunch of vloggers. good times. i great 80's computing film with a high level of fromage but will some great snippits of what computing was like 'back in the day' - replace the AI of edgar with our social networks of today and you can see some similar aspects that cannot be far away from being reality in the coming years.

Has a brilliant soundtrack as well. If your based in the UK and want to borrow the DVD just drop me a comment/email/dm.

Oh, and someone sent me a link to the soundtrack on pirate bay - http://bit.ly/8EGgPE

imdb | http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0168122

pirates of silicon valley must be one of the best explanations of the start of microsoft and apple that you will come across. really opened you eyes to how these two titans of the scene today managed to work their magic into the digital space we have today. some really good advice for startups in here on how, when and what. a great film. if your a geek. ;0

 

Something about antitrust, the fact that it clearly aims itself
directly at the time when microsoft was trying to take over the world
with their browser has heavy overtones in this movie. Very early
signs of startup culture, ethics and then this fantastic vision of
'synapse' this universal broadcast system that will work anywhere. we
race towards this today. oh, and slight spoiler, fibre installed in
each geeks house capturing what they are working on from their screens
via hd cameras. what! ahead of it's time. ;0

I'm not sure how i found out about real genius. i guess i just went
digging around for geeky films to do with tech and when your a kid a
film that has a laser in it always hits the spot. what i actually
ended up finding was a very young val kilmer, a great 80's soundtrack
(comsat angels ftw) and a pure geeky storyline. I love real genius.
You know what, i think i should organise a geek movie meetup - a day
of oldskool movies and snacks and beers in the evening with some of
the more up to date geeky/tech movies.

If you have never seen real genius. grab it, ignore the fromage.
it's a classic.

So, Phil wants to reminisce over the old days. Lets do bring out some old hardware, and next time we'll see about some software. I should explain most of these came from my father, a former employee of British Coal, during his tenure there he would bring back odd bits & pieces for us to build, test or use. There are some old pictures about of one of my first PC's, an 8086 I think it was, with a green monitor. Tinny little PC speaker would make some most interesting noies. In Battle Chess, the shriek of the bishop as he fell through a hole in the floor a pawn created was perfect.

First on the list - the ATI Mach32, circa 1992, with an impressive 2MB of DRAM, 100% compatible with IBM 8514/A and featuring basic DOS support, I believe extending into Windows, but not that far. Used exclusively by dad, I had other cards in my own computers, at one point an Orchid Technology Farenheit card, running the dinky 15" monitor at 1024x768 at 60Hz interlaced. Windows 3.11 never looked so good.

Next, the Quantum ProDrive LPS, I'm given to believe from 1990, and the model I hold probably didnt exceed 180Mb. This was from the day when Windows running in '386 Enhanced Mode' was something new and exciting. My memory is a bit hazy here, I remember when dad had a Victor PC with an 'impressive' 40MB of disk space. Disk space was a common problem back in those days, what with games like Team Yankee, and later Apogee's Commander Keen happy to take up disk space, requiring you to offload from time to time. I remember playing Cartooners in 1989 with floppy disks, chuckling as the mouse made his way across the screen with a speech bubble overhead. Oh, memories.

Finally, an old 5-1/4" floppy drive, likely from the early 80's, if not earlier, I'm not even sure if this one supported double-density (360K) or high-density (720K) disks without trying to boot it up, highly unlikely without a floppy controller to talk to it, and those dont exist any more.

Next time I hope to speak of old software, really need to go through my old drawers for photos to scan in.

omg. i just found and remembered this that i just had to post it.
Ok, it's not that old skool compared to some of the other stories but
it reminds me of some crazy times with subwolf in roswell, new mexico.
so much has happened in three years. I really need to start
pulling some of this older content together and out into a better
system to present it. roll on posterous allowing us to use
javascript. i haz ideas! :)

imagine living in a town of 68,000 people and not knowing anybody else
who does what you do. then imagine that you seem distant from
everyone else and have been exposed to information and ideas that
others do not.

It's quite strange how me and rob met, i'm not sure exactly how. I'm
not sure if the BBS (bulletin board systems) came first or if we met
through working at the council at the time. either way, we were geeks
- the nerds that fixed stuff. experimenters. this photo on this
entry is from a train track in roswell, new mexico when rob lived
there for a time in 2006.

Rob ran the 'suburban lair' and i ran 'fundemental' - we were the only
two people in the whole of our town to run bulletin board systems. in
fact most of the time i think most of the sysop chat was between rob
and myself on each others boards as we went digging around in each
others 'computers' for stuff. i've known 'subwolf' for over a decade
and in that time lots of things have happened and have changed. I'm
hoping that rob will find some time to put keyboard skills to digital
paper and write some of his own digital memoirs and memories over
here. I'm sure he has loads.