THE ALTAIR 8800 (1975)
If you were around in 1975, and happened to purchase this baby, all of your friends would be crowding around your desk, going ‘oooh’ and being jealous. While it may look a bit like your sound system’s amplifier, the Altair 8800 is considered by many to be the first mass produced personal computer, although it was known as a micro-computer at the time, since they were formerly about the size of an entire lounge. The device came as a kit which had to be assembled, a process that only technological wiz-kids would have attempted.

As oldcomputers.net explains:
“Since no keyboard or monitor was necessary, or cheaply available, users flipped switches on the front panel, writing their own programs in machine language, and watching the LEDs on the panel light up in response to their commands. Bill Gates and Paul Allen saw an opportunity and wrote Altair BASIC, a true programming language, and the first commercial Microsoft computer product. Monte Davidoff contributed maths routines, including the floating-point routines for Altair 4K BASIC”.

The IMSAI 8080 (1975)
The IMSAI 8080, with its appealing blue and red switches, was one of the first consumer computers available. And, while there were earlier ones available, the IMSAI was the first to be available ready assembled, not to mention the sexiest and best looking micro-computer so far. The machine inspired interest in computers as well as the launch of Byte Magazine, in 1975, who’s first front cover declared “Computers: The worlds greatest toy!”. But the world didn’t agree, not yet anyway, and when much more user friendly computers became available just a couple years later, IMSAI filed for bankruptcy.


Let’s hear from oldcomputers.net again: 
“In its simplest configuration with only a CPU (Central Processing Unit) card, you enter your program using the front panel switches, while reading the results on the LED indicator lights. No keyboard or other display is necessary. This type of programming is very slow and tedious – any mistake could corrupt the system and you’d have to start over again. Only true hackers were successful at efficiently operating an IMSAI 8080”.

THE IBM (5100) (1975)
This, IBM’s first microcomputer (it had only produced mainframes before) is often called the first portable computer, although, weighing in at 55 pounds, it was hardly a laptop (unless you have an unusually large lap). It took the technology to the next level. It was a complete system with a built in monitor (on of the first examples of this), keyboard and data storage. It was designed for professional scientists, not businessmen or casual users.

The Apple 1 (1976)
Even PC users would have to concede that Apple have come a long way when it comes to making machines. Their first computer was made by Steve Wozniack becaause he couldn’t afford one and wanted one. Also, he wanted to impress his friends, which he did at the Homebrew Computer Club, where Steve Jobs loved it so much he decided to try and sell some. The first Apple was sold as a kit which had to be assembled, and only 200 were made. It was only with the Apple 2, the following year, that the brand came, so named because Jobs once worked in an Apple orchard, came into its own.

The Apple 2 (1977)
While containing the same processor and running at the same speed as the Apple 1, the Apple 2’s improvements, which mainly made it more accessible to the average computer user and more aesthetically pleasing, made it one of the most popular early computers. It featured major innovations including a color display, eight internal expansion slots, and, wait for it… a case with a keyboard. Yes, back in the 70s this was by no means a standard feature. It ran Basic, the ‘Windows’ of the time, and this programming language made it the most user-friendly machine yet. But what made it popular was VisiCalc, a spread-sheet programme that was the Xcel of its time and made it incredibly useful for accountants. It was released on Apple because of the Apple 2’s superior memory – it supported a whopping 48K or Ram.

The Atari 400 and 800 (1979)
While most people remember Atari for their gaming consoles, the 70s saw them attempt to produce home computers as well. The Atari 400 was meant to be kiddy-friendly, and the 800 was its ‘big sister’. The machine would boot up into ‘notepad’, the only installed application. Everything else, including Basic, would run from a cartridge. As one would expect, the machine had an emphasis on gaming, and one could insert cartridges and play a range of arcade copies (Pacman and Donkey Kong included) and original games. Apparently, the machines were purposefully designed to look like typewriters, as users found these more ‘friendly’ than computers at the time.

Stay tuned for Part Two: Still Big, Slightly Better and Also Obsolete: Computers of the Eighties.

The geek code is used by geeks universally. It’s basically a few lines of code that define our level of geekdom and our personalities. Generating a geek code entails choosing from a variety of options including Type of Geek, Appearance, Age, level of computer literacy, politics and entertainment interests. Once you have generated your own code you are invited to add your geek code your signature file. The result? Other geeks will be able to know exactly where you stand, both as a geek and as a human being, just by looking at your code.

Being a geek is one thing, but these days more info is needed. How much do you pwn when it comes to computers, are you a PC or Mac user, are you left wing or right wing, do you love Star Trek or worship Babylon 5? Generate your own geek code and other geeks will be able to determine the above and more without even having to ask.

