The First Internet Band

STD...in the flesh!

Kids, it was 1994.
Desert Storm was still fresh on everybody's minds.
The fun Clinton was running the show.
Nirvana was dead and the Spice Girls were just beginning to peek their vacant heads over the horizon.
Oh, and the internet -- most of us were just starting to test out the proverbial e-waters with our digital toes (see what I did there) and just a select few of us were regularly dabbling with a kind of black magic called "email."
Also some guy named Jeff founded a book reselling outfit called Amazon, of all things, but nobody really cared.
Despite the fragile, house-of-cards state of the web at the time, a handful of hippy-engineers from California decided to see just how far they could push this fledgling technology by promoting an event that was likely the first use of the internet to broadcast a live rock-band performance, even though the Rolling Stones would actually do the same thing immediately following it.
Check out the short vid below for a bit of old-school schooling about Severe Tire Damage, the first internet rock-band. Party on, Garth!

VIDEO
HISTORY OF THE INTERNET - SEVERE TIRE DAMAGE

BONUS VIDEO
COMPUTER CHRONICLES INTERNET EPISODE FEATURING SEVERE TIRE DAMAGE - BEGINS AT 3:40


LINK
FOR EVEN MORE INFO VISIT THE OFFICIAL (AND SWEETLY RETRO) SEVERE TIRE DAMAGE WEBSITE AT WWW.STD.ORG BY CLICKING HERE

World's Biggest Pac-Man

The original Pac-Man game from Namco was an 80s classic and will always retain its crown as the top-dog of all video games. But if I could change one thing about it, it would be this: bigger boobs MORE MAZES. "So go play Ms. Pac-Man, you schmuck! It's got like four of them! (mazes, that is)" you brazenly respond. Well OK, Ms. Pac-Man's 4 mazes are definitely a step up from her old man's lone blue labyrinth, but it certainly doesn't hold a candle to this:

Yup, it's the world's biggest Pac-Man game and it was created entirely by ordinary netizens like you and me. Once logged into the site (using Facebook, of course), users can access a simple WYSIWYG editor that allows wanna-be game designers to create their own ultimate Pac-Man maze in just about any configuration they desire. When finished, the new maze is then is automatically linked to the existing collection of mazes via the escape tunnels, which, when entered, will transport the player's avatar to a whole new play-field, rather than just spitting him or her out of the tunnel on the opposite side (as was in the original game). The result of all of this effort is an endless, massive grid of interconnecting Pac-Man mazes that seem to go on forever. If you just want to play a quick game of dot-munch, however, and do not want to link your Facebook account to yet another damned website, you can do that too. There are plenty of unique mazes to start out on, each presenting its own twists and turns, while keeping intact the now-iconic sounds and sprites that make Pac-Man the game we all know and love.

One last thing. While I thought I'd never have to say this about any modern website built after Y2K, the site actually works best in Internet Explorer, and in fact (shudder), was designed specifically for it. So shut down your Chrome, Safari or Firefox and dig out that old M$ relic so you can get your digital noms on! Woof!

A big thanks to RetroGeeker fan, Cheryl, for tipping me off to this awesome, awesome site! Cheers!

CLICK HERE TO VISIT WORLDS BIGGEST PACMAN - NO QUARTERS REQUIRED

Retro Computing on the Boob Tube

Keeping up on tech news these days is piece of piss. Push notifications, Twitter feeds and an increasingly large number of other digital enemas make it easy to forget that there was a time when people actually sat down to watch TV programs about technology, or more specifically, home computing. Two of the more notable entries in this genre were an unassuming and decidedly stilted tech-show called, rather unimaginatively, Computer Chronicles, and its more colloquially-monikered spinoff, The Internet Café, later retitled simply Net Café. Having enjoyed an impressively lengthy run on PBS from 1981 to 2002, Computer Chronicles played witness to many key developments in the home computing industry including the introduction of the Mac, Windows 95, CD-ROMs and even birth of the internet which prompted the creation of its sister show, The Internet Café, in 1996. While you can't just turn on your TV and hope to catch a rerun of either program, episodes of both can be found tucked away at the always awesome and always free Internet Archive. Click below to take a trip back to a time before corporations owned the internet and 512K was more than enough for anyone.

CLICK HERE TO WATCH THE COMPUTER CHRONICLES

CLICK HERE TO WATCH NET CAFÉ

BONUS VIDEO!!
PITFALL INVENTOR DAVID CRANE EXPLAINS HIS NEW GHOSTBUSTERS GAME FOR THE COMMODORE 64

Peace, Love and Mass Consumerism

The internet. You're soaking in it. You talk on it, shop on it, bank on it and perhaps partake in other unmentionables on it. But for all of our modern tech-savvy and gadget-centric behavior, it turns out that the brilliant minds of 1969 already knew what we idiots in 2012 would be doing with all of those amazing technologies they could only dream about - well except for maybe Facebook. Sure they had the implementation a bit wrong and our culture has changed quite a bit in 43 years, but as you'll see in the video below they were on the right track. So the next time Al Gore tries to tell you he invented the information super-highway, a.k.a. "cyberspace," you can politely tell him to go hang his chad.