Tag: spring-2024

Good Afternoon! 

Hello all! We’re at the final stretch. We hope you’ve been doing well and wish you luck with all exams and projects coming up! 

Due to exam season and summer coming up, this will be the last newsletter for this semester. We will be present for the upcoming Vintage Computing Festival this summer, though, and of course we will be back during the fall semester. We hope to see you there!

Demo of the Week 

The demo of the week is Aussie Joker Poker on the Apple //c! 

If we had a nickel for every time we’ve had a gambling related video game demo’d on the Apple //c, we would have two nickels. Which isn’t a lot, but it’s weird that it happened twice. Come and stop by the lab during our open hours to play it with us if you have time to spare!

Object of the Week 

The object of the week is this POW! WHAM! sign we have displayed on the shelf at the lab. 

When you look at it head on, it says “POW!”. When you look at it from the sides, it says “WHAM!”. Simple but effective. Not sure where this piece originated from; our faculty sponsor, Professor Balsamo, just brought it in one day as an interesting art piece. 

Images like these are an example of Lenticular printing, which involves the interlacing of two or more images where each image has its light refracted in a different direction, resulting in the illusion of the image “changing” as you view it from different angles. I was not able to quickly find any particularly interesting articles, but the Wikipedia page for Lenticular printing is still a pretty good read if you are interested in how it works. This type of printing is also responsible for the “3D” props you sometimes see at illusionist exhibitions or for movie advertisements at the theatre, where they’ve interlaced many images to achieve the effect of the image “moving” as you view it from different angles. Our POW! WHAM! sign has only two different images interlaced, but there is a lot you can do with this kind of technique. 😊  

Lab Hours and Room Number 

We are located in ATEC 1.705, right next to ATEC’s welcome center. Our open lab hours are: 

Monday: 4:00pm-6:00pm 

Tuesday: 1:00pm-4:00pm 

Wednesday: 1:00pm-3:00pm 

Thursday: 4:00pm-6:00pm 

Thank you for reading our newsletter! We hope to see you soon and wish you a stress-free week. 

Sincerely, 

The Media Archeology Lab 

The University of Texas at Dallas

Hello all! 

We hope you’ve been having a good week and that your studies have been going well.  We can’t believe the semester is almost over! 

Brownie Cameras! 

Recently, the lab had a brownie camera workshop for our student employees where we deconstructed Kodak Brownie cameras, cleaned their innards and inspected any damage, and put them back together. Hopefully we will have some interesting black and white photography to share here in the future. 😊 

Demo of the Week 

The demo of the week is Top Fuel Eliminator for the Apple //c! 

Stop by and enjoy a retro racing game originally released in 1987. 

Object of the Week 

The object of the week is the black and white movie Godzilla (1954) by Ishiro Honda! 

Did you know that this film is free to borrow and watch on the Internet Archive? Almost 70 years old this year, this movie still holds up as an excellent watch. It is a lot more somber than you would expect. Most people nowadays associate Godzilla with tacky merchandise and an epic scale of destruction, but originally Godzilla was posed as a very frightening consequence of nuclear war. If you have only seen Godzilla, King of Monsters!, I would still recommend giving the original version a watch-through; the ending has a noticeably different tone. 

There is quite a lot of interesting retro technology featured in the film. Old telephones, antenna TVs, and automobiles, it is a fascinating movie for media archeology purposes. This movie epitomizes our lab’s motto “We dig culture.” 

Lab Hours and Room Number 

We are located in ATEC 1.705, right next to ATEC’s welcome center. Our open lab hours are: 

Monday: 4:00pm-6:00pm 

Tuesday: 1:00pm-4:00pm 

Wednesday: 1:00pm-3:00pm 

Thursday: 4:00pm-6:00pm 

Thank you for reading our newsletter! We hope to see you soon and wish you a stress-free week. 

Sincerely, 

The Media Archeology Lab 

The University of Texas at Dallas

Happy Solar Eclipse!

We hope you have your eclipse glasses ready. Total solar eclipses are rare, and according to CBS news, one that are visible from the continental U.S. are “even rarer.”

We’re within the area of totality and all classes during the eclipse event (from 1pm-2pm) are canceled, so we hope you take some time to enjoy it!

Demo of the Week

The demo of the week this week is HIGH ROLLERS for the Apple //c!

Drop by and try some low stakes gambling on a computer from 1984!

Object of the Week

The object of the week is Java’s Eclipse IDE!

Photo from an archived version of Wikipedia’s Eclipse article December 2005.

