Well, one difference is that Apple products tend to look like they were designed by someone at Fisher-Price.

A nice Thinkpad (especially a T or X series model), on the other hand, never looks like something that came from Toys R Us.

Pennies..? I didn't know Canada was still using British monetary units. I suppose the sixpence and shilling will be next to go..?

I thought Canada's primary monetary unit was called "dollars" and the secondary unit was "cents". ...Either that, or it's Canadian Tire Money, I forget which.

Note: The U.S. and Canada do not produce pennies at all(unless their mints are producing coins under contract for other countries that use such units). They produce one-cent coins called "cents". The Whitman "Red Book" wouldn't lie to me, would it? A "penny" is a British coin, originally worth 1/12 of a shilling, or 1/240th of a pound sterling. Since Great Britain changed over to a decimal currency, the "new" penny is a much smaller coin and worth 1/100th pound. The use of "penny" in the U.S. and Canada to refer to a one cent coin is technically just a common slang term.

OK, that all seemed a bit picky. But, hey, someone had to point it out...

Just thought I'd put in my two groats' worth.

Y'know, I wondered if anyone was going to point out something along those lines. Actually, IIRC, the original maximum "official" memory capacity of the early 64K PC1 was in fact 256K if you only used official IBM memory expansion cards, but the memory map officially allowed up to 512K of RAM (and was supported by some 3rd party expansion cards). A few years later, IBM apparently realized that there wasn't really a need to reserve the entire remaining 512K of addressing space for ROM and device-specific RAM (such as video RAM), so they "unreserved" a block of 128K, thus bringing the official maximum to 640K.
Even then, it was still possible to get beyond 640K of base ram by adding RAM in the "holes" unused by ROM on your particular PC, and using an appropriate driver in MS-DOS so that DOS would know about it. Examples of such "holes" in the memory map would be the space reserved for PCjr cartridge ROM, or the MDA video RAM space if you didn't have an MDA (or the CGA space if you had an MDA instead of a CGA). When VGA became commonplace, there was a shareware driver out there that would map the 64K VGA "window" to MS-DOS use, and switch the card to CGA compatibility mode. This gave you 704K of usable base RAM in DOS without any additional hardware, and was great for text-mode or CGA-mode only software where the VGA modes wouldn't be needed anyway.

Bingo. Also, while NTSC has 525 scan lines, some of them are "invisible" since they're part of the vertical refresh interval. That leaves, oh, just over 480 scan lines for the actual picture. Since it's an analog signal, horizontal resolution is not measured in pixels, but in line pairs-- essentially the densest arrangement of pairs of black and white vertical lines you can have across the frame before they are no longer distinguishable as individual black and white vertical lines (and look like a solid gray area instead). Normal NTSC TV receivers top out at about 270 line pairs unless they are equipped with a comb filter circuit, but the NTSC broadcast signal itself is good for somewhere around 320 or 340 line pairs. Double the line pair number to get an approximate "pixel" count for a digital equivalent, and you get about 640 pixels. Hmm. 640x480 pixels. Where have we seen that before..?

BTW, in the days before color, the video amplifiers in some early 525-line B&W TV receivers had bandwidths that covered the full 4 MHz video channel, giving them even better horizontal resolution than NTSC color would allow. This results in the odd experience of being able to "see" the colorburst signal (3.579545 MHz) when viewing a color NTSC program on such sets, which appears as a fine grid-like pattern of shimmering dots on the screen.

As others have mentioned, the "Usa, Japan" story is an urban legend. That doesn't mean that you've entirely misremembered your own "little transistor radio," however. Many of the early small transistor radios were in fact made in the USA. It wasn't until the early 1960's that the American radio manufacturers pretty much gave up that market, and contented themselves with selling re-badged Japanese-made transistor radios. [Some high-end Zenith and (perhaps) GE transistor radios were made in the USA for a while longer, though]

Actually, the new Metro interface reminds me a lot of the old Program Manager from Windows 3.x. Apparently Microsoft has forgotten why they replaced it with the Windows 95 "Start Menu" style of program selection. The problem with Program Manager was that it started to become unwieldy after you installed about a half-dozen major applications, each having multiple shortcut icons. ...And unlike the formerly-known-as-Metro interface in Windows 8, Program Manager at least let you organize the icons (shortcuts) into folders and minimize or overlap groups of shortcuts on the desktop so they wouldn't have to all be visible together.

