I recently revived an open source Apple II Agent project I began in January: An Apple IIe with a custom client that allows AI to easily write software through a chat taking place on the machine itself, similar to Anthropic’s Claude Code.

Through an Ethernet card, the client links to Anthropic’s Claude Opus AI model using a Mac proxy with API access to Claude. After automated testing in emulators on the proxy (allowing rapid iteration in an accelerated Apple II simulation), the agent deploys the new program (in BASIC or assembly) directly into real Apple II memory, over the Ethernet link (it’s an Uthernet II card). That part feels like magic.

The goal is that a user sitting at the Apple II can type whatever they want and just have it appear in front of them, and so far it works very well! I’ve made some solitaire games with mouse support (and a Sim City clone) that are really fun to play. I might get addicted to creating hi-res monochrome Apple II games with the mouse (using Apple’s official Apple II mouse card of course!).

The code for the agent is currently available on GitHub if you want to try it yourself. The proxy runs on a Unix-like machine (can be a Mac), and right now the Apple II end requires an Uthernet II card, but it could be adapted to other types of network interfaces.

Aside from the Apple II Agent, I’ve also been experimenting with using AI to make multiplayer mods of classic NES games (four-player Super Mario Bros. is my fave so far) and to port PC games to unusual platforms (such as ZZT for the NES, a BBS door game for the NES, and the first NES game with a built-in AI language model). You can see (and play) many of them over at the BX Foundry website, which is my home for experimental projects.

Unfortunately, just after I finished getting the Apple II Agent in great working order and had coaxed Opus into creating an awesome mouse-based Solitaire engine, my wife requested that my somewhat smelly Apple IIe (musty with age) should leave the house, so now I’m searching for a less malodorous unit to keep running it on. 🙂

I recorded a quick demo back in October you can see below:

How a childhood memory, a forgotten online service, and two years of reverse engineering led me to bring NAPLPS back to life.

A before-and-after look at an image translated into NAPLPS format.

[ Please welcome Joe Hammond, a graphic designer and amateur software developer who has spent the past couple of years reverse-engineering NAPLPS — the graphics language that powered PRODIGY — so that authentic new NAPLPS files can be created again. Below, he tells the story of how a childhood memory turned into one of the deepest technical rabbit holes he’s ever fallen into. –Benj ]

Every programmer has a moment that starts it all.

For me, it was PRODIGY.

When I was a kid, my father subscribed to PRODIGY. At the time I didn’t appreciate what he had really given me. To me it was just this incredible place that existed inside our computer. I could play games, read news, send messages, and explore. The modem would shriek while it connected, and moments later this colorful world appeared on the screen.

Those afternoons sitting in front of that monitor with my dad were my introduction to technology. Looking back now, I can honestly say that without those experiences I probably wouldn’t have become a software developer.

Thirty years later, after becoming involved with Prodigy Reloaded, I discovered something I never knew as a kid: those graphics I’d spent so much time looking at had a name: NAPLPS.

That discovery sent me down one of the deepest technical rabbit holes I’ve ever fallen into.

[ Continue reading Resurrecting Prodigy’s Dead Graphics Language » ]

Greetings, fellow retro tech fans. 20 years ago today, I launched Vintage Computing and Gaming. The origins of the site have been well-covered elsewhere, so I’ll spare you the rehash.

Just kidding, that was a rehash. I copied and pasted that first paragraph from my 15th anniversary post and changed the number. 🙂

But seriously, 20 years is a long time. Looking back, it’s hard to fathom the scope of it. It’s true that I have not updated this blog much since I started freelancing back in 2007, and even less over the past decade. But I still feel it’s an important archive of observations about computer and video game history that generally spans the 1960s-1990s, the era of myself and my father.

In my initial 2005 post, I think I laid out the mission statement for the site when I wrote, “I believe we are in the middle of the most important and exciting transition in human history, where humans fully embrace and integrate computers into their lives, changing the way we live, work, and play forever. So it will be important in the future to be able to look back and see how we got there. And I, in my own small way, want to contribute to that effort.”

Looking at that statement all these years later, I find that I am very happy with my contribution that happens to span dozens of interviews, thousands of blog posts, hundreds of freelance works, even more posts on sites like How-To Geek and Ars Technica, and one book. All that started here on VC&G.

In general, I am not as worried about the preservation of tech history today as I was in 2005. I can’t claim full credit for that achievement, of course, and the best part is that many people who have never read this blog respect tech history now and put great effort into preserving it. So that part is covered, and I think we’ve seen a broad victory for cultural tech preservation. But regarding the “transition” itself — well, there’s a lot more to be said.

[ Continue reading Vintage Computing and Gaming is 20 » ]

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!

—

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 » ]