How surveillance capitalism and DRM turned home tech from friend to foe.

For a while—in the ’80s, ’90s, and early 2000s—it felt like nerds were making the world a better place. Now, it feels like the most successful tech companies are making it worse.

Internet surveillance, the algorithmic polarization of social media, predatory app stores, and extractive business models have eroded the freedoms the personal computer once promised, effectively ending the PC era for most tech consumers.

The “personal computer” was once a radical idea—a computer an individual could own and control completely. The concept emerged in the early 1970s when microprocessors made it economical and practical for a person to own their very own computer, in contrast to the rise of data processing mainframes in the 1950s and 60s.

At its core, the PC movement was about a kind of tech liberty—–which I’ll define as the freedom to explore new ideas, control your own creative works, and make mistakes without punishment.

The personal computer era bloomed in the late 1970s and continued into the 1980s and 90s. But over the past decade in particular, the Internet and digital rights management (DRM) have been steadily pulling that control away from us and putting it into the hands of huge corporations. We need to take back control of our digital lives and make computing personal again.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m not calling the tech industry evil. I’m a huge fan of technology. The industry is full of great people, and this is not a personal attack on anyone. I just think runaway market forces and a handful of poorly-crafted US laws like section 1201 of the DMCA have put all of us onto the wrong track (more on that below).

To some extent, tech companies were always predatory. To some extent, all companies are predatory. It’s a matter of degrees. But I believe there’s a fundamental truth that we’ve charted a deeply unhealthy path ahead with consumer technology at the moment.

Tech critic Ed Zitron calls this phenomenon “The Rot Economy,” where companies are more obsessed with continuous growth than with providing useful products. “Our economy isn’t one that produces things to be used, but things that increase usage,” Zitron wrote in another piece, bringing focus to ideas I’ve been mulling for the past half-decade.

This post started as a 2022 Twitter thread, and I’ve offered to write editorials about my frustrations with increasingly predatory tech business practices since 2020 for my last two employers, but both declined to publish them. I understand why. These are uncomfortable truths to face. But if you love technology like I do, we have to accept what we’re doing wrong if we are going to make it better.

[ Continue reading The PC is Dead: It’s Time to Bring Back Personal Computing » ]

Clip art collections from the early 1990s are today’s forgotten cultural time capsules, freezing life three decades ago as digital illustrations full of obsolete tech, vintage fashions, and more. Just for fun, let’s explore computer art from a time just before the Internet hit it big.

[Benj’s note—I wrote this piece years ago, and it never saw the light of day until now. Hope you enjoy.]

The Origins of Clip Art

The concept of clip art originated in the pre-computer era, when graphics designers would browse printed collections of royalty-free illustrations to cut and paste into their compositions.

When desktop publishing came to personal computers in the mid-1980s, the need arose for digital artwork that people could paste into newsletters, banners, signs, and more. Illustrators created these artworks and publishers collected them onto volumes of floppy disks or on CD-ROM, and users would load them into applications such as WordPerfect, Microsoft Word, and Aldus PageMaker.

Historically, artists created most clip art in a vector format, which means the images could be scaled to any size and not lose quality. That makes it extra fun today to take an image designed for very low resolution and scale it up to 3000 pixels wide to see details that you might otherwise miss.

I browsed through about a dozen early 1990s CD-ROM clip art collections found on the Internet Archive and Jason Scott’s CD archive and picked out a handful of examples of the artform that represent an unusual and rare peek into our digital past.

Obsolete Technology

Clip art collections from the early 1990s are full of obsolete technology, such as 35mm film, pagers, brick-like cell phones, typewriters, word processors, VHS tapes, huge answering machines, overhead projectors, film cameras, and much more. Browsing these images somehow makes you feel like a digital archeologist discovering the tools people used in the past (even if you lived through that time period yourself).

[ Continue reading Tech Time Capsule: Early 1990s Clip Art Captured an Era » ]

Platform Studies book from Zagal and Edwards launches May 14, 2024.

Attention video game fans! I co-wrote an MIT Press Platform Studies book called Seeing Red: Nintendo’s Virtual Boy with Dr. Jose Zagal, and it’s coming out May 14th of this year.

You can pre-order it now on Amazon if you’re wild about stereoscopic red consoles.

Be aware that it is definitely an academic book, so it doesn’t read like a pop culture narrative, but I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised at how much depth we go into on this fun console. I still think it’s an enjoyable and essential work of video game scholarship (but then again, I would think that, wouldn’t I).

Here is the official blurb:

The curious history, technology, and technocultural context of Nintendo’s short-lived stereoscopic gaming console, the Virtual Boy.

