18 Sep
1998
18 Sep
'98
11:34 a.m.
What's keeping you?
I had the same wishes when I was a kid and somehow I still have them.
Unfortunately they have evolved too: as a kid I wished I had a robot that
could stack blocks (whoopee) or one that would run around without bumping in
the furnitures (prety advanced). Today I wish I had one that would vacuum
when it's needed, pick up the toys the kids leave all around the house, wash
my car and changes the cat litter.
What I'm getting at is that what we dreamed of as kids is not, by todays
standards, dream material anymore: you have those programable cars and all
sorts of talking toys (some of them animated) so the novelty and feeling of
innovation or creation is not the same. Dreaming of building a robot that
can pile blocks or solve the hanoi towers is not quite as fascinating as
beating the big bad dude on level four of the latest nintendo game.
But I still go and build stuff from spare parts, still keep steppers and
gears in neatly ordered cabinets and still dream that one day, when I have
the time, I'll build that robot or one of the numerous projects I have
recorded in notebooks.
In 1994 I started working on one "project" thinking to bring it to market,
built a prototype thought of a better way to do it and wanted to make a
second proto but it involved much more money than what I had at the time and
it got filed with the rest. That is until I saw my idea in a catalog earlier
this week. So I fired Quake II and logged on a server and fragged for the
rest of the evening.
Boy I feel like rambling today.
Anyway there is not much that prevents from building the stuff you want, you
just need to know what you want and how you want to do it and stick to it.
Or did you loose that drive, that desire to build and bring innanimate
things to (artificial) life?
Francois
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Sanctuary at: http://www.pclink.com/fauradon
-----Original Message-----
From: Sam Ismail <dastar(a)ncal.verio.com>
To: Discussion re-collecting of classic computers
<classiccmp(a)u.washington.edu>
Date: Friday, September 18, 1998 4:10 PM
Subject: Kids these days
I was just thinking about how kids these days are so damn lucky. They've
got all this cheap, extraodinarily useful computer hardware sitting around
in massive quantities that they can do all sorts of killer things with.
I remember when I was a kid I was dreaming about building robots and using
computers to control them, but all the parts and expecially the computers
were too expensive. I had one design based on a //c, but this was around
1986 when the //c was still relatively new.
Today, a kid could go to a thrift store and buy all manner of salvageable
computer parts, including printers (to get the steppers and gears out of),
disk drives (for the motors and gear shafts) and of course the computers
to control their projects with easy to use languages built in, all for
just a few bucks.
An entire robot could be built for under $100 with thrift store and flea
market parts. It could include a fairly powerful and easy to program
"brain" in the form of a Commodore 64, a Tandy CoCo, even an Apple ][
board. This stuff is everywhere and extremely simple to hack.
Man, I wish I was a kid again!
Sam Alternate e-mail:
dastar(a)siconic.com
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Ever onward.
September 26 & 27...Vintage Computer Festival 2.0
See http://www.vintage.org/vcf for details!
[Last web site update: 09/12/98]