We got back from vacation Tuesday, and I spent yesterday at home catching up. As a welcome-back, here are a few news chum items that caught my eye over the past two weeks, all having to do with looking at the past (which is appropriate — I meant to post this yesterday):
- Pop Culture References. Mental Floss has composed a list of 11 Pop Culture References that young people won’t get. This includes a lot of things from the 60s and 70s, and a little earlier. My favorite example of such references are in many of Stan Freberg’s work. For example, he has the line “You over here on a Fullbright?”, when most people these days have no idea what the Fullbright Scholarship was.
- Diskettes. A very nice history of the floppy disk from HP. I remember all of these formats, from the 8″ on down. I particularly liked the mention in the comments of SCCS, the Southern California Computer Society. I was actually a member in my early days (back in the late 1970s).
- Surfridge. Whenever you take off from LAX, you fly over a community that no longer exists. What this article calls “Surfridge” was originally part of Playa Del Rey. Growing up in Westchester and PDR, I had loads of friends who lived in the houses that once existed on those hills and on the sides of the airport. I always think of them when I see the dead streets.
Of course, people don’t always get current pop references either. Yesterday /. reported that a majority of people think the Internet Cloud is affected by the weather.
