Break Into Chat

Josh Renaud’s blog about BBS history, retro computing and technology reminiscences.

  • BBS doors: innovative social games?

    I came across a fantastic essay written by Andrew Chen in 2009: BBS door games: Social gaming innovation from the 1980s He makes the case that BBS door games pioneered many techniques used today by social games. I think he’s right on, especially in this passage: You may notice from all of these screenshots that…

  • BBS Documentary clip: TradeWars

    Here’s a short segment from the BBS: The Documentary where folks discuss TradeWars (There’s also a mention of Legend of the Red Dragon.) I am a big fan of Jason Scott and of the documentary. It was very thorough on many topics, and included wonderful chapters about the artscene and Fidonet among other things. One…

  • VT-52 demo: Beat Nick Part 2

    VT-52 demo: Beat Nick Part 2

    Since I began telnetting into Atari ST BBSes again regularly, I’ve gotten interested in VT52 which was the Atari ST’s native terminal mode. The Atari supported 16 colors in low-resolution, and 4 colors in medium-resolution (80 cols). If you know BBSes, you can think of it this way: VT-52 was to the Atari ST what…

  • “Why I love my ATARI Computer”

    “Why I love my ATARI Computer”

    Today I came across a really cool textfile that I wrote near the beginning of my BBSing days. What’s amazing to me is that it gives a date for when I began BBSing, and even explains how I got started (a story I had forgotten).

  • The Commodore 64

    Although I was raised on a steady diet of Atari growing up, I did use other machines over the years at school. For example, I remember using a Commodore 64 in kindergarten, and learning to work in LogoWriter on the 64 in third or fourth grade. I came across this wonderful blog post from the…

  • The Christmas we got an Atari Jaguar

    The Christmas we got an Atari Jaguar

    Christmas is nearing, and it occurred to me that nearly 20 years ago, I had my most memorable Christmas present of all time.



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