Tag: internet

  • 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.

  • Web browsing on the Atari ST with a CosmosEx

    Web browsing on the Atari ST with a CosmosEx

    Probably the best retrocomputing purchase I’ve made in recent years is the CosmosEx, a cool peripheral for Atari ST, STe, TT, and Falcon computers. Soon after I bought it, creator Jookie added “screencasting”, a feature which lets you control your Atari remotely through a web browser. Amazing! Around that time, Jookie was also working on…