I mostly use my (elderly) MacBook Pro as a web browser when I need something more than a phone and am away from my desktop. It’ll play basic games, so I have Steam installed for when I’m traveling and feel the need to play something like Tales of Maj’Eyal. The screen is still in great shape so it works nicely for watching movies, as long as I can plug it in. Battery isn’t great any more.
Hmm, with those specs maybe for indie games that are a couple of years old, I’m thinking, using Boot Camp if that’s still a thing (if you want to play Windows games). Also you’d need a bit more (external) storage and a proper monitor.
I still use this -.-
Those things were pretty cool.
They were cool (oh, I see what you did there!). And they really worked well.
Actually I only realized the joke after I posted. :-)
Ok ok, what is it?
It’s an ice tray. Pull the handle and the new ice cubes pop out into an ice bucket or wherever.
Ah, I wasn’t that far off I suppose, I thought it looked like a pill organizer with a release handle, but that didn’t make sense.
Air raid sirens?
Hehe. I think I saw Empire Strikes Back the first time with one of those.
Speakers to hang inside the window of a car at a drive in movie place (before you could assume that everyone had a car radio–roughly till the late 1970s).
After that they’d use a low power FM signal and you’d tune in on your car radio.
I have fond memories of the punched card. I remember that utilities mailed out punched cards as bills. Do not fold spindle or mutilate. My highschool had a keypunch room. (Yes, I am an old fart who attended highschool in the 70s). I took some computer programming courses in highschool which included learning how to operate the IBM 029 keypunch machines to type our programs. The card deck would be sent through a card reader attached to modem with an acoustic coupler to a central mainframe for execution. We would get the results the next day on a paper prinout that had been shipped back to the school. Dropping a card deck was a lesson in why line numbers were used. Not a big deal for us as the room also included an IBM card sorter.
The ability to use an IBM 029 keypunch was a useful skill when I went to university. The unversity used computer terminals for program input and editing but still had one keypunch room left that had not yet been decommissioned. So why was my knowledge useful. Because the unversity residences had a big scavenger hunt as part of Frosh Week. My residence floor was quite serious about winning as it meant free cable TV in the common room for a year. One of the hunt items was a pound of punch card “chips”, the punched out portion of the cards. Other residence floors were at the keypunch room at the time we were and tried just typing only getting a few chips. I knew hot create a fishnet card (all holes punched) and use the duplication function to create lots of chips quickly. We got what we needed just before security kicked everybody out. And yes, we won the free cable TV.
The most fun thing about the punch cards was making what we called “DO loops”. Fold the leading (long) edge of the card over a a couple of times, run the edge over a desk or table to give it a curve and join the short ends to make a loop. Thrown like a football, these card loops flew fast and far in a curving trajectory. A damn fun thing to do in a huge lecture hall in first year.
