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Dr. Webster writes "In his article "Data Mining 101: Finding Subversives with Amazon Wishlists," Tom Owad of Applefritter outlines a way in which one could build detailed personal profiles of hundreds of thousands of U.S. citizens in a matter of hours. Reading habits, personal tastes and even political party affiliation could be inferred from the results, and through the use of Yahoo! People and Google Maps, one could even map out geographically where people with certain interests or affiliations live, down to their address. Most surprisingly, the process of doing this is completely legal, and doesn't even violate Amazon's Conditions of Use."

Dr. Webster writes "In his article "Data Mining 101: Finding Subversives with Amazon Wishlists," Tom Owad of Applefritter outlines a way in which one could build detailed personal profiles of hundreds of thousands of U.S. citizens in a matter of hours. Reading habits, personal tastes and even political party affiliation could be inferred from the results, and through the use of Yahoo! People and Google Maps, one could even map out geographically where people with certain interests or affiliations live, down to their address. Most surprisingly, the process of doing this is completely legal, and doesn't even violate Amazon's Conditions of Use."

I spent several hours this week poring through Gordon Laing's beautiful book Digital Retro , and it's one I'm sure to return to at odd moments, the same way I like to flip through old copies of The Whole Earth Catalog. Digital Retro represents years of research into a 14-year stretch of personal computing history, distilling that effort into a work that is graphically appealing, but also an informative, informal historical look at the machines it celebrates (all 40 of them). Depending in part on what year you were born (and at what age computers entered the picture) you may recognize most of these machines, or only a few -- it's an equally fun read either way. Read on for the rest of my review. Digital Retro: The Evolution and Design of the Personal Computer author Gordon Laing pages 192 publisher Sybex rating 9 reviewer timothy ISBN 078214330X summary Eye-candy mixed with a good dose of history, perfect for the library of a modern techno fetishist.

Digital Retro is about personal-use (though not necessarily home-use) machines: there are no PDP11's or mainframes represented, nor devices like the DECWriter, which gave computer access to individuals but required a mainframe or minicomputer in the background. The book covers hardware that was sold at retail (barring the Altair and a few other mail-order-only kit machines), at prices householders could afford for their hobby use, including gaming, or that businesses could afford for their executives and other knowledge workers. All the same, the prices are sure to make you calculate every so often things like how many BogoMIPS could be had today for the $3,250 that a 613KHz HP-85 cost in 1980 -- and those are 1980 dollars. Early adoption has its risks as well as its rewards.

From iconic to obscure

Too many computer makers (and even more computers) came and went in the decade-plus spanned by this book for it to cover all of them; Laing's list of chosen machines is representative rather than comprehensive. More than 30 of the machines came from the The Museum of Computing in Swindon, and despite their age most look like they just popped out of their delivery boxes.

Digital Retro's central section starts out with a MITS Altair, the machine generally considered the first computer practical for a hobbyist to buy. (And the buyer had to be a dedicated hobbyist; the Altair was sold in kit form for home-assembly, and its display was a series of winking lights, its input facilities a row of toggle switches.) "Practical" in the case of the Altair meant affordable and accessible -- there wasn't much of a practical nature for the solder-weary user to actually do with an Altair once it was assembled; the chicken and the egg of availability and usefulness were still fighting it out at this point in computer history. The Altair also has another interesting spot in personal computer history: it provided the first platform for an operating system from Bill Gates and Paul Allen.

(There's an Apple I in homemade wooden raiment snuck into the book's introduction -- an Apple I proved too difficult to find for a full writeup and photoshoot, however, and no Apple II clones made the cut.)

