• This column was first published in ITWeb Brainstorm, a South African business technology magazine, on 1 July 2007. They pay me for this stuff, so you’d do me a great service if you’d consider subscribing.

This wasn’t intended as a column extolling the virtues of reading history. Yet if only Poison Ivy¹ would do so, she might actually “connect us to the future”, to use her words.

There she goes again. After eight years in office, and all those nice things they said about encouraging competition, technology neutrality and managing liberalisation, minister Ivy Matsepe-Casaburri is proposing to drive us up another dead end.

“I have taken the policy decision,” she dictated in her Department of Communications budget speech, “that Mobile Broadcasting Services will be provided on a single network with national coverage, using the DVB-H standard. The network … will be operated on the basis of open and non-discriminatory access principles.”

She’s proposing yet another monopoly, presumably to be run by government, and limited to a single choice of technology. Oh yay!

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1. Ivy Matsepe-Casaburri, South Africa’s minister of communications. [↩]

It didn’t take Randall Hoven long to update the list of journalistic frauds, liars, plagiarisers and hoaxters I mentioned a few days ago.

Monday morning is a bad time for nostalgia. C|NET News.com did a fascinating story on the Digibarn, a private collection of curiosities. The proprietors, Bruce Damer and Alan Lundell, obtained some of their exhibits straight from some of the biggest names in the development of the personal computer.

Just about everything is there, from old mechanical devices for pilots, scientists and race car engineers, to the seminal Xerox Alto. From the popular Commodore 64, PET, and VIC20, to the IBM 5150 (aka the IBM PC). From a 1979 granddaddy of the iPod,  to evidence implicating Microsoft in work done for Apple in 1977. Successes, failures and oddities document the rise and rise of the ultimate geek toy.

Alongside is an autographed Apple II computer. I used one of those during school athletics meetings, before I decided to rewrite the software for the IBM PC. It would become my first commercial computer program, dedicated to my friend and co-designer, Frank Tintinger, who died at the age of 15 from a rare, invisible, but evidently serious condition.

Do check out the picture gallery.