Originally first released in 2001, Eclipse as an IDE has survived and remained relevant for an impressive 2 decades. It was created by IBM, and then transferred over to the Eclipse Foundation, an independent non-profit. Many other IDEs, such as Visual Studio or NetBeans, have names that are more obviously related to programming, but Eclipse’s name is rather vague for what it is. Why did IBM decide to name it Eclipse?

The main story (and the one that Wikipedia cites) comes from this 2005 eWeek article, where supposedly Lee Nackman explained during EclipseCon 2005 that it was named this way because IBM wanted to “eclipse” Microsoft’s Visual Studio IDE. I wasn’t able to find any footage of the speech, but I did find what looks like a transcript of that keynote on this blog. The only other article I could find on this was from techtarget, which says this story has “been said, though not confirmed.”

If you’re familiar with software development companies at the time, it should also be noted that one of Eclipse’s major competitors at the time, NetBeans, was being developed by Sun Microsystems. The fact that an eclipse blocks out the sun is something that was likely not overlooked by the designers when choosing the name, and maybe even intentional.

The history behind the IDE is interesting, and I recommend looking at any linked sources here. Going onto the Wayback Machine and looking at what Eclipse looked like in 2005 is also a very interesting experience. 😉

Lab Hours and Room Number

We are located in ATEC 1.705, right next to ATEC’s welcome center. Our open lab hours are:

Monday: 4:00pm-6:00pm

Tuesday: 1:00pm-4:00pm

Wednesday: 1:00pm-3:00pm

Thursday: 4:00pm-6:00pm

Thank you for reading our newsletter! We hope to see you soon and wish you a stress-free week.

Sincerely,

The Media Archeology Lab

The University of Texas at Dallas

PRINT “WELCOME REBEL MAL_READER.” 

Happy April Fools! We are not personally pulling any pranks this year, but we hope you have been having an excellent day with a minimal number of inconvenient prank experiences. 😊 

Demo of the Week 

The demo of the week is Space Adventure, a game developed by Load n’ Go Software and published by Green Valley Publishing for the Apple //c! 

Drop by the lab to play this retro adventure on the computer it was designed for.

Object of the Week 

The object of the week is the Macintosh 128k! 

This wonderful machine has been sitting in our lab for the entire time we have been open. Released in 1984, this was not Apple’s first computer; the Apple I released almost a decade earlier in 1976 as Apple’s first computer. However, this computer is most notable for being the very first in the “Macintosh” or Mac line of computers.  Like modern iMacs, the computer, monitor, and disk reader are integrated into one package, and if you booted it up and looked at its user interface, it might look familiar if you’re a user of modern MacOS versions. It’s one of our favorite computers of the lab, so be sure to marvel at it next time you stop by 😉

Lab Hours and Room Number 

We are located in ATEC 1.705, right next to ATEC’s welcome center. Our open lab hours are: 

Monday: 4:00pm-6:00pm 

Tuesday: 1:00pm-4:00pm 

Wednesday: 1:00pm-3:00pm 

Thursday: 4:00pm-6:00pm 

Thank you for reading our newsletter! We hope to see you soon and wish you a stress-free week. 

Sincerely, 

The Media Archeology Lab 

The University of Texas at Dallas 

Hello all! 

We hope you’ve had a good week. We are now over halfway through the semester, so hang in there! 

Demo of the Week 

This demo of the week this week is Ghostbusters for the Apple //c. 

Delightfully, this demo plays the Ghostbusters theme by Ray Parker Jr. when you boot up the disk. Come drop by to give this retro game a try!

Object of the Week 

The object of the week is the PowerMac G4! 

Originally released in 1997, the PowerMac is an interesting line of computers. These computers were being released roughly alongside the iMac G3s, which you may recognize as the colorful “jellybean” computers living in our lab. You would think PowerMac G3 would refer to a single computer, but the G3 editions were actually a whole line of computers; their cases originally shared the beige design seen in machines such as the Apple //c or the Macintosh 128k but starting in January 1999, when the Blue and White model was released, they were completely redesigned. You can check out apple-history.com’s entries for the original beige PowerMac G3, the Blue and White model, and the PowerMac G4 by clicking any of these links! The PowerMac G4 included multiple different versions, including the G4 Cube which, in our opinion, has a very fun design. 

Lab Hours and Room Number 

We are located in ATEC 1.705, right next to ATEC’s welcome center. Our open lab hours are: 

Monday: 4:00pm-6:00pm 

Tuesday: 1:00pm-4:00pm 

Wednesday: 1:00pm-3:00pm 

Thursday: 4:00pm-6:00pm 

Thank you for reading our newsletter! We hope to see you soon and wish you a stress-free week. 