From the Altair to the NeXT cube which caps off the Digital Retro's collection, the 38 machines (and in some cases machine families, such as the MSX computers mentioned below) are presented in order of appearance. The book presents too many interesting machines to give each a proper summary, but here are a few to whet your appetite:

• The Sharp MZ-80K (December, 1978) -- with its 10" screen and built-in drive (tape drive, though -- the 3.5" diskette wasn't invented yet), the MZ-80K seems ahead of its time; the choice of a Zilog Z80 processor didn't do much for its longevity as a business system, though; Z80 systems were soon eclipsed by other choices.
• The GCE/MB Vectrex (June, 1982) -- the only video game system I really wanted as a kid, and one of the seeming few I've never encountered used in thrift stores. Bright vector graphics, built-in screen and a quality joystick gave it the same kind of appeal that the arcade-console versions of Asteroids and Battlezone had for me.
• The Jupiter ACE (September, 1982) -- an impossibly simply looking machine, a terraced slab of white plastic with a minimalist typewriter layout (just 40 grey keys). The ACE was aimed at programmer-hobbyists, though, like the similar-looking Sinclair ZX-80, but the ACE ran a version of FORTH and had raised keys rather than the Sinclair's flat membrane.
• The Sinclair QL (January, 1984) -- one of which, Laing notes, was Linus Torvalds' machine (between a VIC-20 and the 386 with which Torvalds started a quaint Unix-like operating system).

Game consoles are also well represented; six dedicated game machines, starting with the Atari VCS (1977) are included; a whole book could be devoted to consoles, but the ones chosen for Digital Retro (besides Atari and the Vectrex mentioned above, the others come from Colleco, Mattel, Nintendo, Sega) are an eclectic bunch, and a good use of space.

Because Laing is based in the UK, the book features quite a few machines that most Americans have probably never encountered in person, like the Acorn Atom, the Dragon 32 (a Welsh-made near-clone of the Tandy TRS-80) and the Grundy NewBrain. If this book had been an American production, many of these UK-made machines might have gone overlooked.

No incentive to work together

In the wilder days of the personal computer's adolescence, the quest for compatibility and standardization among machines was anything but a top priority -- and when it was a factor at all, it was usually about software compatibility between sibling computers (like the TI 99/4 and its 99/4A successor) or at most within a single model line.

As the book's back cover points out, "Compatibility? Forget it! Each of these computers was its own machine and had no intention of talking to anything else." An overstatement, but not much of one.

Laing covers an intriguing exception to this one-off philosophy, a multi-manufacturer line of machines that appeared in 1983 (starting a 5-year run), sharing a Zilog processor and adherence to an early Microsoft attempt at standardization called MSX. Mostly-compatible machines were launched by JVC, Hitachi, Sony (a name that didn't pop up in the American computer market for quite a few more years) and 18 other Japanese manufacturers as well as SpectraVideo, the only non-Japanese maker. Each manufacturer tweaked their entries in the line to distinguish themselves, adding features like (in Pioneer's case) control of laser-disc players. The differences soon rendered the attempt at standardization moot, and the MSX standard fell from grace. And if you're wondering what MSX stands for, you'll have to choose from the three possibilities listed: I prefer "Matsushita Sony X, where X could stand for any other company."

Get a good look

The photographs dominate; they give external views of each machine from several angles, over two two-page spreads apiece. (The pictures are well-chosen, but not exhaustive: there are no shots from the underside, and in only a few cases are internals exposed. Don't expect to replicate the innards of an Altair from the photographs.) You can make out what sort of ports each device provided, see what kind of display it used in most cases, and look at the included input peripherals. (Many of these machines, though, were hooked to televisions, and only the main unit and its input devices are pictured.)

Speaking of peripherals, one of the nice things about a photo book like this is for the mugshots it provides of unique physical arrangements tried by computer manufacturers: the integrated tape drive of the black-clad Amstrad CPC-464 (which sits to the right of the keyboard) makes it one of the most interesting to me; it sure is a lot neater arrangement than the cassette drive linked messily to the family C64 in the early '80s.

Besides the photographs, though, the spreads devoted to each computer provide a compact history of the machine, list its country of origin, and give a rundown of the most important specs (processor type and available I/O ports).