My geek code is:

—–BEGIN GEEK CODE BLOCK—–
Version: 3.1
GMC d? s+:- a- C+++ U+>$ P+ L- E W+++$ N++ o+++ K+++++ w++ O M+ V PS+ PE Y+ PGP++(++)>++ t–(–)>– 5+ X R tv- b+++ DI++ D++ G e+++ h r y+(+)
——END GEEK CODE BLOCK——

To decode it and find out a little more about me than the average person would want to know plug my code into :
The Geek Code Decoder .

To generate your own code automatically go
here.

I went online to see if a n00b would be able to learn to speak geek using nothing but Google.

There are various sites offering dictionaries of geek terminology. Many of them, like the Webopedia, offer nothing more than boring IT definitions – and let’s face it, if you are a true geek you probably know what DHCP, OEM or CMOS means already, and if you’re not chances are you don’t want to know. Of much more interest to geek and non-geek alike are the definitions on Mainfraim.org’s GeekSpeak – it has definitions of some hilarious and uniquely geeky phrases, many of which perfectly capture the geek’s tendency to apply terms that used to be reserved for computers to everyday life.

Selected highlights:
Alpha Geek: The most knowledgeable, technically proficient person in an office or work group. “Ask Larry, he’s the alpha geek around here.”
Doorstop: A computer that is no longer considered fast enough or to contain insufficient storage, etc. for use in normal work. All 286’s and 386’s are doorstops. Most 486’s are now doorstops. Soon we’ll see Pentium doorstops.
Egosurfing: Scanning the net, databases, print media, or research papers looking for the mention of your name.
Let’s take this off-line: Let’s talk about this later, after the meeting.
Uninstalled: Euphemism for being fired.

For a comprehensive list of internet acronyms/ chat slang/ jargon, click here.

Sure, everyone knows what it means to LOL, and most people are familiar with the phrase WTF. But there the list includes some truly obscure examples, my favourite being :

BSEG – Big sh*t eating grin
DDSOS – Different day, same sh*t
IANAL – I am not a lawyer (expect an uninformed opinion)

So yes, we do have our own language, but don’t despair, with the help of Google even the greenest n00b will be talking like an uber-geek in no time. Good luck.

Spiderman (Peter Parker) and Hulk (Bruce Banner)
In their own right, both Spidey and the not-so-jolly green giant are, while fearsome fighters when in the guise heir super-hero alter-egos, complete geeks when in normal human mode. Peter Parker is a brainy guy with glasses who gets good grades but struggles to succeed socially at school, while Bruce Banner is the polar opposite of the thoughtless monster he turns into when angry. He is a withdrawn, shy and extremely intelligent physicist. Respect.

Mohinder Suresh
He may be exceptionally good looking, and he may not live up to the geek stereotypes (the glasses, lack of social skills, greasy hair, etc), but Heroes’s main boffin, hailing from Chennai in India, is a geek, make no mistake. As a genetics professor, Suresh is an expert on impressive sounding things things like algorithms, the genetic fight-or-flight impulse and the Shanti virus. While many other characters on the show can be found partying, Suresh is most often perched behind a screen or buried in a book, determined to discover what he needs to… even if it takes all night! Oh, and he’s hot. And his status as one of the few geeks with pulling power make him an aspirational character.

Marshal Flinkman
One of the stars of TV’s CIA action drama, Alias, Flinkman is a true geek hero. He is kind of the series’ Q, inventing incredible gadgets. He is also an expert in robotics, chemistry, acoustics, electronics, biometrics, explosives, computer networks, and has a photographic memory to boot. Despite all his skills though, he is completely socially inept. Just like many of us! While Mohinder Suresh gives geeks false hope that we will all one day be charming and debonair, most of us unfortunately are a lot more like Flinkman.

1. The Million Dollar Homepage
In 2005 a 21-year-old English student named Alex Tew had an idea to help with his university fees – he started a website arranged in a 1000 x 1000 pixel grid and sold each pixel for a dollar to advertisers (Tew felt that people were more likely to respond to the idea if he used dollars rather than pounds). Despite the fact that the result is one of the most boring and spam-heavy sites in history, Tew succeeded in selling all the space on his site, and grossed over a millon dollars in the process. The site is still up there, and you can go see it, if you really want to – it’s a pointless if colourful slice of history.

2. Save Toby

Few people have ever mixed black humour with internet entrepeneurship, which is why Save Toby deserves a place in history. The site features pictures of a cute bunny rabbit, with its anonymous webmasters threatening to cook and eat Toby unless they receive $50,000 in donations to care for. Banking details were provided, as were a variety of rabbit recipe, just to show that they were ‘serious’. One could make a donation or buy a variety of ‘Save Toby’. Since the sites creators remained anonymous, it’s unclear how much money they made off the website, or, in fact, if Toby actually exists/existed. Just in case he does/did, good news for animal lovers is that Toby was saved by Bored.com, who bought the site, thereby sparing Toby from the pot.

