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.

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.

Ask any old skool geek and they will remember dialup. Not only will
they remember the tones of that modem with glee (sad?) but they will
remember the day that they got hold of the latest and greatest
compression protocol that would allow them to squeeze more bandwidth
connection out of their phone line.

Yes kids, it was never like the broadband we have today. It was
narrowband, dialup - you had to wait up to a minute to connect 'into'
the network - was never always there and your computer made a series
of cryptic noises to be able to communicate with the outside world.
The musical interlude was a constant reminder that you were connecting
to somewhere exciting, you were becoming a node on a bigger world
ourside of your room. You were going out onto the world wide web of
'things'

I remember the day my US robotics 33.6k arrived. Mine was black, not
white like the photo i put on this blog post but i liked the
perspective of the shot on this one. I think i had an internal card
at some point as well. Yes kids we used to have things attached to
the outside of our computers that made noises that did nothing but
provide us with a gateway to another place. The weirdest thing
about the modem was how you started to get used to the way that the
modem made a connection. You could tell when you would get a solid
connection or not. After a while i could predict if i got a solid
33.6k connection or not. Back then you were connecting to a bank of
devices and you sometimes never managed to connect to a unit that
fully supported your new all singing latest firmware with new
compression modem.

It was all about the compression back then, a new modem with a new
standard came out - now we just upgrade to provide the connection and
have forgotten how that devices gets us there. as long as it gets us
there. It's the way social media is going, like making a phone call
- you never question that the phone call might not get through, we
assume it will. Social media will become as second nature as
connecting via broadband as we do today. It will just work and
you'll not know the work that went into getting that message to you.
transparent hardware. We have come a long way.

What will the future in the next few years look like with touch
screens and easily faked information with 3d modelling and social
media having the ability to create cause and effect in seconds. who
controls the flow of information when information itself is being
reformatted and shaped creatively by the hive social mind.

then i stopped thinking about it because it was starting to freak me
out. Instead i decided to setup this blog, unstyled for the moment
called 'oldskoolretro' which was going to be a crowdsource journal of
your entry point into technology. I think remembering where you came
from and your 'entry' points into technology will be as those journals
that store the worlds information within them. capturing your
memories of how that technology made you feel, how it shaped your
world or indeed how you utilised it to shape the world around you.
I'm opening this up to the world, be a regular contributor or just
post us an email and as long as it is not spam we will make sure it
goes straight up on the site. I'll be posting memories of my entry
points into computing and they will be as random as the memories
themselves as they hit me. I have some crackers! :)

Simply email your story (and pictures/video/youtubelinks) to
post@oldskoolretro.posterous.com and we will take care of the rest.
expect a design and style in the coming weeks.