the five stages of cable standards

July 11th, 2010

As I dig around my disaster of an office, searching for a standard power cable and finding everything else, I realize there are five apparent states for cables:

  1. Introduction: What the hell is a eSATA cable?
  2. Acquisition: Man, I guess I’d better buy another HDMI cable.
  3. Over-saturation: Why the hell do I have all these USB cables?
  4. Perceived obsolescence: I haven’t used a RS232 cable in years, so I guess I can throw these out.
  5. Desperation: Where the hell am I going to find a Commodore IEC cable?

I suppose I have had the right number of cables once or twice, but never for long.

an introduction

February 12th, 2008

This blog is an attempt to chronicle all the really great ideas of the future that, in retrospect, are really awful; the weird, freaky cool things that didn’t make it into the next decade; and even things that we’re really happy are gone.

We’re here to talk about dialing your home to turn your oven on, or reading news over your TV set.

We’re here to gripe about how game pads replaced joysticks, and how raster monitors replaced vector monitors.

We’re here to celebrate the MMU, the DVR, and the DSL, and remember how bad the world was before them.

We’re here to make fun of 8-track, video discs, DivX, and every pair of 3D glasses that ever gave us a headache.

Forward, into the past!