Digital gauge clusters, as in the kind that are 100% digital, started making their way into production cars in the US around the early 1980s and lasted up until the mid-1990s. For computer geek, a gauge cluster like this looks just plain cool. It’s not any more or less accurate than needle gauges, but you feel like you’re driving a very...

The dial-up modem (a.k.a. faxmodem) was the primary way people got online from home in the early days of internet connectivity. Modems came in two flavors, internal or external. If internal, the modem had a very chintzy little speaker on the card or used Windows to send its connection tones through your audio speakers. If external, the modem had its own in-built...

Next week, a bunch of you are going to be traveling to see friends and family for the holiday season (and probably do it again on New Year’s Eve and Day). Right now is a good time to do a few very simple things to make your travels easier. 1. Make sure your cell phone’s address book is up-to-date Is Aunt Marge’s phone number in your cell...

Some computer geeks like collecting specific old forms of media storage just for the sake of collecting them. For example, some keep around 8-inch floppy diskettes. Others keep around CD caddies. Some even have Iomega REV drives (photos). Are they used? Of course not. They just like owning them. One piece of storage technology that is very difficult to acquire...

The pager, often called a beeper (because the only noise it ever made were beeping alarms) was once a ubiquitous part of the mobile landscape. Although they came in many variants, the most popular was called the numeric pager, seen right. It was called as such because it had a small one-line digital display that only displayed numbers, similar to many...

PCMech is based out of Tampa Bay, Florida, and I’m also a Florida resident, so when particular news for this area come across the wire I see it periodically. For non-US readers, US states are divvied up into counties (and then municipalities which are cities, towns, boroughs and sometimes villages). Hillsborough County is directly within the Tampa Bay...

For those of you living in nations that must observe Daylight Saving Time, here’s the stuff you probably forgot to change the clocks for so they can observe DST proper:The clock(s) in your car(s) Microwave clock Oven range clock Laptop or netbook (did you turn it on today so it can auto-adjust?) The wall clock(s) you have that aren’t atomic...

I don’t think anyone would argue with me when I say China is the #1 maker of tech gadgets in the world. Note that I didn’t say good tech gadgets, but they have mountains of the stuff. Those who manufacture tech gadgets will make anything and everything – and moreover when you order direct from China, it’s cheap because you can knock off...

Back in the mid-1990s, email wasn’t a household word yet and the clients used to connect to email services were difficult at best to use. One such client that was at one point very popular was Eudora. It is without a doubt one of the most difficult clients to set up and get working, but many held a large affection for it and some even still use it to this...

Back in 1995, Bill Gates released a book called The Road Ahead. With the book came a CD that had some videos on it, one of which showed what people thought mobile communications would be like in the future:You have to bear in mind none of the stuff shown in the video above existed in 1995. How much of it exists now? Paying with a mobile device? Possible, but...