A closet Commie user?

Now, this will be a stroll down memory lane for personal computer enthusiasts of a certain age:

Today, we are releasing Commodore BASIC as a Scripting Language - it works on Linux, Windows, Mac OS X 10.4/10.5 (Intel and PowerPC), and you even get the source, so you can adapt it to other operating systems and CPUs.

pagetable.com: Commodore BASIC as a Scripting Language Now Open-Source for Windows and Unix

Haven't tested it on Linux yet, but it works a treat on both Mac OS X and Windows XP!

10 PRINT "HELLO WORLD"

20 GOTO 10

(via Lifehacker)

Vintage computer ads

If you've been interested in the computer industry for a while, BoingBoing has assembled a collection of 101 vintage magazine ads that will be a real stroll down memory lane.

Just let me get my walkin' cane.

Below, what looks to be a newspaper circular ad for one of the best computers I ever owned, bang-for-the-buck, and considering existing technology at the time: the Radio Shack Model 100 was an ultraportable machine that ran on AA batteries (!) and was a writer's dream.

(via Gizmodo)

Holding the future of computing in your hand

At this very moment, in a building somewhere in Silicon Valley, I guarantee you that a team of engineers from Google and Apple are designing a set of devices that, hooked up as terminals to Google's "supercomputer," will define how we use computers in the future. You can see various threads of this system today - in Apple's iPhone and iPod Touch, its dot-mac service, its iLife and iWork applications as well as in Google's Apps suite and advertising system, not to mention its vast data-center network. What this team is doing right now is weaving all those threads together into what will be, for most of us, the fabric of cloud computing. (This is so big, you need at least two metaphors to describe it.)

Rough Type: Nicholas Carr's Blog - Google, Apple and the Future of Personal Computing

(via GigaOm)