Break Into Chat

Break Into Chat

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

  • Instant Graphics and Sound, Part 1: Introduction

    Instant Graphics and Sound, Part 1: Introduction

    This is the first part of a multi-part series. “My God, what a fantastic program you’ve written! It’s astounding! I’m very, VERY impressed! This will change BBSing in the Atari world forever.” These words, written in February 1990, kicked off a gushing fan letter — the kind of feedback every hobbyist software developer dreams of…

  • I’m heading to Atlanta — plus, Jack Tramiel’s phone numbers

    I’m heading to Atlanta — plus, Jack Tramiel’s phone numbers

    I’ve been remiss in sharing some fantastic news. In April, I was awarded a “Geffen and Lewyn Family Southern Jewish Collections Research Fellowship” from the Rose Library at Emory University! This fellowship will enable me to travel to Atlanta for a week or two and study materials at Emory related to several Jewish educational games…

  • The college basketball bracket … in ANSI

    The college basketball bracket … in ANSI

    Eleven years ago, when I worked as a designer of news and sports pages at a daily newspaper, I created a system to automate the production of our college basketball brackets in print. One year prior, data journalist Aaron Bycoffe pointed out on Twitter that NCAA.com was using a nice, clean JSON feed to power…

  • Revisiting my ANSI tile map

    Revisiting my ANSI tile map

    Nearly 10 years ago, my daughter Jadzia wanted me to make a game called “Jewel Mountain.” One of my early ANSI experiments for the game was to make an RPG-style tile map in ANSI. When I started it years ago, my initial idea was to adapt 16×16 pixel-art tiles to sprites made of ANSI text,…

  • Try Kirschen’s games and software on the Internet Archive

    Try Kirschen’s games and software on the Internet Archive

    It’s been a little over a year since I began publishing the Kirschen software collection, and during that time I have also worked to upload Kirschen’s software to the Internet Archive and make it playable in the browser. The entire collection is tagged “kirschen-software” to make it easier to find. The emulation works well for…

  • Unearthed: Kirschen’s “Magic Harp” for Commodore Amiga

    Unearthed: Kirschen’s “Magic Harp” for Commodore Amiga

    When I published the original four-part “Bringing dry bones back to life” series where I shared 10 pieces of previously-lost computer programs developed by Yaakov Kirschen, I couldn’t include “Magic Harp,” his original Amiga-based “artificial creativity” music composing software. At the time, Kirschen’s wife, Sali Ariel, believed that it was likely gone forever, because she…

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