Tag: history
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Talking about Kirschen’s software at Arch Reactor
This Sunday I spoke about my retrocomputing hobby and digital preservation work at Arch Reactor, a hackerspace/makerspace in St. Louis. I was honored to be invited, and I had a blast sharing some of the things I’ve learned as I researched (and rescued) the lost 1980s software of Ya’akov Kirschen. I recorded the talk, and…
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Visualizing 314: The directories, the data, and the caveats
This is the final part of a three-part series. In this post I’m going to discuss Fire Escape’s BBS directory formats, the directory parser and the dataset; I’ll also give some caveats about this data.
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Visualizing 314: The St. Louis scene in charts
This is the second part of a three-part series. It’s chart time! In this post you can explore several graphs that show facets of the St. Louis BBS scene.
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Visualizing 314: Fire Escape’s BBS Directory
This is the first part of a three-part series. If there was a superstar of St. Louis BBSes during the 1990s, it had to be Fire Escape.
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The FBI’s Atari files
Did you know Atari was investigated by the FBI over a scheme in which they imported Japanese DRAM chips to the U.S. from their plant in Taiwan and resold the chips at greatly inflated prices? Neither did I, until tonight, when I stumbled across an awesome website called AtariLeaks.
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The birth of “Break Into Chat”
In October 2012 I logged into Wikipedia and found three alerts waiting for me: “Proposed deletion of Space Empire Elite” “Proposed deletion of Space Dynasty” “Proposed deletion of Solar Realms Elite” Not good, I thought.
