CS After Hours

When the Internet went commercial over 25 years ago, very few people could have imagined what the world would look like today.  3.8 billion people (nearly half the world’s population) has a smartphone.  Who is collecting the data that is being generated and what are they doing with it?  Does privacy matter?  Are the conveniences of the modern world worth it?  We will explore what it means to be part of the information age in this week’s episode.

The death of Sega was long and slow at the hands of Sony.  In this episode we explore the demise of Sega in the console market and look at the introduction of a new player, the Xbox.  What drove the market at those times and could Sega have made a go of it?  What decision led to the state we were in at the dawn of a new century?

After the release of the NES, there came the game boy for the dawn of hand-hand general purpose consoles.  From there, consoles evolved into the 16bit machines and we got what would be the first of the console wars in the late 80s and early 90s as Sega took on Nintendo.  As we revisit these consoles we once again reminisce about the games we played and the memories we made.   As always, feel free to call us out on any of our mistakes by contacting us on Twitter, Facebook, Reddit or emailing [email protected].

Playing games on your TV goes back many years, and today we are going to take a look at some of those early consoles, from the Atari 2600 through to the Nintendo Entertainment system.  What do we remember about those systems?  What made them special?  What games did we play?  These early systems provided a level of gaming different than today, and we will explore the how and why of the evolution of the console in the first of several episodes on this topic.  As always, feel free to call us out on any of our mistakes by contacting us on Twitter, Facebook, Reddit or emailing [email protected].

1995 saw the dawn of the internet as we know it. There were FTP sites and web pages before that, but it was 1995 that saw the commercialization of the Internet and the beginning of the Internet age. We take a look back at those Wild West Days of computing and the first cable modems and the creation of Google and Winamp. It was an era before smart phones and the dawn of truly portable cell phones. While the previous decade had been a time for rapid changes in computers, this was the era of rapid change in communications. Join us on this look back, and feel free to call us out on any of our mistakes by contacting us on Twitter, Facebook, Reddit or emailing [email protected].

The end of the 80s into the mid-90s was a rapid time for transition for computers, from the creation to dialup services (at 120 characters per second, not 12), to the creation of the CD-ROM, VGA graphics and programming in DOS, we take a look at many of the aspects that got us interested in the computer whether it be programming it, playing games on it, or being social on it. No matter what we did, we mostly managed to get in trouble. Join us on this adventure, and if you want to know more about any of these things, email us at [email protected] or find us on Twitter or Facebook. 

In this weeks episode we reminisce about the early years of computing for us, whether is be with the Commodore 64, the Amiga 500, or the Apple IIe, we explore what these machines meant to us and how they compare to today's machines.  How did we live with these machines and what did we do on them?  Join us on this first adventure down the road of our early childhood computing.