I was a nerdy kid ("Noooo" I hear you cry).  Had a hand-drawn periodic table on the wall, took apart anything I could get my hands on and had a number of toys that apparently you just can’t get any more because they’re "not safe".

One of my favorites was the Thomas Salter Chemistry Set.  These things were available in "Levels".  Level 1 contained some water, iron filings and probably little else.  But by the time you reached Level 7, you had most of the periodic table, a dash of plutonium and enough odds and ends to do start some serious fires.  Well, okay, maybe not plutonium, but you could have some scarringly good fun with any kit beyond Level 4 or so.

Sadly, if Wired
and other sources are to believed (and I think they can be), such
danger has been removed from the lives of today’s kids.  And that’s a
real shame.

I distinctly remember some random combination of Salter chemicals that bubbled up and out of the test tube, melted the test tube holder and made a fair sized hole in the various layers of newspaper etc protecting the kitchen table. Now that’s what I call an educational toy — I gained far more respect for chemicals from my Salter-inspired misadventures than I ever from what we did in school.

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It’s been a long time since I wrote a dead tech post. 

Logan (CTO) and I are almost exactly the same age.  I’m not sure which of us was online first — probably him since he started coding pretty much in-utero.  Before the web, we both used tools like email, gopher, and telnet.  I even recall using telnet and the Unix "talk" command to IM a girlfriend I had in college. 

Yep.  I’m seriously old in internet years.

We were both also very early users of the web, back when NCSA Mosaic was the tool-de-jour and there were only two porn sites on the web (which represented about the same percentage of the web back then as porn sites do today).

But one of the things I had forgotten about until recently was the joy of sending attachments via email "back in the day".

Without getting well beyond my technical knowledge & re-writing history, email was basically designed to handle ASCII text — letters of the alphabet.  There was no direct support for binary files e.g. a jpg (bad example, JPG wasn’t around then) or other image.

So you went through a nifty process called UUEncode, which converted a binary file into chunks of ASCII text, something like this:

ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz0123456789+/

and there would be pages and pages of it.  More often than not you’d have to split the text across multiple emails. 

The recipient would then have to paste all the text back together and run UUDecode to get back to the not-yet-invented JPG you emailed them.

Sounds like fun, no?  I know a lot of folks hate Outlook, but trust me, it is a _slight_ improvement over the way things used to be…

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There can be only one…

Yes.  The ever fabulous Knight Rider.  I happened to catch an episode last week and it was a smorgasbord of cheesetastic loveliness.  And my car still doesn’t do all that stuff…

Now bear in mind that when Knight Rider aired when I was a kid growing up in England, most cars looked like this:

(the trusty Fiat 126)

or this (my first car):

(the Renault 4)

or, if you were really lucky, this:

(yay Austin Maxi)

So looking like this:

was a turbo-boosted ride to amazing…

That ever-trusty bastion of trivia, wikipedia, says that 90 episodes were created and they aired in more than 30 countries.  Did you know the crazy Swedes called it "Knight of the Night", and for the terribly literal German market, it was titled "Knight Rider - a car, a computer, a man - A man and his car fight against injustice".  And in Hungary, KITT had the "S-P-M-Fokozat".  Have you ever wondered what the Fokozat?

Fantastic!  And just try not humming that theme tune all day after you watch the video clip…

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I mentioned the Franklin Rex card previously.  It was a marvel.  I also mentioned that I had a better mobile office setup in 1997 than I do now.  The Laurel to my Rex’s Hardy was the HP Jornada 820.

This thing ran Windows CE, had a full size keyboard, weighed less than 2lbs and was tiny.  Take a legal-sized piece of paper and fold it in half, and you have about the right size.  It was about an inch thick when closed.  The screen was color, the batteries ran for 12+ hours per charge, it came with a CE version of MS Office, and it even had a modem built in.  I also seem to recall that the OS was all in ROM, so it booted instantly.

Last, but not least, it had a PC-Card slot, and played happily with the Rex card.

My previous experiences with laptops weighed in at almost 10lbs.  With the Jornada and Rex, I barely had 2lbs of luggage.  I could create and edit Word and Excel files, and send and receive email.  Life was good…

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Back in 1997, I had a slicker mobile office setup than I have now.  This was largely thanks to the Franklin Electronics Rex PC Companion.  Here’s a picture of the little fella…

This thing was awesome.  It was about the size of two credit cards glued together.  The whole thing could be placed in a laptop’s PC-Card slot (then called PCM-CIA) and sync’d with Outlook.  It ran on two watch batteries that literally powered it for months at a time.

The screen was a modest black-and-white 160-by-98 pixels, and the whole thing only had 5 buttons.  But it worked like a champ. 

Picture this: Prepare for a trip and sync your laptop with your desktop.  Get to your destination, update your calendar, to do list and notes on your laptop and download it all to the Rex.  Put the Rex in a shirt pocket and walk to the tradeshow with all the information you need for the day contained in just a few ounces of electronics that never failed, never locked up, almost never ran out of battery life and could easily be READ in bright daylight…

Sadly, the Rex never really took off.  I think it was mis-marketed — too many folks thought it was a replacement for a PDA.  Since you couldn’t enter data, those folks were always disappointed when they tried it.  But back then, PDA’s were awful.  Palm’s ate batteries as though they were candy and Windows CE was mostly a disaster.

But as a device to carry data, the Rex was second to none… and it spared me many pounds of luggage on many occasions…

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