when i was a kid, buying a new game was serious business. it meant saving up my weekly farm-chore allowances of $2.50 for six to eight months, before I could afford a brand new computer game. this usually meant about one new PC game a year, along with whatever I got for christmas.
among the lost pieces of canadian computing history are the retail prices for computer hardware and software we swallowed in the 1990s
buried in the archives was this Softwarehouse catalogue from 1994 - an Edmonton-based computer retailer from the 80s and 90s.
enjoy skimming through the eyeball-gouging prices we paid back then, like an $80 copy of Isaac Asimov's Science Adventure for DOS. this was mostly due to a crushing US-CAN exchange rate at the time.
ps: anyone else remember visiting Softwarehouse in YEG? it was at 102 ave and 108 st :D
i've been sitting on this gem for 25 years. i think it's time.
so back in 1997, i was a first-year undergrad and dial-up was finally rolling out to the general public in most of canada.
with every new welcome package, u of a students received a 25 page manual on setting up smtp/pop for eudora lite, and a copy of netscape navigator.
the Computing and Network Services department decided that the best way to onramp students to the world wide web was via an interactive multimedia tutorial for win95 and macOS that they built themselves with macromedia director
last year an old buddy was cleaning out his basement, and he found his NetSurf '97 CD. couldn't resist capturing some of the 👌 performance by virtual paul
Today of course marks the 30th anniversary of nine inch nails' legendary record The Downward Spiral. This masterpiece of an album was released March 8, 1994, and was a pretty intense thing for 14 year old me to hear.
This photo is from Instagram - Trent just posted it, saying what 28 year old him had to say still excites him but breaks his heart. It's a dark album, man. All the pigs are still lined up.
Back in the 80s and 90s there were the punks, the goths, the ravers, the grungers, the hip-hoppers, the trip-hoppers, etc., and each of these genres was powerful enough to become a creed and give a really large number of people a sense of integrity and belonging. And today? Seems to me that on the one hand there's the painfully inconsequential and mostly manufactured pseudo-mainstream, and on the other an ever-increasing number of micro-genres and niche communities... 😔 @music#1980s#1990s
I remember using a Flightstick Pro for the family Mac Performa in the mid 1990s. My dad had the Chuck Yeager flight simulator (which was pretty cool at the time), and that was the game he had gotten the stick for.
When I was a 16-bit game graphics creator, I got accustomed to thinking in multiples of 16, for sprite dimensions, game scenery patterns, image resolutions, RGB color values and more.
That became a lasting habit. Even now, long after using multiples of 16 was necessary, I'm still entering 16, 32, 48, 64, et cetera, when numerical input is required. Does anyone happen to recognize this? 🙂
30 years ago today (Feb 25, 1994), nine inch nails released the first single from The Downward Spiral, 'March of the Pigs'. I had this record pretty soon after it came out and I played it nonstop. World changing. Step right up.
#GreatAlbums1990s – TOP 20 - #DepecheMode – #Violator (1990). Dark leathery synth tones create tension under the catchy hooks of “Personal Jesus,” “Halo,” and “Enjoy the Silence” on this immaculate set from Basildon’s finest. “Waiting for the Night” recalls early Roxy Music and “Clean” adapts a Pink Floyd riff into new landscapes of emotion. “Never again is what you swore the time before” propels the anthemic “Policy of Truth” to an epic status rare in pop.
March 29th, 1995: Netscape Communications Corporation goes public. Netscape Navigator was a dominant web browser in the early days of the internet. Its IPO was a landmark event, fueling the dot-com boom of the late 1990s.
jeff vogel's Spiderweb Software website, in march 2000. creator of the Exile and Avernum series, jeff previously took mail orders and telephone orders. the web site introduced the concept of ordering shareware games over the internet to his fanbase.
5 years after its disappearance from general use in HTML, it is surprising still using a server-side imagemap to handle navigation clicks on the menu 😆