Sincerely, 

The Media Archeology Lab 

The University of Texas at Dallas 

Welcome Back! 

We hope you had a fun spring break! We had a laid-back week at the lab since several of us had obligations during spring break.  

Where are the iMac G3s? 

Don’t worry, they’re not gone forever! They are simply at another location temporarily. They will be returned soon. 

Demo of the Week 

The demo of the week is Exploring Apple Logo on the Apple //c! 

Stop by during open hours and come learn this old visual programming language! 

Object of the Week 

The object of the week is the Voyager Golden Record! 

Of course, the copy we have in the lab is not the original Golden Record, which was made in 1977 and is currently on the Voyager traveling through interstellar space. This record was designed to attempt to educate any recipients that could discover the voyager about earth, the surrounding solar system, the human species, and other similar information. It contains images and audio (transcribed onto the disk) of nature, music, speech, and a message from Jimmy Carter, the U.S. president at the time. If you want to learn more, I recommend this page from NASA on the contents of the record, as well as this page from NASA explaining the images on front of the disk. 

Lab Hours and Room Number 

We are located in ATEC 1.705, right next to ATEC’s welcome center. Our open lab hours are: 

Monday: 4:00pm-6:00pm 

Tuesday: 1:00pm-4:00pm 

Wednesday: 1:00pm-3:00pm 

Thursday: 4:00pm-6:00pm 

Thank you for reading our newsletter! We hope to see you soon and wish you a stress-free week. 

Sincerely, 

The Media Archeology Lab 

The University of Texas at Dallas

Note: This email was originally titled “Media Archeology Lab Newsletter Week 9: Spring Break Hours,” which was in error. However, renaming it would require renaming the rest of the newsletters and adding this notice in each of them, which is work that will perhaps be done in the future.

Hello all, and good luck on midterms! 

Good afternoon! We hope any exams you have this week have been going well. We are very much looking forward to spring break. Speaking of which, please be aware that the lab will be closed over spring break. Since the lab is closed, there also won’t be a newsletter that week. 

Demo of the Week 

The demo of the week this week is SimCity 2000 on the iMac G3 Lime!  

Come over to the lab during open hours to have some fun building a city on a period-accurate piece of hardware!

Object of the Week 

The object of the week this week is the Comdyna GP-6! 

The Comdyna GP-6 is an analog computer from the late 1960s. The first question you might ask after looking at it is “how am I supposed to use this?” After looking up the operator’s manual as well as several YouTube videos, from what I could gather you would use various banana connectors to input information about the different variables involved in an equation, each variable set to a different “channel” of the computer, and the Comdyna GP-6 would compute the result and send it to output. Most applications I’ve found online of this computer seem to be for solving differential equations. To visualize the result of the program, you would often connect an oscilloscope to the computer (shown in this paper by Ray Spiess, the inventor the computer, on page 69). 

Looking at it, you may think its relevancy ended after other non-analog computers, such as the Apple Lisa or TRS-80, were produced, but according to Ray Speiss it was in production for at least 36 years after its initial creation (p. 68). The previously linked paper goes into more detail, but essentially it was a very popular machine for teaching control systems to students in universities, as well as for a few other very specialized lines of work (Speiss p.70). 

Lab Hours and Room Number 

We are located in ATEC 1.705, right next to ATEC’s welcome center. Our open lab hours are: 

Monday: 4:00pm-6:00pm 

Tuesday: 1:00pm-4:00pm 

Wednesday: 1:00pm-3:00pm 

Thursday: 4:00pm-6:00pm 

Thank you for reading our newsletter! We hope to see you soon and wish you a stress-free week. 

Sincerely, 

The Media Archeology Lab 

The University of Texas at Dallas

Good afternoon! 

We hope you’ve been doing well. We do not have any major announcements or updates for this week, but we are steadily working on various projects and plans. 

Demo of the Week 

The demo of the week this week is Nanosaur, on the iMac G3 Strawberry! 

This demo is a personal favorite of the lab, so if you have seen it mentioned here before, that’s why! If you are at all competitive, you should come over and try and beat our high score! 😊  

Object of the Week 

The object of this week this week are the lab’s resident Furbies! 

During the late 90s, these creatures were everywhere. Did you know they were, in part, influenced by the Tamagotchi? According to this article (which is a fascinating read), one of the big inspirations for the Furby was because the main architect of the toy, David Hampton, was disappointed that you “couldn’t pet” a Tamagotchi. Another part of what made Furbies such a hit was the innovative approach taken during their development; in order to stand out among many of the electronic toys of the time, the creators of the Furby decided to make it seem as if it had a life of its own, which, as Peters explains in the linked Bustle article, is also why they can also be seen as creepy. They are supposed to learn, adapt, and talk to each other. 

