10 DAYS OF VINTAGE: Day 5

The famous IBM PC 5150 turned 30 in 2011, and I spent quite some time preparing for that important anniversary. During my brainstorming process, I thought it would be fun to celebrate the 30th anniversary of another famous cultural icon — the “smiley” ASCII character, which originated with that seminal IBM machine.

To me, the the smiley character (seen above in its original and inverse forms) is best known as the protagonist of pseudo-graphical text-based games like ZZT.

To find out the origins of this whimsical denizen of Code Page 437, I sent an email to Dr. David J. Bradley, one of the creators of the IBM PC, whom I had corresponded with before. In fact, Dr. Bradley is best known as the inventor of “CTRL-ALT-DELETE” keyboard combination that once reset almost every IBM PC-compatible computer.

I never did get around to writing that Smiley celebration as I planned, but I just ran across my conversation with Dr. Bradley recently, and I still find it interesting. With Dr. Bradley’s permission, I am reproducing a transcript of our email conversation below, which I hope will aid future IBM Smiley researchers in their quest for information.

[ Continue reading [ VC&G Anthology ] Origins of the ASCII Smiley Character: An Email Exchange With Dr. David Bradley (2011) » ]

Today, PCWorld published the inaugural entry of my new column, This Old Tech. In the column, I will be writing about vintage gadgets, games, and computers — pretty much the same stuff I talk about on Vintage Computing and Gaming. So far, the plan is to publish a new piece every Friday.

For the first column, I talk about the first MS-DOS computer I ever learned to use, the Toshiba T1000 laptop. I still have the same machine from all those years ago, so aside from just waxing nostalgic, I also attempt to get it working again.

So spread the word — I am looking forward to exploring my personal tech history in this new column. I hope you enjoy it.

In September 2008, I began working on an in-depth history of the early online virtual world called Lucasfilm’s Habitat for 1UP.com. After delays in hearing back from Chip Morningstar (one of the game’s co-creators) and an unexpected death in my wife’s family, the article got the kibosh. It’s probably for the best, because I barely knew what I was doing back then.

Along the way, I did manage to interview Habitat’s other main creator, F. Randall (“Randy”) Farmer via email. Farmer didn’t answer half of my most probing development questions (he kept pointing to an earlier piece over on Gamasutra), but what he did answer is pretty interesting.

Some of this information be recounted elsewhere by now — I think more articles have been written about Habitat since 2008 — but I’m publishing my complete interview here in the hopes that it may help someone else with research about Habitat in the future.

10 DAYS OF VINTAGE: Day 3

[ Continue reading VC&G Anthology Interview: F. Randall Farmer, Co-Creator of Lucasfilm’s Habitat (2008) » ]

10 DAYS OF VINTAGE: Day 2

It’s a famous story: Under the direction of minimalist Steve Jobs, Apple designed the first Macintosh to be a security-screwed box that kept internal hardware upgrades away from users’ hands. He wanted to keep things simple and user-friendly, but the limited memory capacity (128K) and fixed nature of the first Mac held the platform back significantly during its first year on the market.

Apparently, that inspired companies to create batsh*t crazy peripherals for the machine.

That’s because, with a sealed box, Mac hardware upgrades could only come in the form of external, plug-in peripherals. Here are six of the strangest ones I’ve ever come across in all my Macintosh-Related Virtual Online Reading and Researching Travels (or “MRVORRT” for short).

Honestly, these are not necessarily bad or useless peripherals. They’re just strange. You’ll see what I mean.

[ Continue reading The Strangest Classic Mac Peripherals I Have Ever Seen » ]

[ Earlier this year, I asked readers what they wanted to see on VC&G’s tenth anniversary. Most people said “behind the scenes coverage,” but I wasn’t sure how to approach that. So I asked my longtime editing partner Harry McCracken to interview me in the hopes that I might accidentally say something interesting about the history of the site. Happy Anniversary, VC&G readers. — Benj ]

I first met Benj Edwards back in 2007, when I worked at PC World magazine and he submitted an article — “The 10 Worst PC Keyboards of All Time” — over the transom. (Actually, we didn’t meet in person until later, and his submission arrived in my inbox like any other email, but you get the idea.) Even then, I was already a fan of his Vintage Computing and Gaming website, which was then a couple of years old.

We ended up publishing Benj’s keyboard slideshow at PCWorld.com, where it became a monster hit with readers. Since then, Benj and I have continued our writer-editor relationship: first at Technologizer, and today at Fast Company, where I’m an editor and he’s a frequent contributor, writing deeply-reported pieces about fascinating topics which everyone else has forgotten about. He’s also contributed to The Atlantic, Macworld, PCMag, Wired, and other publications.

Benj has never stopped blogging at Vintage Computing and Gaming, which celebrates its tenth anniversary today. To commemorate the occasion, he asked me to interview him about the site, his other writings, and his pursuit of collectible tech products and the stories behind them. I learned a lot from his answers — and so will you.

