This is the final part of a three-part series.
In this post I’m going to discuss Fire Escape’s BBS directory formats, the directory parser and the dataset; I’ll also give some caveats about this data.
Continue readingThis is the second part of a three-part series.
It’s chart time! In this post you can explore several graphs that show facets of the St. Louis BBS scene.
Continue reading
Users who wanted to chat with Fire Escape when she wasn’t online would be greeted with this ANSI screen on her BBS.
This is the first part of a three-part series.
If there was a superstar of St. Louis BBSes during the 1990s, it had to be Fire Escape.
Continue readingGeekWire has an interesting look back at a debate on CompuServe in 1993 about the future of journalism. This piqued my interest as a journalist, and as someone who loves looking back at computer history.
The members of CompuServe’s JForum made predictions about the form factors of future news delivery devices that were accurately fulfilled by today’s iPad and iPhone.
But then there’s stuff like this:
Of couse these pundits had no way of forseeing disruptors like Craigslist who would innovate — and eat away at newspapers’ profits.“Just wait until AT&T and the major networks and the movie studios and two or three radio networks and computer companies and the government all start seriously exploring the technology. Not to mention the number of years it will take to standardize the equipment. All the competition for information control (NOT dissemination) will slow the death of newspapers if it comes to that.”
Austin Seraphin has been blind since birth and has loved computers since he got an Apple IIe at age 6. In 1993 he released Barneysplat!, one of the zaniest BBS door games ever conceived, in which players try to kill or intoxicate Barney the purple dinosaur and his cast of kids. Today Seraphin works as an accessibility consultant who specializes in making iOS apps more usable to the blind.
As a teen, anti-Barney humor definitely appealed to me and I definitely remember playing Barneysplat!. This interview was conducted by email Feb. 6 through May 6, 2013.
Continue reading
Today I had an article published in an Atari-related periodical for the first time since 1994.
Continue reading
Did you know Atari was investigated by the FBI over a scheme in which they imported Japanese DRAM chips to the U.S. from their plant in Taiwan and resold the chips at greatly inflated prices?
Neither did I, until tonight, when I stumbled across an awesome website called AtariLeaks.
Continue reading
Login screen for Digital Distortion BBS as seen in Telemate under DOSBox.
A few months ago I wrote about my experiences trying to telnet in to Atari BBSes using an emulated Atari on my Mac.
Basically the solution boiled down to this: Use tcpser4j to change a telnet connection to a serial connection, use socat to pipe that serial connection to a file, and set the Hatari emulator to use that file as a virtual RS232 device. After those steps, I could run my favorite old Atari ST terminal programs like ANSIterm and Freeze Dried Terminal.
Recently I decided I wanted to do the same thing with a DOS emulator like DOSBox — but for different reasons.
Continue reading
My daughter Ludi’s drawing of me, created in Adobe Ideas on an iPad 2.
Today was “Parents get to watch dance class” day. In the afternoon my daughter Ludi and I went to see my oldest daughter, Jadzia. The “public” part of the class came at the end, so Ludi and I were waiting for a bit. During the downtime we played a few games on the iPad, and then she drew a picture of me using Adobe Ideas.
Continue reading