Break Into Chat

Break Into Chat

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

  • Thinking about Jadzia, C.G., and our ephemeral digital lives

    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…

  • 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…

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