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February 26, 2010

John N. Davis

Historic Tweet

The 140 character limit on Twitter may be a constraint for some, but it lets others go retro.

On February 20, an antique Commodore VIC-20 (circa 1981) at the Personal Computer Museum in Brantford, Ontario was used to send a tweet. There was a CBC report on YouTube the day before, and the event itself was recorded for posterity here.

The program had to be loaded into memory from a cassette tape. Talk about constraints!

John Davis joined the faculty of Osgoode Hall Law School in 2000, and teaches Intensive Legal Research and Writing. He was the Law Librarian at Osgoode from 2000 to 2005. From 1987 to 2000, he was an Associate Professor and the Law Librarian at the University of Victoria. From 1981 to 1987, he was the reference librarian and a sessional lecturer at the University of Manitoba. He also practised law for a time in Cayuga, Ontario. His pre-law studies were in computer science.
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4 Comments on “Historic Tweet”

  1. Steven Matthews says:
    February 26, 2010 at 6:00 pm

    Ah, but completely amazing that my little tape deck could play back sounds which translated into 1s and 0s. Our first family computer was the TI99-4A which operated in similar fashion.

  2. Chris Jaglowitz says:
    February 27, 2010 at 10:58 am

    While the VIC-20 had only 5k of RAM, it had some pretty neat games and helped pass many a rainy day.

    What a gem that PC Museum is! While browsing through its website and gallery of \artifacts\, I came across the Atari 800XL, with which I ran a BBS with a 300 baud modem when I was in high school — http://bit.ly/dypj57

    Visiting that museum's site brought back many memories of a time when computers were fun, long before our society became utterly shackled to computers and the Internet.

    Thanks for sharing this!

  3. John N. Davis says:
    February 27, 2010 at 11:51 am

    I had a cassette player to go with my TRS-80 Model 100 too. I probably still have it somewhere, if I dig around a bit. It never did fit in the carrying case, which I just opened up again for the first time in years, but the acoustic coupler was in there. I remember carrying that thing to conferences so I could check my e-mail, 1980s-style.

  4. Simon Fodden says:
    February 27, 2010 at 5:24 pm

    Oh man, nostalgia time: I also had a TRS-80 100 (a "Trash 100, as we said then), one of the truly great machines. The height of its impressiveness was when I was in a cottage without electricity in deepest, darkest Europe, writing away on it day after day and saving to cassette, all powered by double A batteries. Hard to beat, even now. Lovely thing.

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