Our Gizmodo '79 celebration may have ended last week, but there's room for a final post, written by famed retiree and mosquito wrangler Bill Gates. It's no joke: Gates read the series then sent this in:

1979 was the beginning of Lego as we know it today, the year when they took over the world, the year of the Galaxy Explorer. I photographed all the classic sets in my Lego trip. Here's the never-released gallery:

Writing about technology as it was thirty years ago, I realized that 1979 was perhaps the last year before a digital tsunami hit, sweeping clean the analog era that had persisted for decades.

From 1979: A source "close to the matter" claims this document outlines a future Audio format that would utilize a tapeless design, and *snort* use lasers as some sort of record needle. Sounds like Bullshit to me.

Gizmodo '79 is a week-long celebration of gadgets and geekdom 30 years ago, as the analog age gave way to the digital, and most of our favorite toys were just being born.

Seymour Cray's big super computer was crazy. It's signals between components had to be timed by trimming long cables up to 1/16th of an inch at a time by hand and was basically interwoven with a giant refrigeration system.

The network started to breathe in the 70's. Above, the first ethernet cable, found in PARC's labs by Boing Boing Gadgets. Dag Spicer, numero uno Curator at the Computer History Museum, tells us more:

Many of our Gizmodo '79 posts have illustrated just how far we've come in the past three decades, but in one important tech example, 1979 kicks 2009's ass: The Concorde Jet.

Even back then, there were computers for people who couldn't afford the more expensive stuff. Take this Tandy, which costs little more than a upgraded Netbook today. From Core Memory, photographed by Mark Richards and written by John Alderman.

Gizmodo '79 is a week-long celebration of gadgets and geekdom 30 years ago, as the analog age gave way to the digital, and most of our favorite toys were just being born.