Category Archives: geek

über

On Good Friday this month a good friend and I photographed the abandoned Solvay Coke & Gas complex in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The 46 acre factory complex closed in 2003 after the EPA took control of clean up and demolition. There were a number of buildings on the property at its peak industrial niveau, but now only four remain intact. The northernmost factory with its dangerous drops, the labratory with its completely flooding basement, an empty rear storage unit, and the main administration offices all contain great photo opportunities. The labratory basement was completely flooded and will soon destabilize. When we visited the administration building basement we could see six inches of standing water and hear flowing water. Unless the water has been turned off I expect that the basement is completely flooded by now. That building will certainly meet a swift demise in the coming years. According to this Milwaukee Journal Sentinel article the location is being cleaned up to make way for homes. This development means that this factory will not last. The adventure and decaying toxic beauty made for a great photo set on Flickr.

Caustic

Foto Zeitgeist

This was quite the eBay deal for me. This unused Apple II Workstation Card makes it possible for an Apple IIe with 128 kilobytes of RAM to boot up over an Appleshare network. How much RAM is 128 kilobytes? Well, my current Apple iMac has 2 gigabytes, which by today’s standards is middle of the road in terms of performance. Two gigabytes is equal to 2,097,152 kilobytes. That means my current iMac machine has 8,192 times more RAM than my Apple IIe. Isn’t it amazing what you can do with technology from 1983?

Foto Zeitgeist

The first electronic toy computer I remember playing with was Playskool’s friendly Alphie II. I’ve always had a fascination with how electronic devices interface. This little robot may be where it all comes from.

The buttons along the bottom corresponded with an icon on the top of the various theme cards. Eventually I figured out that the cards were totally irrelevant. The bottom row of program buttons followed a predetermined question pattern. One could get the “right” answers by memorizing the pattern.

I regret not paying the $1 adoption fee for this benevolent robot at the thrift store.