Steampunk Computing

Each week, I spend Sunday mornings over coffee combing through the statistics for this site, seeing how many pages were served, which files are the most requested, and where people are finding links to my pages and clicking though from.

For quite a while now, a good percentage of my page views have come from vonslatt.com, a bus-related page owned by Jake Von Slatt.

This morning, I saw that I had 256 referrals from something called "steampunkworkshop.com". Of course, I had to follow the link to find out what the linked page was and who/what a steam punk was.

What I found was a photo and written essay about the building of a bus into a retro-era RV. I didn't get very far into it until I recognized that the bus in question was Jakes. In fact, it appears that Jake has launched a new site, the very steampunkworkshop.com that I was viewing.

After I thought about it for a while, I realized that I'd been following referral links from time to time that lead me to some odd pages about people who take modern objects and hack them into retro-antiques, the point being to make them appear to have come from the time of the Industrial Revolution. Jake's site is just exactly about that.

For example, he has taken his computer keyboard and LCD monitor and worked them over until they actually look like something from the 1800's:

(I'm hoping that he doesn't mind me biting on his server's bandwidth to display that image here)

Tearing up old typewriters for keys could become a new pastime. The whole project is contained here: steampunkworkshop.com/lcd.shtml (I get a shiver up my spine thinking about the hardware in the offices in the movie Brazil.)

Now, once I got over the intrigue of this unique project, I wondered if there was any commercial prospect for turning out such products for people with less artistic skill than Jake. Turns out that someone else is way ahead of me on this one, check out Datamancer:

At any rate, if you have a few spare minutes, and haven't reached your internet providers bandwidth restriction this month, drop on over to the home page at Steam Punk Workshop and check out some of the other projects. I knew that Jake was deep into kerosene lamp repair and restoration, but now it looks like he has taken fascination with pre-electrification appliances to a whole new level. Anyone for an art-deco etched iPod?