The Computer Chronicles

Back around Father's Day Peter Rojas had a moving tribute to his late father. I was struck by the similarities in our dads' approaches to technology, what I guess pre-blog we called "enthusiasm." You know, computer enthusiast, hifi enthusiast, etc.

And once there's enthusiasm for something, there's an audience to which the media wishes to speak. Witness blogs! Before there were blogs, there were magazines. Somewhere along the way (hi cable!) we invented the TV 'news' magazine, ancient forerunner to the very best of YouTube (but more like the best of the nascent Web-based TV industry or IPTV).

For tech enthusiasts who loved computers, there was The Computer Chronicles. Some loving soul has seen fit to put several of these on the Internet Archive. If you missed the history of the Mac, and you wonder why the graphic design dept. has so many Apples in the garden, go check 'em out. Sure made me feel old.

How Time Machine could work with portable machines

I've been thinking about how Apple could implement Time Machine, their auto-backup tool, for laptops, or machines without enormous data stores inside. Given their sucky network hard-drive implementation on the Airports of late, will they go that route? Probably not recommended, but maybe. Lord I hope Finder doesn't wig out everytime TM tries to upload 122k of incremental Word changes. Ouch. Can I have my OS 9 back?

Anyway, wired drives will be the way to go for safety's sake. Now when you undock, and happen to be unplugged from your drive, what happens? My hope is you can tune a little portion of your local hd to serve as a temporary storage facility. Secure? Not really. If your hd craps out totally you're screwed. But if you kernel panic or something it'd work like magic to restore all those "unsaved" changes. But Apple, give us a chance to set the limit, OK? You gobble enough resources as it is.