Curiosity
This year's CarolinaCON badge was a an old 5.25" floppy disk with custom labels made for the CON. It was a great idea and a throwback to the days of old. If you notice in the picture below, the label even peels up like they used to! Of course, it was an opportunity for those senior members of our fraternity to bash (pun intended) on those less advanced (in years) also in attendance. |
| CarolinaCON 2013 Badge |
The question of the CON soon became "does the badge really work?" As you can imagine at a hacker CON, all sorts of assumptions are made about the contents of the disk. The irony was that with all the tech present, nobody had a drive to read the thing and find out! At least not a drive with them...
I was lucky enough to hear the story from Curbob himself who procured the badges. After coming up with the idea to use old 5.25" floppies, Curbob was tasked with finding a large quantity of them for the CON. When he found a vendor that had a sufficient amount of them available he laughed in telling us "they were curious what they were being used for." He told them it was for a technology conference and was immediately hit with "but do you need them to work?" The difference in price was quite hilarious for which he responded along the lines of "they're for badges and don't need to work...send me the broke ones."
Old (Vintage) Computers
So even though we knew these things shouldn't work, my cohort in crime Noah wasn't satisfied. Noah is a bit of a hoarder when it comes to electronics. I thought it was a bit of shtick when he would talk about his "collection" of vintage computers. As it turns out, he was telling the truth and has one of the most incredible museums of paperweights I've ever seen! Surprisingly, a lot of it still works!
I can't remember which one it was, but one out of the several Noah tried actually booted its last in the process. I thought I was actually going to see him cry when it happened. Eh...
At some point, I'll do a blog post to inventory all the random computers, laptops, PDAs, cell phones, cameras, etc., etc., that he has. It is truly a walk down memory lane!
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