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Inside Walt Mossberg's Gadget Museum

posted by on Thursday June 15 2017, @11:06PM   
from the obsolescence-was-never-so-fun dept.

canopic jug writes:

The Verge bids farewell to tech writer and editor Walt Mossberg by talking to him about his favorite bits of gadgetry.

Walt Mossberg is retiring this year — he's already written his last column, hosted his last Code Conference, and taped the final episode of Ctrl-Walt-Delete in front of a live audience in New York. But Walt's also assembled an impressive collection of notable gadgets over his two-decade run as a reviewer and columnist, and we asked him to talk us through some of the more notable items as he cleared out of his office.

This isn't everything — there's far too much for that. But there's nothing quite like Walt talking about gadgets and what they mean, and we tried to pick a few that defined their moments in a way few products now seem to do.

[There are 16 tech items in the linked story's photo — how many can you identify? --martyb]

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Original Submission

• ZX81 ZX81 (Score: 2) by looorg on Thursday June 15 2017, @11:31PM (3 children)

  by looorg (578) on Thursday June 15 2017, @11:31PM (#526248)

  From the title I thought this was going to be about shotguns, I never even heard of this Walt guy -- I guess I don't read enough WSJ. That said most of the items on the big image (- the once mentioned in the article) are fairly easy to identify since you can read the labels or they just are not that old. The only one I can think of that was a bit hard, if you hadn't owned one, is the ZX81 with the memory expansion -- even tho I don't recall there being blue text on mine, perhaps this was some American feature cause I have distinct memory of it being written in red on mine.

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• Re:ZX81 Re:ZX81 (Score: 2) by aristarchus on Friday June 16 2017, @01:50AM (1 child)

  by aristarchus (2645) on Friday June 16 2017, @01:50AM (#526292) Journal

  I guess I don't read enough WSJ.

  Sometimes I dream that I never left the Green site. Corporate shilling. Literal hunting of heads. Capitalist values, Venture/Vulture capitalist values. And then I remember, it is all about the marketing. It always has been. Those of us interested in tech are not profitable enough, because we are too smart and able to subvert the entire marketing process. So, whenever I read Remington, I think "typewriters". Is that wrong?

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  • ''whenever I read Remington, I think "typewriters" (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 16 2017, @07:04PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 16 2017, @07:04PM (#526573)

    I think of the widow with the weird house that was never finished.

    Winchester Mystery House [wikipedia.org]
    In 1884 she purchased an unfinished farmhouse in the Santa Clara Valley and began building her mansion. Carpenters were hired and worked on the house day and night until it became a seven story mansion. She did not use an architect and added on to the building in a haphazard fashion, so the home contains numerous oddities such as doors and stairs that go nowhere, windows overlooking other rooms and stairs with odd-sized risers. Many accounts attribute these oddities to her belief in ghosts.

    Superstitious people with excess wealth make for weirdness.

    -- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]

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• Re:ZX81 (Score: 2) by turgid on Friday June 16 2017, @08:12PM

  by turgid (4318) on Friday June 16 2017, @08:12PM (#526596) Journal

  It's red on my ZX81.

  --
  I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].

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