I just spent a minutes on Google Earth lurking around some of the places I visited in Mountain View, Santa Clara, Palo Alto sometime shortly after Atari went bust IIRC. Weird Stuff, Frys, Computability(? book store) and if I remember right HSC. There was also "Halstead" (Hdb?) Electronics up in Redwood City - looks like it is now gone. I'm glad (not!) that I grew up in the midwest where we had literally *none* of those places - nearest Radio Shack was 45 minutes away. Leaving SFO I had to pack extra careful just to fly home with all the junk I bought! I could not imagine the problems I would have today checking it in my luggage.

Companies are actively segregating employees, ranking them by their "importance" to the company. Why? All the way from the quarterly reporting on gross revenue/employee to justifying the summer picnic expenses to making the business more salable.

A similar concept to yours, pressing a silicone button on the drive breaks open a sealed capsule of silica sand into the HDA; this would most certainly scrub any magnetic film from the rotating disks. And during its self destruction, it would attempt to rezero and seek, sure to polish most every data surface and thoroughly destroying the heads .

Don't listen to these people... It says that you really liked the free time and imagination you had when younger.

I have done the same - slotcars (some repo, some orig), wham-o superballs, my old marble collection, model and electronics kits, science fiction movie and poster collection. Funny thing, you can find them in better shape and more complete now than I could find or afford then.

All that stored happiness, with little maintenance cost, for less than $1k - where can you get a better bargain than that?

PS Still waiting for that primo Matt Mason for 15 bucks.

As many others, I had a blast with the 400/800/XL Ataris. In one hacking project I ran the official 400/800 Translator disk which overlayed the internal XL OS ROMs with those mostly compatible with a 400/800 system. After loading I then dumped the memory locations, readdressed them, and used an EPROM burner of my own design (my coworkers laughed - you should have seen the EPROM eraser they made up to mock my attempts, complete with framing hammer) to burn it into an EPROM, which I used to replaced the on board ROMs. As well, I fixed a few things I didn't like the OS defaults (don't remember now what they were tho'). I had several (P)ROMs selectable via switch and a board I layed out and etched. Most anything would then run on an XL, some that the Translator disks would not as I recall.

I also organized a user-group hardware project to build the famous bank-switched memory add-on published, where, maybe Byte mag. I modified it to use the 256k chips IIRC. 5-10 people but only a few comprehended what they were doing, and only a few finished though everything was supplied including solder.

Those were the days.

Interlibrary loans; maybe they will, maybe they won't.

How will they prove/disprove by disinterested parties an actual landing?

haha

I see it as a forced, painful, crowbar'ed lurch. But it is a good thing, regardless.

Americans could look to technology as long as the resources of the land supported individualism (that IMHO cannot last further than, say, another century based upon population growth). As our needs overlap, the need to cooperate and find political solutions will grow as fast, maybe faster, than even technology needs.

That is where we differ.

Something that is bound to be as ephemeral, trite, as (most) television is should not be payed for by me; I should be payed for watching it. Though of course, many people also are voluminous readers of romance novels as well.