Here’s a site worth noting for all you historians out there. For the last ten years, Kevin Savetz has been hard at work transcribing the text of hundreds of vintage computer and video game magazines. Better yet, he’s received full permission from the original magazine publishers to provide the articles for free online. And they’re all available in the Classic Computer Magazine Archive. Kevin’s focus was originally on magazines about Atari consoles and computers, but it’s no surprise since the whole operation started out as the “Digital Antic Project,” whose aim was to put the entire text of the Atari-centric magazine “Antic” online. In September 2000 he met that goal and soon turned his attention to other magazines like the Atari ST-focused “STart” and multiplatform magazines like “Compute!” and “Creative Computing.” Now the site contains articles from nine different publications, either in whole or in part, available for online view.

Kevin loves sending me news of his latest additions (and I’m not complaining), which I’ve meant to tell you about before. Just this morning he wrote:

AtariMagazines.com has added the full text of 21 more issues of Compute! magazine: Fall 1979 (the first issue!), January 1981, February 1981, March 1981, April 1981, October 1981, December 1981, February 1982, June 1982, July 1982, October 1982, November 1982, January 1983, March 1983, June 1983, August 1983, September 1983, October 1983, September 1989, November 1990, and December 1990.

Published from 1979 through 1994, Compute! was a multiplatform computer magazine covering Atari, Apple, Commodore, Texas Instruments, Timex/Sinclair, and other early personal computers.

If you’re the kind of collector / historian who likes to delve deep into the news, thoughts, and reviews of the period, I definitely recommend checking the Archive out. I’d also like to thank Kevin Savetz for providing a valuable service and resource for the vintage computing and gaming enthusiast.

Move over, Michael Jordan. Dan Bricklin, co-inventor of the PC’s original killer app, VisiCalc, has something to say about shoes. And he’s afraid somebody might steal them.

[ Scanned from Time Magazine, September 26th, 1988 ]

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[Update: 07/21/2011: I asked Dan Bricklin on Twitter how this shoe endorsement deal came about. Did they approach him? His answer: “The ad agency needed a software person, saw a photo of me in the Boston Herald and knew my work and called.” He also mentioned that, in addition to Time, the shoe ad ran in Sports Illustrated, and a similar ad ran in the Men’s section of the New York Times. ]

Søren Ladegaard recently sent me news of his new Commodore-related website. Sure, there are plenty of Commodore-dedicated sites out there, but this one has a twist — it’s geared exclusively towards Apple Macintosh users. He writes:

I have created a website called Think Commodore. It’s about everything Commodore 64 & Amiga such as emulation, games, demos, music etc. from a Macintosh perspective. While there are tons of sites about Commodore emulation for Windows users you’ll be surprised of the amount of sites along the lines of “last update 2002, Mac OS 8.5 required etc.” That’s why I decided to do a Commodore emulation site that’s 100% up-to-date.

I’ve created a real nice and active forum too. I was fed up with posting “Any Mac users out there?” on all the popular Commodore forums. Here’s your chance to join a Commodore forum where every user is a Mac user.

After poking around the site myself, I find it quite nicely designed and very informative. If you’re a Mac user and you love Commodore computers, be sure to check it out (www.thinkcommodore.com).

For some computer lovers, the sounds that computers make is music to their ears. And by “sound,” I don’t mean 32-bit digitized audio coming from a Sound Blaster Audigy; I mean the actual mechanical whirrs, clanks, and cronks that emanate from computing hardware in action. They make you feel warm and fuzzy inside.

It was this very love I had in mind when I set out to compose a “computer music” piece for a class I took at a local university back in Spring 2002. But I wasn’t exactly following the instructions (more on that later). The class focused on the history and composition of music generated by computers. Not pop music or anything like it, of course, but what I would typically call “highly inaccessible, elitist, please pull the stick from my ass” music. In particular, we learned about what proponents of the genre call “new music,” which pretty much means any music that has an unconventional structure, typically lacking vocals, instruments, rhythm or melody as we know them. The computer variety of this avant garde style arose from early attempts at generating music with computers in the 1950s and 60s, but lacking sufficient computational horsepower for a decent compositional AI at the time (and even now), composers could only squeeze abstruse sequences of notes from their machines. But (surprise!) some people thought it was cool because it was abstruse, and a new class of music elitists was born. They embraced the limitations of the medium and ran with them — straight into a wall. If you think you’d get a kick from the seemingly random bloops and bleeps generated from applying a complex algorithm to the DNA of sperm whales, then this music is definitely for you. Sure, it’s got a great “nerd factor,” but it’s hardly emotionally inspiring.

[ Continue reading The Music Computers Make: Impenetrable Noise and Silicon and Steel » ]

[RedWolf writes: “This story was written by K4DSP, who is an old and dear friend of mine (and a fellow computing and technology enthusiast). He sent it to me recently and I enjoyed the story so much that I thought I would share it with you.”]

1982 was an exciting time for computer enthusiasts. The personal computer market was still in its infancy, and there were literally dozens of different models available at all sorts of price points. As a poor college student studying engineering and computer science, I found nearly all of them out of my reach financially, but the one I really lusted after was the Apple 2. I constantly imagined all the great software I could write and all the games I could play if I only had one of these 1 MHz 8-bit screamers. Never mind the Ataris and Commodores and Sinclairs and the multitude of CP/M machines — the Apple II was the one for me.

There was one insurmountable obstacle between the Apple and me. At $1195 it was literally the equivalent of six months’ rent. It might as well have been a million dollars. So I looked for alternatives. I thought about building a computer. In the early 80s it wasn’t all that unusual for people to build their own computers from scratch, but it wasn’t like homebuilt computers today – you didn’t go to a computer store and buy a motherboard and CPU and case and power supply and hard drive and bolt it all together and pop in your Windows install CD. Building computers meant soldering and drilling and (sometimes) even writing your own software to make things work. When the Apple II came out in 1977 it was one of the first “store bought” computers that didn’t require any assembly. That’s one of the reasons I wanted one. As a full time student with a job and a wife I really didn’t have time to figure out how to build a computer from scratch.

[ Continue reading How I Got My First Computer,
and How I Got My First Computer Back » ]