Practical Upshot

Digital Retro is a coffee-table book which happens to have quite a bit of interesting history, not a deep historical text. For each machine displayed, though, a chunk of text titled "What happened next" gives an idea of what developments each one led to (or prevented); some of these are only a paragraph or two, others are mini-essays in themselves. If you crave more technical and historical details, Laing's book makes an excellent companion volume to narrative-centric books which cover the same period of computer history though, like Fire in the Valley and Steven Levy's Hackers. It's a perfect way to appreciate the aesthetic appeal (and exuberant variety) of personal computers from the mid '70s to the late '80s.

You can purchase Digital Retro from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews. To see your own review here, carefully read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

TheAlchemist writes "Applefritter.com has posted recordings of the talks that took place at the Vintage Computer Festival held at Sun's Boston campus July 16th and 17th. One of the talks revolved around the Atari 7800's 20th Anniversary, and was presented by Curt Vendel of Atarimuseum.com and Steve Golson, one of the original designers of the Atari 7800, the successor to the Atari 5200 that has more in common with the 2600 than the 5200. The presentation and accompanying slide show covered the history of GCC (the company that designed the 7800 for Atari, as well as many 7800 games), Atari, and the 7800. Sitting in the front row of the audience were 10 former GCC employees, who provided additional insight during the presentation. You can listen to the full Atari 7800 session here, and can find more talks from the Vintage Computer Festival here."

TheAlchemist writes "Applefritter.com has posted recordings of the talks that took place at the Vintage Computer Festival held at Sun's Boston campus July 16th and 17th. One of the talks revolved around the Atari 7800's 20th Anniversary, and was presented by Curt Vendel of Atarimuseum.com and Steve Golson, one of the original designers of the Atari 7800, the successor to the Atari 5200 that has more in common with the 2600 than the 5200. The presentation and accompanying slide show covered the history of GCC (the company that designed the 7800 for Atari, as well as many 7800 games), Atari, and the 7800. Sitting in the front row of the audience were 10 former GCC employees, who provided additional insight during the presentation. You can listen to the full Atari 7800 session here, and can find more talks from the Vintage Computer Festival here."

TheAlchemist writes "Applefritter.com has posted recordings of the talks that took place at the Vintage Computer Festival held at Sun's Boston campus July 16th and 17th. One of the talks revolved around the Atari 7800's 20th Anniversary, and was presented by Curt Vendel of Atarimuseum.com and Steve Golson, one of the original designers of the Atari 7800, the successor to the Atari 5200 that has more in common with the 2600 than the 5200. The presentation and accompanying slide show covered the history of GCC (the company that designed the 7800 for Atari, as well as many 7800 games), Atari, and the 7800. Sitting in the front row of the audience were 10 former GCC employees, who provided additional insight during the presentation. You can listen to the full Atari 7800 session here, and can find more talks from the Vintage Computer Festival here."

TheAlchemist writes "Applefritter.com has posted recordings of the talks that took place at the Vintage Computer Festival held at Sun's Boston campus July 16th and 17th. One of the talks revolved around the Atari 7800's 20th Anniversary, and was presented by Curt Vendel of Atarimuseum.com and Steve Golson, one of the original designers of the Atari 7800, the successor to the Atari 5200 that has more in common with the 2600 than the 5200. The presentation and accompanying slide show covered the history of GCC (the company that designed the 7800 for Atari, as well as many 7800 games), Atari, and the 7800. Sitting in the front row of the audience were 10 former GCC employees, who provided additional insight during the presentation. You can listen to the full Atari 7800 session here, and can find more talks from the Vintage Computer Festival here."

