Weasel @wildweasel@computerfairi.es

some of you know that i wrote a book - "Mages & Modems" - soon to be published, about my experiences growing up in the 80s and 90s with microcomputers in northern canada.

back in 95-97, as a teenager, i worked at the arctic's first ISP. but before it became an isp, ssi micro was canada's only Gateway 2000 computer retailer.

a village of less than 500 people housed a massive 40,000 sq ft computer store.

i've been searching for photos of the old computer store, before it disappeared in the 2000s. the search has been fruitless for twenty years, until today.

today i found the one surviving photo of the store EXACTLY as it was the day i left it to go to university when i was 17 years old.

an annotated version of this photo will appear in the book. the photo is painfully low-res (digital cameras were VERY new in 97), but you can make out some of the details if you squint.

a few fun things: the cowprint sweaters in the center of the photo are official Gateway 2000 gear. i don't remember us selling a single one to a customer 😅

directly behind the sweaters are slatwall shelves (every computer store had 'em!) full of games. my big box copy of Dune CD-ROM - the one with the incredible sandworm mouth - came from that shelf

to the right of the sweaters and main entrance, along the shelves, are dozens of ISA and PCI upgrade cards. whenever a customer made a custom order, i'd walk over from the service bay, grab the upgrade card, and stick it in their machine. it was always exciting to get to test new weird stuff like SCSI and video capture boards.

the computer on the far right was supposed to be for customers to test out software and our internet service. i never once saw a customer use it, but i sure as hell got a lot of Quake DMing done on that machine 😆 it was a Gateway 2000 full tower with a Pentium 90. the fastest machine in the building.

i was a repair/ISP technician in those days, and my little service bay was beyond the wooden birch-coloured doorway. that room also housed our local dial-in lines (four of them!) and 33.6 Sportsters.

if you're interested in reading the book, i'll be posting about it more in the coming weeks. i've got a few review copies out, and once i've had more feedback and (made some edits) it'll be ready to go.

#1990s #retroComputing #books

Smart.

Lounge Lizard - Patricia Lillie
https://macthemes.garden/themes/d625f134994a-Lounge-Lizard

Ohmelette

today's buried treasure:

an interview with john henry thompson on the history of Macromedia Director. it's one of the only interviews ever recorded on the subject.

as the lead programmer and creator of Lingo - the OO scripting language used in director - he relates intimate knowledge of its origins. i was delighted to learn that he borrowed much of the grammar from Hypertalk!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TqISbaJ7qug

#macintosh #vintageApple #macromedia #softwarePreservation #programming

somehow i still keep learning new stuff about css

today i discovered that `font-family: monospace;` causes the text to become smaller!

you can get around this by doing `font-family: monospace, monospace;`

Hiromi wants to be like Be - Chillyday Yosh Kondo
https://macthemes.garden/themes/ee689ef7064f-Hiromi-wants-to-be-like-Be

If you thought COVOX was cool, hear this out: tuning the radio to the radio inference produced by the computer to play music.

I wonder if it is possible to produce sounds this way on ZX-81 while displaying an image on the screen. Would be impressive to make a demo that has colours on B&W ZX-81 and plays music on ZX-81 that doesn't even have a beeper sound output.

Source: Dr Dobb's Journal Vol 1

Ness it's your dad. i heard you killed some bugs on the sidewalk today. here's $400. fight for what you believe in

PCC Newsletter, an early hobbyist computer magazine (1972!), has strong zine vibes <3

This is impressive: a fully responsive website template system based on Star Trek’s LCARS operating system, built with only HTML & CSS – no images. Made by Jim Robertus, based on the original designs by Michael Okuda.
https://www.thelcars.com

(Sound on for full experience.)

via @stuarticus who used it to make a new RSS reader theme for @NetNewsWire 🤯

I traced the eepy from a bitmap, changed the text and extracted the rest from an original PDF :)

the IRS has decided I owe them $600 for some fucking reason

https://donate.unascribed.com

bbs enthusiasts might remember the name Telegard - a bbs server written based on wwiv's source code and hugely popular with the ibm pc/ms-dos crowd

telegard had a long and tumultuous history by its authors, and its own source was eventually leaked and was modded into many more popular (pirate-friendly) ms-dos boards like Renegade, Oblivion and Iniquity.

while i was doing research a few months ago on the history of those systems, i found out that telegard.net - the original home of tg - was taken over by a domain squatter in 2010, populated with ads for the past 15 years.

two months ago, i noticed that the squatter had not renewed the domain, and it went into the long grace/redemption/auction/expiry cycle. i checked on it every single morning, and to my absolute delight, it was released this morning for purchase. 💸

the domain will be used purely for historical preservation of telegard and its many descendants

#bbs #warez #softwarePreservation

Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis