Home Computers: 100 Icons that Defined a Digital Generation (Wiltshire, Short 2020)

I heard about this one through respected retro computing channels, so my expectations were relatively high.

It doesn’t bill itself as such, but it’s really one of those museum collection books, in this case for the Center for Computing History. This is a fine genre, but understand that’s it is, deep down, an art book. It’s there to inspire, not as a research tool. The photographs are, therefore, artistic rather than documentary. It’s an industrial design coffee table book as much as it is a chronicle of computing.

Some reviewers have disputed the accuracy of the histories and I can’t speak to that except to say that I would have preferred the book cite its sources and spare one or two pages for a bibliography.

I appreciate that the iMac G3 is included as a sort of pinnacle of PC design though.

July / August web links

Gonna keep this one short and sweet.

Zzurgoll Take The Wheel (penny-arcade.com)

Amusing comic to set the tone here.

In the Future All Food Will Be Cooked in a Microwave, and if You Can’t Deal With That Then You Need to Get Out of the Kitchen (colincornaby.me)

This article captures the zeitgeist of being a software engineer in the summer of 2025.

They’re putting blue food coloring in everything (blog.foxtrotluna.social)

And this captures how it feels to live in summer 2025.

Signpost 2025-08-09Disinformation report (en.wikipedia.org)

Wikipedia editor goes on a multi language deep dive to expose someone’s self promotion operation. I find this stuff absolutely fascinating.

The Scam That Duped Pokémon’s Most Obsessive Card Collectors (popularmechanics.com)

Article about a scam in the Pokemon card collector community with good flavor on the collectors themselves and an interesting resolution. Proper caper.