Posts tagged 1990s
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ICQ, One of the Oldest Instant Messengers, Is Shutting Down
On Friday, the ICQ website posted a simple message: “ICQ will stop working from June 26.” It now recommends users migrate to the messaging platforms from VK, the Russian social media company that acquired ICQ from AOL in 2010, but under a different corporate name.
It’s an unceremonious end for a software program that helped kick off instant messaging on PCs in the 1990s. ICQ, which stands for “I Seek You,” was originally developed at an Israeli company called Mirabilis before AOL bought it in 1998 for $407 million.
ICQ, which was released several months before AOL’s own instant messenger, had 100 million registered users in 2001. But over time, ICQ lost out to competing instant messengers and smartphone chat apps. In 2010, VK bought ICQ with the goal of revitalizing it since the instant messaging app had been quite popular in Russia.
I never had an ICQ account, so this doesn’t hit me with any nostalgia sadness, but I’m always bummed to see the passing of remnants of a bygone era.
Also I had no idea ICQ had been acquired by a Russian company, of course it had lmao. Apparently the old ICQ even shut down a few years ago, and they replaced it with an “ICQ New” based on some messaging thing they already had, and that’s what’s shutting down now
Classical Cats
Misty De Méo’s latest post for CD-ROM Journal, a site which it doesn’t look like I’ve somehow never linked before now:
Sometimes, all you need is to take two things you love and put them together. For visual artist and classical musician Mitsuhiro Amada, that’s classical art, classical music, and cats.
Amada has made a career out of pairing his particular interests. A classically-trained cellist who has performed with the Japan Philharmonic Orchestra, his art almost exclusively depicts cats playing classical instruments. He paints using the traditional Japanese sumi-e ink brush painting technique on textured paper which gives his work a slightly abstracted touch and allows him to imply a variety of settings without explicitly staging his cats anywhere in particular.
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Classical Cats is adapted from the 1994 book of the same name. A bilingual Japanese/English publication, it pairs Amada’s artwork with classical Japanese poetry. The CD-ROM uses the same paintings and poems as the original book, but updates the presentation to take advantage of the format. Most notably, it no longer just visually depicts classical music; each page is accompanied by a variety of well-known pieces performed by a sextet assembled specifically for this disc. With a mixture of flute, violin, piano, and irish harp, the players perform a variety of pieces from across the classical canon—Schubert, Bach, Haydn, Händel, and others. The poetry from the original disc is now also presented via readings instead of text; like the original book, it features a bilingual presentation, with the English poetry performed by its original translators.
Two great tastes, together at last
We Spoke With the Last Person Standing in the Floppy Disk Business
Niek Hilkmann and Thomas Walskaar for Eye on Design:
Tom Persky is the self-proclaimed “last man standing in the floppy disk business.” He is the time-honored founder of floppydisk.com, a US-based company dedicated to the selling and recycling of floppy disks. Other services include disk transfers, a recycling program, and selling used and/or broken floppy disks to artists around the world. All of this makes floppydisk.com a key player in the small yet profitable contemporary floppy scene.
While putting together the manuscript for our new book, Floppy Disk Fever: The Curious Afterlives of a Flexible Medium, we met with Tom to discuss the current state of the floppy disk industry and the perks and challenges of running a business like his in the 2020s. What has changed in this era, and what remains the same?
Guy owns
An Oral History of Jurassic Park: The Ride
To launch Jurassic Park: The Ride, Universal Studios enlisted the help of several of the world’s biggest amusement park attraction experts, including Landmark Entertainment Group and Sarcos Robotics. Here’s how it went from a movie, to a phenomenon, to a wet and wild theme park mainstay.
Fraser Smith, chief innovation officer, Sarcos: The T. rex we made was larger than a real T. rex, because we really wanted to scare people, but most of the others were actually quite faithful to the scale. There were even a couple of paleontologists involved at the beginning to try and keep everybody honest, especially about how the figures would look and sound.
Actually, if you look at the full-body T. rex on the ride, you will notice that the head doesn’t move side to side too much. It actually could move side to side very rapidly, but when they started testing it out and exercising the lateral motion, the whole building started to move, because the figure weighs 80,000 pounds and the builders hadn’t really anticipated just how dynamic these robots were. In the end, they had to tone down that motion.
I think they should’ve made the T. rex move its head as quickly as possible, as a bit
Virginia hid execution files from the public. Here's what they don't want you to see
Chiara Eisner for NPR:
In January, NPR aired excerpts from four tapes recorded behind the scenes during Virginia executions. It was only the second time in history that audio from inside an execution chamber had ever been published. The records revealed details about the last seconds of prisoners’ lives and indicated the Virginia Department of Corrections may have tried to cover up one of the state’s recent botched executions.
A former employee donated the four tapes and hundreds of other execution documents to the Library of Virginia more than a decade ago. But shortly after NPR aired the audio, something unusual happened. A representative from the Department of Corrections requested that the library give the records back. Within a week, the library complied. The collection is once again behind prison walls.
