On Death and iPods: A Requiem

Sophisticated electronics and other technologies have become so inexpensive that many for some time now are considered disposable commodities. Where once we paid (through the nose or with our firstborn) for a new gadget, that same gadget today is practically a give-away/throw-away item. Flash/thumb/USB/jump drives, for instance.

Years ago I worked at Parker Bros toys, in the electronic-games lab where we developed new products or ported existing ones, like Q*Bert (under great secrecy thanks to the ever-present threat of industrial espionage, rampant in the toy industry) to game consoles such as the Atari 2600 and, by the end of 1983, Atari 5200, Intellivision, ColecoVision, Commodore VIC-20, Texas Instruments TI-99/4A and Commodore 64.

At the time we had more money than sense and so we could afford 'development tools' like the latest, fully-loaded $80,000 Synclavier from New England Digital, one of the first Apple Lisas and, just for the lab, DEC's DECSYSTEM-20 which had a whopping 2 gigabytes of mass-storage. Unheard-of capacity in 1982!

Today, 32 years later, I saw a 2 GB flash drive for ... free.

Even better, it was smaller than a full-service laundromat.

My friend paid $75.00 USD for a 4 function pocket calculator back in the late '70s. Battery powered, not solar cells.

I bought off ebay a calculator watch (even had sqr rt function) for 2$ US. Had free shipping from Japan. Yea its butt ugly green, but it tells time and can do basic math. They had an old TI science calculator watch on ebay last year that went for >1500$. Just goes to show ya.

I've got one of those, somewhere. Mine's black. Had it for yours. They have like20 buttons or some such.

Also have a "talking" watch. Yes folks, it tells you what time it is on the 1/4 hour and counts the time out when it's in stopwatch mode.