Rob_Warwick writes "I've just posted a one on one interview with Kevin Mitnick on Applefritter. In just less than 20 minutes, we take a look at who generally gets targeted by social engineering schemes, and how social engineering can assist in making a technical exploit work. Mitnick speaks about which industries are at highest risk from social enginerering, and what types of workers are generally easier to talk into doing something for you. Kevin also talks about who his heroes were when getting into phreaking and computers, as well as a humbling moment when he was on the recieving end of some social engineering. The HOPE keynotes for both Kevin and The Woz are also available for download."

Rob_Warwick writes "I've just posted a one on one interview with Kevin Mitnick on Applefritter. In just less than 20 minutes, we take a look at who generally gets targeted by social engineering schemes, and how social engineering can assist in making a technical exploit work. Mitnick speaks about which industries are at highest risk from social enginerering, and what types of workers are generally easier to talk into doing something for you. Kevin also talks about who his heroes were when getting into phreaking and computers, as well as a humbling moment when he was on the recieving end of some social engineering. The HOPE keynotes for both Kevin and The Woz are also available for download."

Rob_Warwick writes "I've just posted a one on one interview with Kevin Mitnick on Applefritter. In just less than 20 minutes, we take a look at who generally gets targeted by social engineering schemes, and how social engineering can assist in making a technical exploit work. Mitnick speaks about which industries are at highest risk from social enginerering, and what types of workers are generally easier to talk into doing something for you. Kevin also talks about who his heroes were when getting into phreaking and computers, as well as a humbling moment when he was on the recieving end of some social engineering. The HOPE keynotes for both Kevin and The Woz are also available for download."

Rob_Warwick writes "I've just posted a one on one interview with Kevin Mitnick on Applefritter. In just less than 20 minutes, we take a look at who generally gets targeted by social engineering schemes, and how social engineering can assist in making a technical exploit work. Mitnick speaks about which industries are at highest risk from social enginerering, and what types of workers are generally easier to talk into doing something for you. Kevin also talks about who his heroes were when getting into phreaking and computers, as well as a humbling moment when he was on the recieving end of some social engineering. The HOPE keynotes for both Kevin and The Woz are also available for download."

babbage writes "I recently bought a Power Mac G5, and when I registered it with Apple, I was offered a free subscription to MacWorld. When signing up for the subscription, one of the questions you're asked is which Apple product you purchased most recently, and one of the items on the list was 'iMac G5.' Does the MacWorld marketing department know something that the rest of us don't?" Maybe they had seen the page that incognito writes about: "Over at AppleFritter, there's an awesome mod that changes an ordinary iMac into a mini version of the aluminum G5 tower. There were lots of details in the creator's work that leads to a very polished final product."

babbage writes "I recently bought a Power Mac G5, and when I registered it with Apple, I was offered a free subscription to MacWorld. When signing up for the subscription, one of the questions you're asked is which Apple product you purchased most recently, and one of the items on the list was 'iMac G5.' Does the MacWorld marketing department know something that the rest of us don't?" Maybe they had seen the page that incognito writes about: "Over at AppleFritter, there's an awesome mod that changes an ordinary iMac into a mini version of the aluminum G5 tower. There were lots of details in the creator's work that leads to a very polished final product."

option8 writes "Have an old laptop gathering dust? Here's another fun hack from Applefritter - this time utilizing an old Mac laptop (a Duo 280) but could be applied to pretty much anything with an LCD, and turning the guts into a cheap, flexible digital picture frame. Now, off to the flea market to pick up one of them cheap Duos I keep seeing..." As the author points out, this isn't a new idea -- but it's a great step-by-step.

option8 writes "Have an old laptop gathering dust? Here's another fun hack from Applefritter - this time utilizing an old Mac laptop (a Duo 280) but could be applied to pretty much anything with an LCD, and turning the guts into a cheap, flexible digital picture frame. Now, off to the flea market to pick up one of them cheap Duos I keep seeing..." As the author points out, this isn't a new idea -- but it's a great step-by-step.

cascadefx writes "I found a great article over at Applefritter about Unix on an Apple before Mac OS X. It seems that Apple played with a commercial version of Unix (AT&T Unix to be exact) on top of which ran the good old 68K Mac OS stuff. Great piece that covers a lot of the UI and architecture. It also has screen shots of the thing up and running in 2001, and the author steps through issues like networking and compiling code on the platform. Enjoy." The article's a good read, and brings back some fond memories ...