The tapes can still be heard in full on NPR’s website and two of six boxes of materials can be seen at the prison if a request under the pubic records act is made. But in order for more of the execution history to remain accessible, NPR is now exclusively publishing a selection of the documents that journalists managed to photograph at the library before they became restricted. The records, which detail responsibilities of staff, include candid photos taken of the prisoners before their deaths and even show the keys to Virginia’s electric chair, illustrate how executions were conducted in the state that carried out more than any other.
Ah yes, trying to cover it up, a time honored strategy that always works
Hector Surprise and a Logan Update
So I just found out that the mascot and office pet of old Mac shareware developer/publisher Ambrosia Software, Hector D. Byrd, was adopted a while back into an actual home, where she seems to be getting on much better than in an office environment (who’d have thought!). Here’s the latest post about her from one of her owners, who blogs as PetMomma. If you enjoy cute bird pics and happy endings, definitely check it out.
'Excuuuuse me, Princess!': An oral history of The Legend of Zelda cartoon
Nicole Carpenter for Polygon:
The world knows The Legend of Zelda’s Link as the brave hero of Hyrule — a young warrior of few words. Link is a master with his bow and an excellent swordsman. But back in 1989, when The Legend of Zelda cartoon first aired, all Link wanted was a smooch. A kiss from Zelda, to be exact — but he’s not exactly picky, and unlike the laconic hero of the games, he would not shut up about it. The hero of Hyrule is still tasked with defending the Triforce of Wisdom from Ganon’s grasp on the TV show, but that’s secondary to his insistence on a little kiss. The show’s bizarre portrayal of Link — especially his constant begging of “Excuse me, Princess!” — has made The Legend of Zelda cartoon a hilarious head-scratcher to this day.
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But for the show’s short run, writers said they had little interference from Nintendo, which just wanted more eyes on its game properties — especially a new one like The Legend of Zelda. It was the first time — and still one of the rare times — that Link and Zelda got their own voice actor performances, and probably not the ones fans expected.
Rather than simply recreating the video game, The Legend of Zelda’s writers positioned the show more as a mix of action, comedy, and drama, taking specific inspiration from Cybill Shepherd’s and Bruce Willis’ ‘80s show Moonlighting. Writers wanted Zelda and Link’s relationship to mirror Shepherd’s and Willis’ rapport as Maddie and David on the detective show — the same angry sexual tension, but goofier and lighter for the kid-friendly cartoon TV show.
I’m not sure that I ever actually watched any of this on TV, just years later on the internet as a meme
The Last Ridge Racer
Here’s a post by Tony Temple on his blog The Arcade Blogger on a rare arcade game I’ve never heard of before, the gigantic physical Ridge Racer Full Scale, and the recovery of possibly one of the only functional cabinets remaining from the brink of disaster. Didn’t really find any passages that stand alone enough on their own for quoting, but it’s a wild story involving potential fraud
Benjamin Burns for Eurogamer back in 2020:
Destined to fail and become joke-fodder for mid-2000s angry video game reviewers, [the Atari Jaguar] was, at the time, in desperate need of a killer in-house developed title. The previous two, Trevor McFur in the Crescent Galaxy and Club Drive were both critical and commercial flops, and the team was searching for its Sonic the Hedgehog moment. This led to some delightfully silly ideas, my personal favourite being a game starring an alligator lawyer named Al. E. Gator. Most of these suggestions were shot down by the design team at Atari, all of whom quite rightly thought they were dumb. That was until one of the junior artists put forward a concept.
The proposed title would be a cyberpunk role-playing game, inspired by novels such as William Gibson’s Neuromancer and pen and paper RPGs such as Shadowrun and Cyberpunk 2020. As a fully open-world, 3D action-adventure with a third-person viewpoint and the ability to interact with every NPC, Black ICE\White Noise would have been a truly revolutionary title. You could enter any building, talk to scores of NPCs, and even open up your ‘deck’ to read emails, make calls, and hack into the city’s electronic infrastructure.
“If we had been able to create the game we wanted Black ICE to be, it would have been a landmark title,” insists BJ. Speaking to me almost a quarter of a century after the conception of Black ICE, he reminisces over just how ambitious the project was. “I’ve never seen another game that early that was able to deliver an open game world from a CD, with no load lags or breaks in gameplay, to transition to a new level.”
I was just clicking on random things yesterday, as I am wont to do, when I ended up finding the frankly outstanding preliminary cover art for this game embedded above, and I had to know more. It looks less like a game and more like the worst late '90s hip hop album you’ve ever listened to in your entire life
So a few years ago, I posted a Kotaku piece about failed attempts to find the American Sailor Moon pilot, and apparently it was found by video producer Ray Mona in the Library of Congress and just casually dropped in the middle of a massive video essay. If you want to not watch three and a half hours of documentary, skip to 1:43:56 in the embedded video.