We are big fans of the Furby here at the lab; we think they are ugly in an endearing way, which is why we have at least three of them. We have positioned them to guard our Laserdisc collection. They don’t quite work, so we don’t know what their personal opinions on our multitude of different movies and vinyl records are, but perhaps, in the future… 😉 

Lab Hours and Room Number 

We are located in ATEC 1.705, right next to ATEC’s welcome center. Our open lab hours are: 

Monday: 4:00pm-6:00pm 

Tuesday: 1:00pm-4:00pm 

Wednesday: 1:00pm-3:00pm 

Thursday: 4:00pm-6:00pm 

Thank you for reading our newsletter! We hope to see you soon and wish you a stress-free week. 

Sincerely, 

The Media Archeology Lab 

The University of Texas at Dallas

Hello all! 

We hope you haven’t been too busy. Things have been a little hectic this semester for some of the lab members, which has resulted in this newsletter being sent about a week later than usual. Now that we’re back, though, we have a small announcement to make. 

New Open Hours 

We have finalized our new open lab hours for this semester! You can check the Lab Hours and Room Number section of this email for more details. Feel free to drop by our lab in the ATEC building during any of these times to demo some of our old computers.

Demo of the Week 

The demo of the week this week is The Print Shop Deluxe on the iMac G3 SE Tangerine! 

The Print Shop is a card-making software originally developed in 1984. The version we own, Print Shop Deluxe, is the 1993 version. If you want to try out making an early 2000s themed birthday card (or a very late Valentines’ Day card 😉), stop by the lab during our open hours and give it a try! 

Object of the Week 

The object of the week for this week is Mattel’s Power Glove! 

I love the Power Glove. It’s so bad. 

The Power Glove, originally released in 1989, was an accessory for the Nintendo Entertainment System. It was officially licensed by Nintendo, but was designed and distributed by Mattel. You might be familiar with it from the movie “The Wizard,” which was also released in 1989 and gave us the iconic phrase linked above.  

Although most remember it as cheap, ineffectual, and indeed “bad,” the development process behind the Power Glove is actually quite interesting. This article by Mental Floss’s Jake Rossen goes into much more detail, but essentially the Power Glove was originally based on a $8800 NASA glove called the “Data Glove,” which was envisioned to help astronauts “control robots in space.” If that excerpt piqued your interest, then I 100% recommend giving Rossen’s article a read. 

Our lab has a Power Glove in a display case near the main entrance to the ATEC building. Make sure to look out for it next time you stop by!  

Movie Screening of the Month 

We are still figuring out the process for reserving the Meteor Theatre so, until then, the dates of our monthly movie screenings are TBD. Thank you for your patience! 

Lab Hours and Room Number 

We are located in ATEC 1.705, right next to ATEC’s welcome center. Our open lab hours are: 

Monday: 4:00pm-6:00pm 

Tuesday: 1:00pm-4:00pm 

Wednesday: 1:00pm-3:00pm 

Thursday: 4:00pm-6:00pm 

Thank you for reading our newsletter! We hope to see you soon and wish you a stress-free week. 

Sincerely, 

The Media Archeology Lab 

The University of Texas at Dallas

> 10 PRINT “Welcome Back!” 

> 20 END 
 

Hello all! We hope you’ve had a calm and uneventful first month of classes.😊 To start off our emails for this semester, we would like to inform you of a few changes and updates. 

Updated Hours 

Our open lab hours are in the process of being updated due to the changing availability of our student researchers. We have not finalized our new open lab hours yet, but they will be available by next Monday, so stay tuned! Because we do not have finalized open lab hours, we will not be demonstrating a demo or object this week. 

Movie Screenings 

Continuing from last semester, we will be having monthly movie screenings. Depending on how things go, we may have a new location for our screenings; some of the lab members are working to see if we can reserve the Meteor Theatre on campus, but this is also tentative as of now. Until then, screenings will still be available at our usual location in the ATEC building. 

Future Workshops 

The preparations for a TRS-80 repair workshop are currently underway. We are planning on having it this semester, if all goes to plan. 

Objects & Demos of the Week 

We will be continuing last semester’s Object and Demo of the week sections. Every week, we will pick an object from our lab or display cases and a piece of vintage software or media running on one of our old computers to showcase in this newsletter. We hope you are looking forward to reading about some of the esoteric items in our collection. 

That’s all for this week’s letter. Thank you for reading through until the end! We hope to see you soon and wish you a stress-free week. 

Sincerely, 

The Media Archeology Lab 

The University of Texas at Dallas