Technologies of Christmas past

Saturday, December 26th, 2009

The grandest Christmas traditions have been with us for centuries, and many will doubtless stick around for centuries more. Trees, gifts and alcoholic exuberance come to mind.

But we techie types have some more modern rituals too. Online Christmas shopping, for example. Loading up your Sky+ Box or Windows Media Center with films you’ll never watch. And, of course, hiding away in the study while you get to grips with this year’s must-have PC game.

For many of us, these customs are as much a part of the Yuletide season as wassailing and mulled wine; yet the technology that makes them possible has only come into being within the past few decades. And as 2010 comes knocking, I find myself looking back over Christmases of the past and marvelling at the huge advances we’ve made within my lifetime to get here. (more…)

Before the AMD Phenom there was… the LG Phenom.

Thursday, June 26th, 2008

I’ve just come across this little LG PDA which, amazingly, has been knocking around the office for a decade – it was reviewed in the December 1998 issue of PC Pro. Even stranger is the name: the Phenom, a title now belonging to AMD’s consumer CPUs.

Plugging in the power supply and switching on to see its black-and-white passive-matrix screen, I was whisked back to a peculiar moment in computing history. (more…)