Retrolife

In Hindsight ‘Digital Life Update - February 1998’ in December 2020 Over 20 years on, and the idea of explaining a move to Mac might seem odd. In context, at the time, Apple was a basket case, Jobs barely back, the iMac wouldn’t be out for another six months and the company was almost bankrupt, so the idea of move to the Mac platform was a bit weird. Rhapsody? Wow, I’d forgotten about that. For those who don’t know, that was what would become OS X Server 1, when Apple bought NeXT with Steve Jobs, and a move to Intel would take another 8 years. Rhapsody would then further evolve into OS X. ...

We all know the web, don’t we. Hell, if we didn’t, then you wouldn’t be reading this now!! There are many issues relating to the web, from pornography to bandwidth. I can’t hope to even cover 1% of this in this page, but I just wanted to put on-line some of the things that can be a bit annoying when you’re on-line. This isn’t really a negative page; overall, I love the Web, and wouldn’t (couldn’t ?) be without it, but sometimes, well, it can get on your nerves. By the way, I’m sure that some of these things, I’ve been guilty of myself at some point, so apologies in advance. ...

In Hindsight - December 2020 I was a huge fan of free online texts, and I wrote this page against that backdrop in late 1997 when I was still teaching English on JET, Amazon was just getting somewhere and when buying an English language book meant a small selection in a larger city like Yokohama and paying a lot of money. Still, they were quaint and fun days perhaps. I still believe in open source e-texts, and still support Gutenberg, and they continue to upload more and more content each day. Interesting I mentioned the extension of copyright, something which rages on even to this day, but against a backdrop of more authors opening up some of their works to the marketplace to see how that model works. Surprisingly then, I think this page holds up, even in 2020. ...