With glowing red stereoscopic 3D graphics, the Virtual Boy cast a prophetic hue: Shortly after its release in 1995, Nintendo’s balance sheet for the product was “in the red” as well. Of all the innovative long shots the game industry has witnessed over the years, perhaps the most infamous and least understood was the Virtual Boy. Why the Virtual Boy failed, and where it succeeded, are questions that video game experts José Zagal and Benj Edwards explore in Seeing Red, but even more interesting to the authors is what the platform actually was: what it promised, how it worked, and where it fit into the story of gaming.

Nintendo released the Virtual Boy as a standalone table-top device in 1995—and quickly discontinued it after lackluster sales and a lukewarm critical reception. In Seeing Red, Zagal and Edwards examine the device’s technical capabilities, its games, and the cultural context in the US in the 1990s when Nintendo developed and released the unusual console. The Virtual Boy, in their account, built upon and extended an often-forgotten historical tradition of immersive layered dioramas going back 100 years that was largely unexplored in video games at the time. The authors also show how the platform’s library of games conveyed a distinct visual aesthetic style that has not been significantly explored since the Virtual Boy’s release, having been superseded by polygonal 3D graphics. The platform’s meaning, they contend, lies as much in its design and technical capabilities and affordances as it does in an audience’s perception of those capabilities.

Offering rare insight into how we think about video game platforms, Seeing Red illustrates where perception and context come, quite literally, into play.

[ Continue reading I co-wrote a book about the Virtual Boy for MIT Press » ]

[Benj’s note — I originally wrote this in 2020 and had it sitting around until now. I still think it might be useful to someone in the future, so I decided to publish it.]

Many Americans alive today witnessed one of the most dramatic cultural transitions since the invention of the printing press: The rise of the consumer Internet, beginning around 1994. For everyone else, life before the Internet may seem like a distant, foggy past. To help future generations understand what happened, here’s what life was like back then, mostly based on my personal recollections as someone born in 1981.

The Internet first made its way to the world as the ARPAnet (1969), a computer network that linked universities and government institutions. The network grew quickly in size and capability, and soon, it opened up to private companies and individuals. Not long after becoming publicly known as the Internet, this global network first made a big splash in the mainstream American press. Around 1995, commercial ISPs began springing up overnight, and soon America was rushing to get connected.

As a result of easy and inexpensive Internet access in homes and businesses (and now in our pockets), many aspects of our society have changed, and I’m going to go over some of them below.

This is a broad generalization

Everything you’re about to read is a generalization. Individual experiences before the Internet differed greatly depending on your location, age, and socioeconomic status.

In fact, experiences varied year-by-year as culture and technology shifted. And obviously, life before the Internet spans back into prehistory. So to simplify things, I’ll be talking about life from the point of view of a middle-class American family in the years before the Internet hit it big—roughly the 1970s to the early 1990s.

I was born in 1981 in Raleigh, North Carolina, USA, and raised there in what might be described as an upper-middle-class white suburban family with a technologically literate father (who was an electronics engineer) and access to varied computer platforms and telecommunications from an early age.

I still think this summary of differences might be useful to people in the future since it is coming from the perspective of a veteran tech historian who has spent nearly two decades writing about these topics.

So first, a very big disclaimer: Your Memories Will Vary.

[ Continue reading My memories of what life was like before the Internet » ]

In August 2022, I joined up with Ars Technica as their AI and Machine Learning Reporter. Of course, even while documenting one of the wildest cutting-edge stories in tech at the moment, my heart never strays far from the subject of this site: vintage technology and the history behind it.

In between writing about AI at Ars over the past 8+ months, I’ve had the chance to occasionally write a piece about tech history or nostalgia (23 in total so far). To capture them all in one place, I’ve created a tag called “retrotech” for all of those articles at Ars. To check them out, click this link.

Here’s a fun one I did not too long ago: Egad! 7 key British PCs of the 1980s Americans might have missed.

So if you’re interested, keep an eye on the “retrotech” tag and follow along there. In a way, it’s kind of an extension of what I did on Vintage Computing and Gaming back in the day, albeit this time I make a full-time living and get health benefits. That’s quite an upgrade!

As I usually mention in posts on here for the past few years, I’m sorry that I’ve let VC&G wither with neglect. I’m not shutting it down since there is so much historically valuable content here (especially interviews and comments), and our Patreon supporters keep these archives online. Thanks for your continued support over the past 18 years!

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P.S. Did you see this piece that lists out all of the tech history work I did at How-To Geek between 2020 and 2022? Pretty cool.

