📅 Welcome to 2022 - This Geek in Review for 2022-01-07

By goz

The year 2021, trying it’s best to out do 2020, ended with the the death of Betty White, a little over two weeks shy of her 100th birthday. I refused to believe it at first, but unfortunately, the news was true.

The death of Blackberry

There was another death at the beginning of 2022, but this one doesn’t really affect too many people. Classic Blackberry devices went offline on the 4th. It’s amazing how the once dominate smartphone maker has fallen. In the first decade of the 21st century, if you wanted to do more on your cellphone than call, you went with a Blackberry. The keyboard was unparalleled. It was so loved that after the release of the iPhone several pundits proclaimed that it was only a matter of time before Apple added a hardware keyboard to the iPhone.

The Blackberry was so groundbreaking that its design was the basis for the first Android phones. Unfortunately, like many tech companies before it, loved the cash they were making from their current products and didn’t innovate fast enough.

I never had a Blackberry devices, but I did use an HTC Ozone for a couple of years. I do miss the hardware keyboard.

Updating BASIC

Most programmers over the age of 45 cut their teeth learning to program computers with eh BASIC programming language. It was simple to get started, but slow. Jeff Atwood, of Coding Horror Fame, is promoting a project to update the single most influential book of the BASIC era. The plan is to update the programs in the book to run under modern day languages.

I didn’t know about these books back in the day, I learned how to program in BASIC from Going Ahead with Extended Color Basic TRS-80 Color Computer on the Color Computer 1. It was a great book. My biggest issue was the lack of a storage device. Any program I wrote had to be transcribed into a notebook if I wanted to save it. Kids today have it too easy.

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