HawaiianMayan asks: "Sure, if you're a collector you might have a working computer from the 60s or even the 50s in your basement or garage. But what about from the 20s or 30s? Lately I've been dreaming of a retro-futuristic computer, with all the convenience of a modern desktop (I don't want to deal with punchcards!), but styling from the early part of the 20th century. I'm wondering if any of the hardware hackers out there are working on anything like this. It would need an appropriate case, a manual typewriter keyboard, a black and white screen, preferably enlarged by a nice freznel lens, and lots and lots of nixie tubes, knobs, and blinkenlights. Would it be too much if the numeric keypad was a rotary dial?" Think about the computer props used from such classics like Max Headroom (both the movie and the TV series) and Brazil, and you'd be very close to what the submittor is looking for. I must admit, making a computer in this fashion would certainly be a break from the beige box and monitor!

mbishop writes: "There's an article over at MacCentral about this years MacHack keynote where all the original creators of the Macintosh got together to talk about OS X and what they think about Steve Jobs." And if the early days of the Mac are too recent for you, Tom Owad writes to say that "the Apple I Owners Club, founded in 1977 by Joe Torzewski, is back, along with the most extensive reference to the Apple I in existence. The site contains over 120 pages detailing the Apple I computer."

mbishop writes: "There's an article over at MacCentral about this years MacHack keynote where all the original creators of the Macintosh got together to talk about OS X and what they think about Steve Jobs." And if the early days of the Mac are too recent for you, Tom Owad writes to say that "the Apple I Owners Club, founded in 1977 by Joe Torzewski, is back, along with the most extensive reference to the Apple I in existence. The site contains over 120 pages detailing the Apple I computer."

Jay Langhurst writes "Take a peek here for photos and explaination on how an 8 gallon shop vac can be converted to a home for an Apple G3. I guess air circulation isn't an issue after this switch."

I've been so busy on the code frenzy that I've been behind on the quickies! Tragic! First lets get the serious quickies out of the way: chris sent us the Atlanta Linux Showcase Tutorial and Conference program for the 3rd Annual ALS, comming up October 12-16, 1999, in Atlanta Georgia. Registration is open. Bl0w0ff noted that The dockapp warehouse has been upgraded and redesigned. k-rist sent us SimShatner. Here is a site selling a video history of Atari with interviews with the guys that did Pac-Man and all that early stuff. Someone sent us a link to another place you don't want to see a BSOD. Want some Blair Witch Parodies? irishmikev sent is a Southpark Parody and stairs sent The Blair Family Circus Project. How about a pair of strange places to put a server? Gareth Walwyn sent us one in a potted plant and GFD noted thatLinux Today has a story about a box that runs in a real Pizza Hut Box. If strange Linux boxes ain't your bag, someone submitted Apple Fritter which contains strange cases for Apples (Legos, Radios, and more) Jade wrote in with how to apply for the position of Sith Apprentice. and rjh pointed us to the iMaul (seems like a lot of stuff is coming in pairs today) Evan Vetere noticed that despair.com has new de-motivators. Matthew McCabe sent us tuxtiles which is taking votes on designs for "Linux Blankets". Since we're mentioning merchandise, I gotta plug Think Geek which is the first place I've seen with good stuff. They mailed us a box of freebies, but I actually woulda bought most of the stuff they sent me (mugs with #include <beer.h> and some sweet perl shirts and other cool stuff). Most of the "Geek" sites just sell crap but most of this was actually clever. We probably should also note that Copyleft finally has the new Slashdot shirts from our contest winners, they look great. ralphb was the first to say that Time Digital has an article on Slashdot.