I last updated you on my Macworld work back in January. Since then, I’ve been busy writing more historically-minded pieces for the site as well as its sister site, TechHive. Below you’ll find a list of the ones I haven’t mentioned yet on this blog in convenient digest form.

• 01-30-2013- The Little-Known Apple Lisa: Five Quirks and Oddities
• 02-08-2013 – The History of Electronic Board Games
• 02-11-2013 – The Mac Color Classic, 20 Years Later
• 02-16-2013 – Abandoned Apples
• 02-18-2013 – Evolution of the Smartwatch
• 03-01-2013 – The Evolution of Apple Pointing Devices
• 03-15-2013 – Teach Your Old iPod New Tricks
• 03-22-2013 – Apple’s Five Most Important Displays

Phew. I’ve been busy! Of those eight pieces, the Apple Lisa one can’t be missed. Plenty of interesting little-known history there. The Mac Color Classic and Abandoned Apples pieces are some of my favorites as well.

I’m not sure, but I get the feeling from the lack of comments on my Apple-related posts that not many Apple or Mac fans visit VC&G. Not quite sure why that is, but if you’re out there, let me know.

Does anybody out there remember VCR games? They were typically board games that integrated a pseudo-interactive VHS video tape into the game play. The first two to be released were the Clue VCR Mystery Game and Rich Little’s VCR Charades Game, both by Parker Brothers in 1985.

They weren’t video games, per se, but you could call them “video tape games,” or VCR games, as I preferred in the recent slideshow of 1980s and ’90s VCR game classics I assembled for TechHive. Here’s an excerpt from the intro:

The rise of the home VCR in the early 1980s brought about that last innovation, which resulted in dozens of board games (and eventually toys as well) that shipped with VHS tapes designed to be played at certain points in the game. Players had to follow cues in the game in order to call up the right segment to play on the videocassette—all in all, a tedious business.

Personally, I remember playing the Clue VCR game at a friend’s house as a kid not long after it came out. It seemed pretty amazing at the time. I also vaguely remember playing some beach-themed game, and maybe one based on Trivial Pursuit.

Oh, and I also had the white Captain Power ship and some tapes. Loved that stuff.

The same sort of pseudo-interactive game format later made its way to DVDs, but the rise of multimedia video games (and ever-better graphics) essentially killed whatever chance they had of becoming a classic game genre.

Thirty years ago today, Sony released the first commercially available Compact Disc player, the CDP-101. It launched alongside 50 CDs in Japan, marking the commercial birth of the widely popular digital audio medium.

Over at TechHive (a new site run by the folks behind PC World), I’ve written an in-depth piece that details the history and impact of the CD as a medium for both audio and computer data. I hope you enjoy it.