Break Into Chat
Josh Renaud’s blog about BBS history, retro computing and technology reminiscences.
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Visualizing 314: The directories, the data, and the caveats
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.
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Visualizing 314: The St. Louis scene in charts
This 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.
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Visualizing 314: Fire Escape’s BBS Directory
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.
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The future of news, as predicted in 1993
GeekWire 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…
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Austin Seraphin, creator of “Barneysplat!”
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.
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Barneysplat! memories
As a teen, I encountered the show enough to develop a hatred of it: saccharine songs that would lodge in your head; giggly, dopey-voiced dinosaur characters; a “one-dimensional world where everyone must be happy and everything must be resolved right away.” It’s no surprise that Barney spawned a backlash. Barney bashing, “anti-Barney humor and parodies…
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