–Harry McCracken

10 DAYS OF VINTAGE: Day 1

[ Continue reading VC&G Interview: Benj Edwards, Creator of Vintage Computing and Gaming » ]

“I REPEAT, THIS IS NOT AN INVOICE”

Although Vintage Computing and Gaming turns 10 years old today, I actually registered the “vintagecomputing.com” domain name back on June 8, 2000. This is what Network Solutions sent to me in the mail. I was only 19 years old — now I’m 34. Time flies.

It wasn’t the first domain I’d ever registered, but it was an early one. I wanted to use vintagecomputing.com for an online computer museum that would show off my vintage computer and video game collection. I never got around to creating that.

Another project got in the way of all of those plans, and I ended up working on music at Request-A-Song.com instead until October 2005.

I finally put my vintagecomputing.com domain to good use — over five years later — when I decided to make a blog on that fateful day in November 2005.

Discussion Topic of the Week: What was the first domain name you ever registered?

Happy Halloween from 1984

My family has this way of saving everything. Not through conscious, organized preservation, but by virtue of never throwing anything away.

In that vein, I was digging through some old papers at my mom’s house after my father passed away in 2013, and I came across this homemade Halloween greeting card.

From the looks of it, my dad made the card for me and my brother using Broderbund’s Print Shop on the family’s Apple IIc. It is printed on a single sheet of 8.5″ x 11″ paper; one is supposed to fold it in half twice to achieve a gatefold design with a front, inside, and back. Click the image above to see the whole thing unfolded — the other side is blank.

As for who colored it with crayons, I’m guessing I did (perhaps my dad or brother did it neatly, then I gave it a once-over with a brown squiggly line). What a great momento from the home PC era. Happy Halloween!

Discussion Topic of the Week: Have you ever made a personalized greeting card using your computer? Tell us about it.

It is no secret that Vintage Computing and Gaming is in its 10th year of publication (the site’s 10th anniversary is November 2nd of this year).

Ten years is like a century on the Internet. Throughout these long 100 metaphorical years, I’ve done a lot of side work for features both on VC&G and in my offsite freelance features that have never been published before.

That is going to change. Today I’m announcing a new series on this blog called VC&G Anthology. It’s just a fancy way of saying “old stuff from my archives.”

To fuel the Anthology, I’ve dug up old interviews, outtakes, notes, and other writings from my history that have previously never appeared on VC&G or anywhere else.

Additionally, some of the upcoming Anthology material will come from my work on other publications that is no longer accessible. This will be one way to remedy the Web’s propensity to forget things when host sites go belly up or get URL-confused or database-addled in their old age.

So stay tuned — this should be fun.

An elephant never forgets. [Front]

Not a September 11th floppy slogan. [Back]

There’s a lot of information crammed onto this Elephant Computer Systems floppy disk, and I don’t mean the digital data. It’s overflowing with external, physical clues and markings that show how it has been handled and used over its lifespan. Archivists call this “metadata” — that is, data about the data — and it is often lost when things are digitized.

The most obvious pieces of metadata from the labeling on the disk are about who manufactured it (“Elephant Computer Systems”), its optimal capacity (“single-sided, single-density”) and intended usage (“soft sector”). If you familiarized yourself with the technical specs of the floppy drives of computers available in the 5.25″ floppy era, you could rule out a few systems. That could be useful if other platform-betraying clues were absent on the disk.

Another obvious set of metadata comes from the presumed contents of the disk, which we can infer from the printed file directories taped to the disk jacket. Again, if one were familiar with the program names in the listing, one could point to a specific computer platform. (In this case, the printout looks like a DOS 3.3 “CATALOG” listing from the Apple II.)

Let’s take a step deeper into the less obvious metadata presented to us by this artifact. From visually inspecting the disk, we can tell (among other things):

[ Continue reading [ Retro Scan of the Week ] Metadata and The Well-Loved Floppy Disk » ]

“In fact, don’t even come in on Monday.”

It’s amazing to think back to a time when the now-common mouse scroll wheel was billed as a labor saving device.

But that is exactly what’s going on in this early ad for Microsoft’s Intellimouse and Intellimouse TrackBall. The Intellimouse series, first introduced in 1996, popularized the scroll wheel.

(By the way, the first mouse with a scroll wheel was actually the Mouse Systems ProAgio in 1995 — see this timeline I created in 2008 for more neat mouse history.)

A long time ago, people thought modernization and labor saving devices would lead to shorter workdays and work weeks. As someone once said somewhere (fuzzy attribution, I know), it turns out that productivity enhancements cease to be productivity enhancements as soon as they are ubiquitous. We just acclimate to them and expect more output for the same amount of work time.

Oh well. Keep on scrollin’.

Discussion Topic of the Week: When did you first get a mouse with a scroll wheel on it? How did you feel about it at the time?

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See Also:

The First Microsoft Mouse (RSOTW, 2007)
TrackMan Marble FX (RSOTW, 2008)
IBM ScrollPoint Mouse (RSOTW, 2010)