Break Into Chat

Slides yield glimpses of Kirschen’s lost “Magic Harp” software

Josh Renaud — Wed, 08 Mar 2023 03:05:06 +0000

Yaakov Kirschen and his wife, Sali Ariel, are in the process of downsizing and moving to a new home in Israel. Sali has been hard at work, sifting through decades of collected belongings in preparation. She found a bunch of things related to Kirschen’s 1980s software development firm, LKP Ltd., and sent them to me […]

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Talking about Kirschen’s software at Arch Reactor

Josh Renaud — Tue, 07 Feb 2023 18:06:02 +0000

This Sunday I spoke about my retrocomputing hobby and digital preservation work at Arch Reactor, a hackerspace/makerspace in St. Louis. I was honored to be invited, and I had a blast sharing some of the things I’ve learned as I researched (and rescued) the lost 1980s software of Ya’akov Kirschen. I recorded the talk, and […]

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Unearthed: Kirschen’s “Music Creator” for IBM PC

Josh Renaud — Tue, 29 Nov 2022 12:38:32 +0000

Decades before the debut of DALL-E, Israeli cartoonist Yaakov Kirschen was developing an “artificial creativity” system to let computers compose their own music, by extracting components of existing songs and combining them in new ways. The software was originally written for the Amiga, but business changes led them to abandon that platform and port the […]

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Unearthed: Kirschen’s Atari ST projects

Josh Renaud — Mon, 28 Nov 2022 12:17:20 +0000

The artificial personalities “Murray” and “Mom” were among the very first entertainment offerings for the Atari ST computer. They were also the first products released by Israeli cartoonist Yaakov Kirschen’s new “LKP, Ltd.” software studio in Israel, in partnership with his American firm, “Just For You, Inc.” “Murray and Me” (monochrome, 1985) “Murray and Me” […]

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Unearthed: Kirschen’s independent Apple II projects

Josh Renaud — Sun, 27 Nov 2022 14:00:38 +0000

Is “Doc Possum” a lost Learning Company game? After the end of Yaakov Kirschen’s partnership with the Gesher organization, he had an idea for a secular educational game for the Apple II, which he pitched to The Learning Company. Around the same time he also made a few independent demos and experimental software. “You and […]

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Unearthed: Kirschen’s Apple II games for Gesher

Josh Renaud — Sat, 26 Nov 2022 17:04:42 +0000

Ever wonder what the Jewish version of Pac-Man might look like? In the early 1980s, video games were exploding in popularity with kids and microcomputers were becoming available Israel. The Gesher organization saw potential in developing educational software specifically for Jewish students. From 1982 to 1984, Yaakov Kirschen worked with them on four games: “Aleph […]

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Bringing dry bones back to life: The Kirschen software collection

Josh Renaud — Sat, 26 Nov 2022 13:32:19 +0000

It’s time to bring some dry bones back to life. In coming days, I will publish a curated collection of lost software developed by the Israeli cartoonist Yaakov Kirschen together with programmers from Gesher Educational Affiliates as well as from his own studio, LKP Ltd. The collection includes ten games, demos, and experiments in artificial […]

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Ten years of Break Into Chat!

Josh Renaud — Fri, 25 Nov 2022 14:36:39 +0000

Ten years ago, editors on Wikipedia began deleting articles about BBS door games. In response, I forked all the door game articles onto a brand-new website. I called it “Break Into Chat”. My original goal was to preserve and expand the articles. They needed better sourcing, better writing, more screenshots. I researched and added references. […]

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Thinking about Jadzia, C.G., and our ephemeral digital lives

Josh Renaud — Thu, 24 Nov 2022 00:30:25 +0000

Synchronet creator Rob Swindell recently shared some sad news: longtime BBSer C.G. Learn died earlier this month. I didn’t know C.G. very well, but we interacted occasionally over the years on Dovenet, a message network for Synchronet BBSes. But I’ll never forget one kind gesture that C.G. extended to me after my daughter died in […]

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Joe Reiss, creator of the “Spoiler-Free Opinion Summary”

Josh Renaud — Wed, 28 Sep 2022 14:37:40 +0000

In 1992, Joe Reiss began the Spoiler-Free Opinion Summary, an effort to collect ratings for each week’s episode of “Star Trek: The Next Generation” from fans on Usenet. The “S.O.S.” caught on and remained popular for years, moving to the web in 1995. Ultimately, Reiss collected nearly 300,000 individual ratings. Were you on Usenet in […]

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Remembering the S.O.S. — the Spoiler-Free Opinion Summary

Josh Renaud — Fri, 23 Sep 2022 15:00:33 +0000

Today, Sept. 24, is the 30th anniversary of the launch of the Spoiler-Free Opinion Summary. The S.O.S. was a crowd-sourced ratings database, born in the early 1990s, which deserves to be remembered. I wrote this blog post to celebrate the anniversary. Also, don’t miss my interview with Joe Reiss. For most folks in 1992, if […]

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Appreciating the physicality of floppies

Josh Renaud — Mon, 10 Jan 2022 00:20:53 +0000

As I continue imaging and curating a collection of Apple II software I received last year, I have an increased appreciation for the importance of preserving physical floppy disks. I have a floppy which contains a copy of a game called “Nosh Kosh.” To preserve the game digitally, Keith Hacke created a “disk image”, which […]

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“Creaks” scene 45: Goat glitch

Josh Renaud — Sun, 17 Jan 2021 19:10:33 +0000

I have long loved playing games by Amanita Design with my kids, particularly “Machinarium.” They create such stellar worlds with interesting characters, without a single word of intelligible dialogue. So it was like Christmas in January when I read on Twitter that Amanita had released a game called “Creaks” in 2020, and somehow I had […]

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Jon Radoff’s BBS-related correspondence

Josh Renaud — Thu, 03 Dec 2020 22:15:56 +0000

Yesterday entrepreneur and tech pioneer Jon Radoff shared on Facebook a letter he found from a former player of his early internet game Legends of Future Past. I asked him if might have similar letters related to his earlier Atari ST BBS door games, Space Empire Elite and Final Frontier. Today he found some and […]

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Paul Witte and Herb Flower, creators of Thieves’ Guild

Josh Renaud — Tue, 15 Sep 2020 16:32:21 +0000

Paul Witte and Herb Flower were friends who collaborated from 1988-93 to create the BBS door game Thieves’ Guild and its graphical front-end client for the Atari ST under the “Mythyn Software” banner. Flower went on to found the Rewolf Entertainment studio, which produced Gunman Chronicles. Witte and Flower teamed up again in 2001 as […]

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