Time Machines

simplicity and sentiment

While the 4-day battery life on my OnePlus Watch 3 is great, the Core Time 2’s 30-day battery life is just ridiculous in the best way possible. And while the design may not be modern, it’s cozy, retro, and familiar in a way I adore. And it’s that last point that really drove my purchase decision.

There’s another reason behind my purchase, and it’s a very personal one: nostalgia.

… looking at the watch online, I’m immediately taken back to my days in high school when I had my original Pebble watches. It’s a feeling I don’t get with any of my other smartwatches, and as personal and subjective as it may be, it’s a feeling I can’t help but love. (Why I spent $225 on an old, outdated Pebble smartwatch)

Hardware

I never owned a Pebble smartwatch but I did own a Psion pda, a miniature laptop from the days before cell phones, small enough to fit in a pocket. It had a keyboard you could touch type on, obviously impossible. Somewhere I have, or used to have, a picture of my daughter, age about 8, sitting in an airline seat with the tray table down and on it the miniature laptop she was reading from. That may have been the family trip to Europe on which my Psion, with all the children’s books on it, somehow got dropped in a bathtub. The machine survived but its contents were lost, which is how our daughter discovered that she liked the grown-up books that her mother had brought.

When the world moved on to cell phones I missed my Psion, proposed, on my blog, that one of the cell phone companies should license the magic spell on the keyboard and build a cell phone version. I was not the only enthusiast; eventually Planet Computers, working with the original keyboard wizard, brought out the Gemini, precisely what I was asking for. I bought one, found the laptop form factor with the screen on the inside less convenient than the cell phone form factor despite the advantage of a usable keyboard, did not end up using it. Then Planet brought out the Astro Slide 5G, with a Psion keyboard and the screen on the outside, so I bought that. But a keyboard plus a cell phone was thicker and heavier than my cell phone, voice recognition had gotten so good that I no longer needed a keyboard, and my Macbook Air was sufficiently portable so I no longer really needed a pocket computer.

Both phones are at the moment in my desk drawer, less than a foot from my left elbow. I occasionally take them out to look at them. My Psions are in a box on top of a file cabinet, a few feet to my right. Perhaps some day I will have a grandchild who would appreciate his own miniature laptop.

After the Psion but before the Air there was Eep, the Asus Eee PC, a netbook, smaller than a laptop, bigger than a Psion. I eventually passed it down to my daughter who used it to take notes in her college classes. With the oversized extra battery it was good for six hours. She still has it.

Vectrex

It looked rather like a smaller version of the original Macintosh. Its screen drew things with sharp lines because, unlike all other home game machines, it used vector instead of bit mapped graphics, hence its name. I owned two, one for me and one for my son. Many years after it had vanished from the marketplace I came across a Usenet news group dedicated to it. Reading the posts, I discovered that someone in the group had located Smith Engineering/Western Technologies, the firm that held the copyright on the Vectrex and its games, and written to ask permission to make copies of game cartridges. The response, pretty clearly from the person who designed the machine, was an enthusiastic yes. He was obviously delighted to discover that there were people still playing with his toy, his dream, his baby. Not only were they welcome to copy cartridges, if anyone wanted to write new games he would be happy to provide the necessary software.

A Fortunate Collision

For about twenty years my wife’s car was an Infinity I30. Eventually we decided that the cost of repairs was more than the car was worth, replaced it with a new Nissan Altima — which she found that she liked much less. One day another driver, glancing at the child next to her when she should have been watching the light, ran an intersection and into my wife’s Altima; neither she nor our daughter was injured but the insurance company found the car not worth repairing.

That was during Covid, which made shopping for a replacement, test driving a variety of cars, inconvenient. We tried for a little, then it occurred to her that she knew what car she wanted — a 2001 Infinity I30. I searched online, eventually found one with low mileage and in very good condition. It cost much less than another Altima, my wife likes it much more. Cheaper to insure too.

Software

I started playing World of Warcraft a little after it first came out; over the next few years my wife, son and daughter joined in. We did things sometimes together, sometimes separately. At one libertarian event where I was a speaker someone photographed me, in the audience for another speaker, playing WoW on my laptop. The picture went viral, here and, I was told, in China; players who had been told theirs was a juvenile entertainment appreciated evidence that it was shared by an elderly professor. Possibly it was a juvenile entertainment but I got more than a dozen blog posts out of it, on a wide variety of topics.

Over time, WoW changed, got worse. Three of the four of us stopped playing. I, and others, suggested that they should revive the original version. Amazingly enough Blizzard listened, brought out World of Warcraft Classic. I went back to it, mostly playing Torkle, a gnome mage who spoke only in rhymed verse; I eventually left the game but I still have his longer efforts on my hard drive. I never abandoned my subscription. Perhaps one of these days, when I find myself with too much time on my hands …

WoW came out in 2004, Strategic Conquest, a conquer-the-world game playable against a human opponent or the computer, twenty years earlier. It was the source of my rule for recognizing a really good computer game: When you pause it to use the bathroom it’s because you really need to.

I lost Strategic Conquest to updates in the Mac operating system but now I have it back. Infinite Mac gives you free emulation of Mac systems from System 1.0 to OS 10.4, each provided with lots of software now free, including Strategic Conquest under OS 9. I still play it, could, perhaps one of these days will, try Warcraft I or II and see how much I remember of them.