What's next? A comeback for the Windows 1.x and 2.x "MS-DOS Executive" as the default Windows shell? [I guess you could do essentially the same thing by putting explorer.exe on the desktop...]

Ask Jimmy Kennedy and Nat Simon. They're the ones who actually wrote that song. ...back in 1953. I've got at least two different versions of it on old shellac 78's. The Joe "Fingers" Carr version is probably the most common, and there was a reissue of that one on LP. The Four Lads version is earlier, but seems to be more difficult to find.

It is rather amusing to play one of those 78's on a wind-up Victrola and watch the reaction of fellow TMBG fans...

You're correct-- Polaroid SX-70 and other integral films have turned out to be quite stable indeed. Polaroid B&W peel-apart prints are also incredibly stable-- as stable as conventional B&W prints on silver halide paper.

The only Polaroid prints that tended to fade were the (mostly older) "coater-required" B&W peel-apart films-- if you didn't bother to use the print coater! Also the Kodak Instant films (at least in the early days) faded pretty badly when exposed to UV (i.e. sunlight), but those weren't Polaroid products.

I don't know about a Kodak instant transparency film, but Polaroid had a product exactly like what you're thinking-- namely Polachrome 35mm film. It was fairly successful for the reasons you just mentioned. I was a pretty dense film and was slow, but it was pretty neat to be able to develop a 36-exposure roll of color slides in about 5 minutes! ...and without a darkroom at that. All you needed was the Polaroid 35mm Autoprocessor box (not very expensive for the manual-crank model)-- and the processing cartridge that was provided with the film.

Oh, and there was also a B&W version that was faster and had more normal density (the color film used additive color filter stripes to produce color).

Also, oddly enough, Polachrome wasn't much more expensive than Ektachrome + processing. [It also has turned out to be much more stable-- my Ektachrome slides from the 1980's look pretty bad now, but the Polachrome ones still seem to look like they did the day they were processed.]

Um, your Super Ikonta is a nice camera, but it is not an SLR.

The more modern Fuji folding cameras are not SLRs either. Folding cameras were once very popular indeed, but none of those were SLRs.

The magic of the SX-70 design was not that it folds up (heck, even the original Polaroid 95 was a folding camera), but that it was the first folding single-lens reflex camera.

The closest thing to a folding production SLR before that was the Graflex family, but those aren't really folding cameras, since the mirror box doesn't collapse. The only "folding" aspect to those is the bellows and focusing track similar to a folding camera, but the lens can only retract a bit past infinity. Also, the big folding "chimney" viewing shield on most models gives it a "folding camera" look, but that's just a sun shield over the waist-level finder. Anyway, as far as I know, the only folding SLR ever made that was not an SX-70 or one of its decendants was also a Polaroid product-- the Polaroid Craptiva. ...I mean Captiva. I never did understand the logic behind going through the trouble to create a whole new folding SLR design around that model, given that it had a rather slow lens and had only a very limited two-zone AF system (and no manual overrride), and no close-focus capability aside from a rarely-seen closeup accessory.

That's pretty good, but I think "A Logic Named Joe" by Murray Leinster in 1946 has describes a service that gets interestingly close to Google in certain regards (once "Joe" starts changing things) even if the details are very different.

Who's joking? I was actually just starting to wonder why nobody even made the suggestion of a 5.25" diskettte drive. I used to do that all the time-- at least, until several years ago when I discovered that the spiffy new motherboard I bought no longer supported 5.25" floppy drives. It was really handy for getting data from old diskettes and putting them onto more modern media.

I don't know if Windows 7 has 5.25" floppy support (I haven't tried), but Windows XP certainly does-- all the way back to the original 160K single-sided format from DOS 1.0. Windows XP/2000 even identifies 5.25 drives with a cute little icon that looks like a 5.25" diskette (instead of the usual 3.5" diskette icon).