Remember the aquarium screensavers?
November 27, 2007 by cynthia
OK, I’m showing my geek here, but this is one of the coolest (literally) PCs that I’ve seen in awhile.
Guess what my main Windows machine is going to look like in the next couple of weeks?
(and trying hard not to think of what will happen when the thing springs a leak…)
And just after I said to myself “it needs bubbles” they ADDED BUBBLES! Let’s see…all you need to do is add some of those creates they found on the expedition to Titan in 2074 that live in the methane pools… oops…sorry…time slip…I’m not supposed to tell people about that.
Remember the plans for turning an old Mac case into an aquarium?
(http://www.theapplecollection.com/Collection/MacAquarium/index.shtml)
GcB
What I want to figure out is how you get fish who can breathe mineral oil. Maybe some kind of mechanical fish toy? That would be cool. (As long as they didn’t bang into a component….)
And what if you tinted the mineral oil with just a hint of green? You’d get that pond scum thing going…
I never did the MacQuarium thing, but I did get a wooden Mac case, walnut I think, from a guy hoping for a review. Even had little wood veneer tops for the keyboard letters. It was for people who are offended at the sight of technology (he got the wrong audience in me), but it was kinda cool. Set me to thinking about how you could maybe take an old piano, replace the workings with a motherboard and hard drives, stick some relays under the keys for the keyboard (the black keys could be programmable function keys,put the monitor where the music stand was…etc…
Oh ghu… now you have me thinking about weird-ass alternative input devices from Back In The Day. Remember the chording keyboard? How about the keyboard with the footpad for handling special features?
As to wooden cases… one of the later version of the PLATO terminals was in this gorgeous mahogany slip-case. I saw one of them a couple of weeks ago at the 50th anniversary celebration of the founding of the late-lamented Control Data Corporation.
I’ll have to go into the bookcase to my immediate right and dig out some of my old Bytes and PC Magazines from the Early Days to amaze myself with Old Hardware.
GcB
Not QUITE what you had in mind:
http://www.bagofnothing.com/?p=13015
GcB
hey, i used to use a chord keyboard, along with a prototype 3 button mouse when i worked on a project with xerox parc in the early 70’s. the mouse couldn’t move diagonally, because it actually had 2 wheels at 90 degrees to each other, so you had to learn to move it up and sideways instead. the 3 buttons where the higher 3 bits of ascii, and the chord was the lower 5 bits.
they already have player pianos, where the music direction comes from encoded cd’s. the keys move up and down using servos. heck, you can get them at costco: http://www.costco.com/Images/Content/Misc/PDF/252625.PDF
how long is a fan going to last running at such a low rpm when immersed in mineral oil? and why have a fan at all?
I kind of wondered about the fan. At least it will even out the temperature in the box. I’d think the oil would get kind of warm before too long in any case. It wouldn’t cool off too quickly, either…thermal momentum and all. The bubbler would help…the bursting bubble on the surface would carry some of the heat off in the air.