Have you ever wished you could create a StuffIt archive on your modern Unix-based Mac with a native open source tool, so you could more easily transfer files to your retro Macs? Well... have fun.
vintageapple
a few years ago i mentioned that i wrote a book about the exciting, awkward and embarrassing experiences of growing up with computers and video games in the 80s and 90s.
i wanted to remember what it felt like being the only dorky computer kid at school. or what it was like to hear my first modem handshake sound. or starting the first flamewar on the school's national FirstClass BBS in the macintosh lab over the lunch-hour
it was originally something i wrote only for my family and friends who were there at the time.
and then i met all of you folks when i started my first masto instance 4 years ago. i had no idea there were so many hardcore retrocomputing and gaming nerds out there; unix and mac and ms-dos folks alike.
so i mentioned it casually. i was surprised by the interest in the book.
so i spent the better part of the past 3 years rewriting the book for *you* fellow mastodon dorkus malorkuses. the book is a celebration of all of the best (and worst) parts of a kid growing up in the digital age.
we're all busy old tired stressed folks now. so every memory and cringetacular story is short enough to read on a 5 minute bus/metro/toilet ride. they're weaved together into an arc that starts at my family's first Tandy TRS-80 and ends at my school's Mac LC II and building my first Pentium 133.
it's finally published, and i'm super proud of what it became thanks to everyone here nerding out for years.
enjoy the book. i wrote it just for you. ❤️
paperback edition: https://mybook.to/EDuUf
DRM-free ebook (EPUB format) and chapter samples here:
https://tomotama.itch.io/mages-modems
#books #indiePublisher #bookstodon #author #macintosh #vintageApple #vintageComputing #msdos #dosGaming #yeg #canada #alberta #bbs #smolWeb #indieWeb
![The rear cover of the book, showing a Carmen Sandiego-style letter from the ACME Detective agency. The letter has a picture of a spazzing out kid wearing a Just Do It sweater.
The letter reads:
ACME Detective Agency
Dear Detective #0294,
As discussed, I have enclosed a hardcopy of VGA256's journals discussed at the departmental briefing. The journal entries are chronological, and document the suspect's computing and gaming activities from the early 1980s to late 1990s - his childhood and adolescent years.
Each vignette is an introspection into the suspect's self-described obsessions, including but not limited to:
* IBM PC, Amiga, Apple ][, Macintosh, Tandy
* MS-DOS, MacOS, Windows 3.1 & 95, UNIX
* NES, GameBoy, Sega Genesis, TI-85
* Modems, BBSes, CompuServe, Prodigy, ISPs
* Warez, FTP, Usenet, IRC, Shell Accounts
* Origin Systems, LucasArts, and Sierra On-Line
... and so on. The stories are a treasure trove of immoral and illicit activities that made him the dysfunctional adult he is now. I hope these will be of value in building your dossier on this delinquent.
I expect a report on my desk by Friday.
Deputy Chief Conover
Brat & Punk Division](/proxy/post_attachment/958760/4c3f9d6273.png "The rear cover of the book, showing a Carmen Sandiego-style letter from the ACME Detective agency. The letter has a picture of a spazzing out kid wearing a Just Do It sweater.
The letter reads:
ACME Detective Agency
Dear Detective #0294,
As discussed, I have enclosed a hardcopy of VGA256's journals discussed at the departmental briefing. The journal entries are chronological, and document the suspect's computing and gaming activities from the early 1980s to late 1990s - his childhood and adolescent years.
Each vignette is an introspection into the suspect's self-described obsessions, including but not limited to:
* IBM PC, Amiga, Apple ][, Macintosh, Tandy
* MS-DOS, MacOS, Windows 3.1 & 95, UNIX
* NES, GameBoy, Sega Genesis, TI-85
* Modems, BBSes, CompuServe, Prodigy, ISPs
* Warez, FTP, Usenet, IRC, Shell Accounts
* Origin Systems, LucasArts, and Sierra On-Line
... and so on. The stories are a treasure trove of immoral and illicit activities that made him the dysfunctional adult he is now. I hope these will be of value in building your dossier on this delinquent.