3. John Chow

His site adorned with the tag ‘I Make Money Online By Telling People How To Make Money Online’, John Chow is the ultimate internet entrepeneur, as he appears to make money for no apparent good reason. He has 50 000 plus followers on Twitter, despite the fact that his tweets include links to pictures of his lunch (BBQ chicken and chips) and advice on where to get customised M&Ms. According to Chow himself. ‘I am best known for his famous quote “My World! My Rules!” and “Oh well.”’ According to most others, Chow is best known for having a high-profile battle with Google, which has since been resolved but saw Chow’s popularity and fame skyrocket, to the point that now, by his own admission, he makes roughly $40 thousand a month from clicking the occasional button.

Most recently, scientists have been able to create a crude visual reproduction of a movie clip that one of their subjects had been watching just by viewing their brain activity. This development became the talk of the recent Society for Neuroscience meeting in Chicago, where some scientists claimed that neuroscience is close to being able to read memories and predict the future. So soon we will be able to tell where we put our keys but where we are going to put our keys tomorrow. Handy.

Needless to say, this new technology has started alarm bells ringing. Are governments going to use it to read our minds? Are the shape-shifting lizards going to use it to control our thoughts when a one-world government comes into being? No! Instead, scientists have been quick to be clear on the limitations of ‘neural decoding’, and have emphasised how important it could become through allowing us to communicate better with the speech-impaired, or stroke victims. It could even be used to diagnose eating disorders and other psychology-based health problems. And I have to admit the idea of this technology one day being used to visualising, say, an artist’s thoughts is kinda cool.

There is still quite a way technology could be used to actually visualise our thoughts. And as of yet, machines still cannot read our minds. But in the meanwhile, maybe try to keep your thoughts clean just in case.

1. Deep Thought: http://easyasfallingoffablog.blogspot.com

In its own words, this blog is about:

‘Random thoughts on subjects such as youth work, worship, God, the Church of England, films, paintings and occasional peeks at Latin, Medieval history, Merovingians and bishops along with a healthy smattering of children’s television, books, cooking and other oddities!’

If you find this interesting, you are probably the blog’s author, or a lobotomy patient, or maybe both.

2. Toast 99: http://hornytoubab.blogspot.com/

Billed as the ‘everyday musings of a middle-aged man’, the five most recent posts on this blog are about the author’s attempts to get his wife decent travel insurance. Gripping stuff.

3. Baller King: http://www.ballerking.com/

God’s gift to women now has his own blog.

It contains educational posts with titles such as ‘The Recession Will Make Getting Laid Easier’ and ‘becoming “exotic” and “intelligent” to a girl”‘.

Here is a sample of the blog’s sagely advice:

‘…when dating girls, remember two things:

1. Don’t spend too much money on them before they sleep with you. Otherwise they wont’ respect you.

2. You still need to pay for any date you go on with them though. So don’t go on any expensive dates before you stick it in her’.

I would bet any amount of hard cash that whoever writes this blog is actually a virgin with chronic BO and at least four cats.

4. Bad Hair Day: http://badhairday.typepad.com/bad_hair_day/

Yes, believe it or not this site is literally about catching people who are having bad hair days and posting the pics online. This is what happens when Heat Magazine’s rejection of your job application isn’t enough to kill your dream of being a writer.

The Tone Matrix:

This nifty little online flash music making device is a sinewave synthesiser invented by the Andre Michelle laboratory. The synth is based on an AudioTools engine and is triggered by an ordinary 16step sequencer. Each triggered step causes a force on the underlaying wave-map. Or, tranlated into non-geek, you press different squares and in the process create interesting combinations of sounds when you play with it. It’s addictive.

Fake news:

Ok, so America’s best made up news source, The Onion, is a site most people have already heard of, but it remains one of the funniest places on the net to waste some time at.

If you want some real information rather than satire, their side-project, a site on movies, music, books, games and tv, The AV Club is excellent too.

And, for a more local flavour there’s our own answer to The Onion, Hayibo, a site with the slogan ‘breaking news. Into little pieces’ which describes itself as ‘South Africa’s second best source of made up news after the SABC’. Through intensive detective work I have discovered that the site is the brainchild of author Tom Eaton and, um, some other guys.

Online Tetris
Anyone who follows this blog, and who read the Geek God post on Tetris inventer Alexey Pajitnov will have guessed that I am a fan of the world’s most addictive puzzle game. Tetris Friends is an incredibly evil waster of time for any Tetris player. One registers and gets a profile and then competes against other people online in a bunch of different Tetris-related games, each of which offers a fresh twist on the original. I started off as a Beginner, and I’m now ranked as Elite (rank 14 out of 20).

