What-if nostalgia

I have been slowly cleaning up the server file system and moving content about over the last few week and earlier today I stumbled across something that I had totally forgotten about.

I started doing video content for ce320 back in 2001 - not much of it survives alas. It was a lot harder work back then compared to today. I even had a VA friend do voice overs for them.

I had completely forgotten that prior to that in 2002 we were already working on a collaborative project together. That project was not always going to (quite) be "HPC:Factor".

It looks as though I re-rendered one of the ce320 video's with some other branding on it (it even has the different name in the voice over).

I've looked and looked and looked and looked this afternoon and I just couldn't find the original video export with ce320's logo on it. I was pretty certain that there was one, but as a gesture of good will to the new team effort, I must have rebranded it as a demonstration of what the new site name would look like on the video. I have a render of it from 13/01/2002 with handheldfactor.com's logo. A full year before HPC:Factor!

Just as I was about to give up though, I found the entire original master project in 2001 Adobe Premier (6?) format!

Yep, the graphic master file for the title card has all three logos in it, ce320, HandheldFactor and HPC:Factor! I can't believe that not only the Photoshop files still open, but Premier managed to even import the timeline and it's scrubbable!

In 2003 after the mess with S|HPC and the loss of the ce320 server and domain name, myself, Clint, John, Sean and Jeff (the founders) were trying to come up with a name or the site. I think we batted several about over a couple of hours until about 3/4 in the morning for me; with hpcfactor.com ultimately winning. I guess that we had already done the leg work on handheldfactor.com... so in the absence of anything creative one of us must have decided to shorten (probably me) it and register it that night (as I wanted to not be awake any more).

There are fragments of ce320 on the WBM... but I've also found backups of ce320 seemingly back to January 2001 too. ha epic.

So here we go, purely for my own nostalgia purposes (I swear I don't remember anything about handheldfactor.com or us working anything collaboratively before 2003). The original CESDC0002 title card in all three of its formats.









Attachments
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ce320.jpg (75KB - 0 downloads)
hhf.jpg (78KB - 0 downloads)
hpcf.jpg (76KB - 0 downloads)

Oh, we were children then. I remember writing you right after ce320 went down and you getting back to me to say sit tight, hpcfactor is just around the bend. Wasn't it about two months of off-line between ce320 and hpcfactor?

Jake

I certainly felt a lot younger back then

I don't remember you contacting me; interesting. I used to get a lot of email back then. I used to offer email tech support back then One of my closest friends today actually contacted me by email in 2001 about a 320lx running CE1. So email can't be all that bad!

Yeah, it must have been something like that. My memory is very hazy about it all it would seem. HPCFactor.com was registered on 11th March 2003. My gut says the issues happened after new year, but I'm an unreliable witness your honour .

I can't believe I managed to find the old files. There is so much about the layout of the site now that was present on ce320. The entire support section, the HCL. You can still recognise them today. If you'd asked me yesterday, I would have said that they were nothing alike.

Good grief...20 years ago...or longer we have been playing with these things. I remember drooling over a 300lx on display at our shopping mall in Anchorage...

I also remember my wife telling me, "No! Absolutely not!"

I'm just in awe that the HPC:Factor wordmark has hardly changed in the last 20 years. A true example of 'if it ain't broke don't fix it'.

Sounds like you had the last laugh on that one Rich... though you turned your hand to NEC rather than HP.

No, fundamentally its the same logo typography, I staggered it into what you see in the masthead for the v2 design, which I far prefer. The original one was a bit square and uninspired.

I always liked ce320's motif... it was just a bit anaemic. I never could get it fattened up.

I feel saddened for these kids today who just automatically incorporate technology into their lives as it is a natural part of existence.

They will never know the joy of discovery. The joy of self-actualization. Remember your first basic program where you made you name repeat printing on the screen?

10 Print "Rich",
20 x = x+1
30 if x = 500 then go to 50
40 go to 10
50 print "You did it!"

Building your own desktop from scratch...getting the Sysop deal on the Courrier HST 2400 baud modem. Waking up the next day to read your Fidonet messages from your BBS. Using a can of WD40 to revitalize your printer ribbon. Tractor feed paper in triplicate layers fanfolded. Getting the graphics card for your Okidata ML82. Buying a HP Deskjet (B&W only) at your local Sears store for $550. Using a paper punch to score a notch in a floppy disk so you could read and write the reverse side. Going from 720mb 5 1/4" floppy to 3 1/2" 1.44mb disks. CGA to VGA... And finally your first MFM/RLL hard drive...12 mb of pure heaven.

We lived through an era...

Oh please Rich, as if you first basic program wasn't

10 print "Boobies" 
20 goto 10

Manually addressing IRQ, DMA and IO - and resolving conflicts
Loading from cassette - the original modem noise
Continual feed printer paper flowing into a chatty dot matrix
The 8-bit era
Typing in your own program from a computer magazine or the manual
Remembering ce320
Spending way too much time writing autoexec.bat and config.sys
Installing Windows from floppy disks
The world before the Internet
Internet Explorer 2
9600/14.4k Dial-up!

DOS For Dummies: "Here's how you do this, but you're too stupid to do that, that, and that."

Editing win.ini and taking out all the double-spacing because PC Mag said that would make 3.1 run faster.

Group purchases of the Leading Edge Model D because if you and your sexless friends could buy 20 at one time, the store would knock off $100usd.

Jake

Over 40 years ago: Hacking a block graphics rom for the VT100 terminal. (1000 or so distributed within DEC, earned nothing extra
Over 30 years ago: Writing a full graphics package for the Hercules card in the Amstrad/Schneider 1640, just to see the rotations of a 4d cube in 'real time': screen swapping at 1 screen per second, in 3D even. In Forth and assembler for max speed.
Upgrading the 8086 in the PC with a V30, just to be able to run some old CP/M programs natively...(naively?) .
Hacking the PX/8 to run ZCPR (CP/M upped for the Z80...) , running a full home network using Kermit...

Now: Keeping 30 years old handheld systems worldwide alive as one of the two 95LX/100LX/200LX repairers in the world. Nostalgia is still what it used to be.

Pretty much sums up how I feel about keeping this old gal' going after all these years... and the hundreds of thousands of hours I've put into it and its predecessors. The months of reworking to keep one step ahead of the spammers, hackers and trying to keep giving people a reason to come here. Despite how minute the community is now... well, you've just gotta really.

Only difference might be that this site is the last dedicated one standing, possibly.

Still remember my amazement when I first discovered email through college in the late 80s.....and the excitement when I first used a modem and downloaded email through my free Juno account.