I expect a report on my desk by Friday.
Deputy Chief Conover
Brat & Punk Division")
Edited 265d ago
Hey so I got a new thing! It’s a Performer PL-CL-SE accelerator for the Mac SE from MacEffects. Supposed to make the lowly SE run like a SE/30 at 16Mhz.
Let’s pop it into one of my SEs and see how it “performs” 😄
Getting a fake AppleTalk ImageWriter to show up in the Chooser took longer than it should have.
not sure how well known this already was, but i just stumbled upon an archive of super high-res 35mm photos of Newton and NeXT photos from the 90s, by photographer doug menuez. the vast majority are candid b+w snapshots of the newton and next teams as they grind through workdays and product launches
thank you to buriedbits for the archival heavy lifting. the originals are from stanford's doug menuez archive, which has more here:
https://exhibits.stanford.edu/menuez
Edited 219d ago
this is not well known, so i thought i'd share this -
way back in 2020, ars released a short interview with rand miller about myst and the challenges of the cd-rom format. it's mildly interesting, but obviously cut from a much larger tapestry.
they eventually released the full, 2h interview with rand, but very few people saw it. in the extended version, he talks about the very early days of working with HyperCard, from the Manhole to Cosmic Osmo to Spelunx. he goes into obscene amounts of detail with the constraints of working with HC and 80s/90s macs, writing custom XCMD and XFCNs, building in 3d with StrataVision, and using Debabelizer to build palettes.
he does an amazing job of explaining what the constraints were for computing in that era. for anyone curious about what it was like making games in the 80s/90s, i can think of few other interviews that express the realities and joys of working in confined space so well:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5qxg0ykOcgM
#retrocomputing #macintosh #vintageApple #hypercard #myst #riven
it took 25+ years of searches, but i finally struck paydirt this morning: a legit, retail copy of FirstClass BBS for the macintosh
the backstory: in 1995, my redneck farm school managed to get an entire lab of twenty Mac LC's, and one of the machines was tucked off in a corner to run "FirstClass" for the entire school using an external 14.4k Global Village Teleport modem.
i was already a bbs kid by this point, but i had never heard of FC. all of the boards i visited were PC/ANSI boards running software like Oblivion/2, Iniquity, PCBoard or Wildcat. i had never even *heard* of a macintosh bbs. our computer teacher managed to get a landline number for the modem, and encouraged me to call it from home.
when i connected from home, i was nonplussed - the board was black/white ASCII with some of the worst menus i had ever seen. i browsed a few of the conferences and logged out. a "lamer board" if i had ever seen one.
the next day, i made my opinion unswervingly clear to my computer teacher: "Your board sucks Mr. M!"
He chuckled, "What? First Class is great! It's you DOS guys that suck."
he motioned to a nearby LC and opened a program called FirstClass Client. it showed a login dialog; he hammered in his u/p and a few seconds later, he was logged in to the BBS over the LAN.
...... except, it was all graphical! the entire board was a rich mac OS gui. navigation between file areas and message conferences was by opening and closing windows, and clicking on buttons. no ascii/ANSI characters. downloading a file was just plain drag and drop from the server's folder to your desktop.
i had never seen anything like it: a bbs that functioned more like an operating system and windowing environment. it was a *decade* ahead of anything i had seen in ms-dos
that experience left a huge impression on me. i never found any bbs that felt as good as FC before or afterward, and spent years trying to find a legit copy of it. because it was insanely expensive ($800+) it was mostly sold to educational and corporate institutions, and very few copies ever showed up on ebay. until today. i can't wait to receive this in a few weeks, and begin documenting
and archiving the contents.
fwiw - i wrote a much longer version of this story, and many others about the 90s bbs era, in my book Mages & Modems: A Childhood Well-Wasted in the Golden Age of Personal Computers, Games, and Internet Piracy:
https://tomotama.com/books