What do you get if you get to rank 20, the highest rank? A giant loser sign tattooed on your forehead, that’s what. Anyone who wants to mess with this site should know that no amount of Tetris-brilliance will gain them the admiration of the opposite sex. You have been warned.

And a whole bunch of others are listed below. Don’t come crying to me when you miss every deadline you have in the next year. I took about fourteen hours to write this little blog post, because I took breaks inbetween to ‘test’ these sites:

http://mashable.com/2007/09/08/5000-resources-to-do-just-about-anything-online

http://thisissand.com/

http://www.unkno.com/

http://www.juliasneedledesigns.com/Air%20Force%20Test%20Game.htm

http://www.jamsbio.com/games/jamsMatchSolo

http://www.miniglobz.com/games/twinspin2_en.html

Sperm-free DNA Testing
Wow, I didn’t even know there was such a thing as sperm free semen. Apparently there is. Sometimes attempts to identify DNA in sexual assault cases are hampered by the lack of sperm in the semen samples – the rapists just ain’t virile enough. A new procedure overcomes that hurdle by gathering DNA from other types of cells in sperm-free semen, like skin or immune cells.

Fingerprinting Bullets
Apparently, these little babies, developed in England (the land of Bond, of course), apply an electrical charge to bullet casings to detect areas on which sweat from fingers has corroded the metal. Fingerprints can be found from a bullet in this way years after the bullet was fired, even if it’s been wiped off. Impressive.

Brain Fingerprinting
Ve have vays of making you talk. A new test, similar to a lie detector, makes hiding information on a crime a lot more difficult. This test works out whether a person has knowledge of a crime by recording the brain’s response to various words and/or pictures that flash on a computer screen in front of the subject. The test does not prove a person’s innocence or guilt, but only whether the person has information about the crime. Unlike lie detection, brain fingerprinting is admissible in court.

Touch DNA
Touch DNA hit the spotlight in America in 2008, when it was used to clear members of the Ramsey family in the 1996 murder of 6-year-old beauty queen JonBenet Ramsey. The process collects DNA from skin cells deposited on an object coming in contact with human skin. So anything you touch, ever, could be used against you in a court of law. Remember that, criminals!

You have to love the United States of America. While down on the southernmost tip of Africa we are forced to spend our money on frivolities like poverty alleviation and employment creation, the yanks have a little extra money to burn. Well, actually, they are in massive amounts of debt (which doesn’t really phase them since they are used to bail-outs), and this article may help to explain why – developing the devices listed above must be costly.

All I know is that we could sure use some of these devices in crime-ridden Johannesburg!

Reason no. 1:
People who shouldn’t be famous
There are a whole bunch of them. The Numa Numa kid filmed himself on a webcam badly miming to a crap Eurovision pop song and became an icon. The Star Wars kid ran around on camera making a fool out of himself with a makeshift lightsaber and gained similarly instant fame. Mahir Cagri, a Turkish guy who must have been the inspiration behind Sasha Baron Cohen’s character Borat, became internationally recognised just for propositioning women in Broken English. The Tourist Guy found fame when he was deep etched and placed on a bunch of dangerous situations and locally, a similar idea turned humble (if strangely dressed) wait-lifter Cassie Booyse into Vernon Koekemoer. And Vincent Van Gogh died, unknown, after selling one painting in his entire lifetime. Depressed yet?

Reason no. 2:
LolCats and ROFLCats
Whether you go to lolcats.com, roflcats.com or icanhascheezburger.com you will be met with the same thing – pictures of cats being unnecessarily cute with a pathetic pidgin internet English caption tacked onto it. The phenomenon was started when Eric Nakagawa found the original I Can Has Cheeseburger pic on the net and started the site of the same name. As if any proof were needed that people are mostly very stupid, the site soon had millions of hits a day. Countless imitations, including LOLDogs and, far more disturbingly, LOLBums, now exist. While we like to think we are more intelligent than animals, the fact that they don’t sit around on Photoshop making ROFLPeople suggests it’s the other way round.

Reason no. 3:
Very bad things
There are sites on the internet hosting things so disgusting that they make you question the humanity as a whole. These range from the bizarrely amusing (example – Cakefart.com, which literally is exactly what its name says it is) to the utterly diabolical, the kind of thing it one watches out of morbid curiosity and then has to work through in therapy for years afterwards. Famous examples include Goatse.com, LemonParty.org and, worst of all, the infamous 2 Girls One Cup. I will not describe the content of any of these sites to you and, if you visit any of them, I take no responsibility whatsoever for any psychological damage caused. All I know is that after viewing any one of these clips it is hard to argue that makind is inherently good.
PS: I have mercifully decided not to provide any links on this one