Break Into Chat

Break Into Chat

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

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

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

    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.

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

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

    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.

  • Appreciating the physicality of floppies

    Appreciating the physicality of floppies

    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…

  • “Creaks” scene 45: Goat glitch

    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…

  • Jon Radoff’s BBS-related correspondence

    Jon Radoff’s BBS-related correspondence

    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…

  • Paul Witte and Herb Flower, creators of Thieves’ Guild

    Paul Witte and Herb Flower, creators of Thieves’ Guild

    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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