Break Into Chat
Josh Renaud’s blog about BBS history, retro computing and technology reminiscences.
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Bringing dry bones back to life: The Kirschen software collection
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 12 games, demos, and experiments in artificial…
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Ten years of Break Into Chat!
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
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”
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.
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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.
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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…
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