Atari founders circa 1972-73 (from left to right):
Ted Dabney, Nolan Bushnell, Larry Emmons, and Allan Alcorn

[ Atari Pong turns 50 years old today, and I thought it might be fun to revisit an article I wrote about the game’s creation for Edge Magazine (Issue 248) back in 2012. Since the web version of that piece is no longer online and I retained the rights, I am republishing it here. –Benj ]

Forty years ago this November, Atari introduced the world’s first video game sensation, Pong. The game, while not the first of its kind, would provide the economic catalyst necessary to jump start a completely new industry.

In 1971, Nolan Bushnell and his partner Ted Dabney created the world’s first commercial arcade video game, Computer Space, for California coin-op manufacturer Nutting Associates. It made a minor splash in the arcade market, but it was not wildly successful.

For round two, Bushnell wanted to follow up with a driving game for Nutting, but he quickly found himself at odds with Nutting’s executive staff about the direction of the company’s video game products. He resigned from the company, taking Ted Dabney with him.

Bushnell began to shop his driving game idea around to other American coin-op makers. Bally, then the largest arcade amusement company in the US, showed interest in the idea. The firm awarded Bushnell and Dabney — then doing business under a partnership named “Syzygy” — a contract to develop a video game and a pinball table. Syzygy would create the video game design and license it to Bally, who would produce the hardware and sell it under the Bally name.

Under the new contract, Atari received $4,000 a month to develop the two games, which gave just enough financial room to hire an employee. Recognizing his limitations as an engineer, Bushnell reached out to Allan Alcorn, a former colleague from Ampex, and asked him to join the company.

Alcorn, then 24 years old, accepted the offer to work for Syzygy in June 1972. It was a risky move at the time, but after a few years at Ampex, Alcorn had grown bored with his work. He was ready for a new challenge at a startup company, and both Bushnell and Dabney recognized his considerable talents as an engineer.

That same month, Bushnell and Dabney incorporated their company under a new name, Atari, Inc., and set out to change the world of arcade entertainment forever.

[ Continue reading [ VC&G Anthology ] The Making of Pong (2012) » ]

[ Phillip Heller is a member of the Prodigy Preservation Project. Here, he writes about his progress since Part 1 in January. –Benj ]

Reverse engineering Prodigy is not without challenges. Though the patent describes the communications protocol and the TBOL language well, it lacks detail of the application protocols – that is, the communications between the Reception System and the server-side applications like Logon, Enrollment, Messaging, and so on.

The progress made last time was to implement the communications protocols and to get the reception system to think it was connecting to the server. Now, we need to move beyond that.

After several months on other projects, I’ve freed up some time, made some significant progress, including successful Reception System login, which I’ll detail below.

[ Continue reading Reverse Engineering Prodigy, Part 2 » ]

“Now computing can be fun and easy for the entire family.”

The Tandy Sensation was an early attempt at a specialized Multimedia PC. In this case, Tandy came up with a 25 MHz 486SX computer with a 107 MB hard drive, built-in CD-ROM drive, stereo sound card, a voice/fax modem, SVGA color graphics, and more.

All this for $2,199 US with a SVGA monitor included (that’s about $4,232 today). You could also get the MMS-10 Stereo Speaker/Amplifier for $79.95. It seemed so futuristic at the time.

The Sensation also shipped with the interesting WinMate interface, a successor to DeskMate that ran on top of Windows 3.1.

I miss the ebullient joy of Radio Shack computer bundles aimed at families. They always seemed so fun. I remember seeing the Sensation in a local Raleigh, NC Radio Shack store circa 1993 and wanting one.

By the way — Merry Christmas!

Discussion Topic: Have you ever owned a Tandy IBM compatible PC? Tell us about it.

In Memoriam: Clive Marles Sinclair (1940-2021)
British inventor, Founder of Sinclair Research, Creator of Sinclair computers

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See Also:
RSOTW: Where’s the Bits? (2008)
RSOTW: Memotech ZX81 Modules (2014)

In the mid-1990s, my dad gave me a Hewlett Packard HP 95LX he bought from a friend and never used. The HP 95LX (1991) is a really cool handheld PC that runs DOS from ROM.

While looking for 95LX software around 1997 (according to the file dates, although it’s very possible I grabbed them earlier), I went on CompuServe and downloaded a passel of shareware games, amusements, and utilities that were designed specifically for the HP 95LX. Many of them were programmed by David K. Goodman, and they mostly date from 1991 and 1992.

[ Continue reading HP 95LX Games From CompuServe in the 1990s » ]