Tag: bbs
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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…
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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…
