Tag: bbs
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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…
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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,…
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Unearthed: My old OASIS BBS Atari floppy disk
For the last few years, I’ve been researching and imaging other people’s old disks — but recently someone turned the tables and salvaged one of mine! Let me tell you the story.
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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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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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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…
