10 DAYS OF VINTAGE: Day 10

One week ago, I had a chance to talk to Felicia Day, an American actress who has gained considerable renown for embracing her geeky side.

In 2007, Day created a pioneering web TV show called The Guild that focused on a group of disparate characters in a World of Warcraft-like MMO who are nonetheless bound together by their devotion to the game — and to each other as teammates.

After launching The Guild, Day went on to co-star in Joss Whedon’s Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog, an award-winning musical miniseries crafted especially for the web. She has also acted in shows such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Supernatural, and Eureka.

Just this year, Day released a memoir called You’re Never Weird on the Internet (Almost), that I read from cover-to-cover in a few days and enjoyed immensely. In it, she talked about growing up in the American South, her gaming habits, embracing her geeky nature, and creating The Guild.

With that book in mind, I thought it would be fun to ask her some questions about her early computing and gaming habits. Along the way, we touch on the philosophy of genius and celebrity, and whether it’s safe to do an interview while you’re driving a car.

I hope you enjoy it.

This interview took place on November 4, 2015 over the telephone.

[ Continue reading VC&G Interview: Felicia Day — Actress, Author, and Geek Advocate » ]

(An interpreted narrative told through real AMD stock photos)

10 DAYS OF VINTAGE: Day 9

[ Continue reading The Story of AMD64 » ]

10 DAYS OF VINTAGE: Day 8

[ This interview I conducted was originally published on Edge.com in June 2012 to roughly coincide with Electronic Arts’ 30th Anniversary. Since then, the interview has disappeared from the web. A few people have asked me to make it available again, and since I retained the rights to the interview, I am free to publish it on VC&G for everyone to enjoy. ]

Electronic Arts is 30 years old, and there is no denying that the behemoth game publisher casts a long shadow of influence over the entire industry. The company, founded in May 1982, pioneered a business model that treated game designers like rock stars and software publishers like record labels. It pushed the use of big names and big licenses in sports (think Madden, NFL) and soon grew to gobble up many renowned development studios to become a massive entertainment conglomerate.

These days, that conglomerate catches lots of flack from gamers on various issues including employee treatment, content milking, premature server termination, and more. Whether or not those criticisms have any merit, there is no denying that Electronic Arts was once revered as a top corporate impresario for identifying and cultivating the world’s best game design talent (although one would have to admit that time was very long ago).

The man behind the early, creatively-rich image of EA is Trip Hawkins, an Apple veteran who founded the company with a simple dream: to bring his sports simulations to life. Hawkins, now 58, left EA in 1991 to start The 3DO Company, which folded in 2003. He then launched mobile game developer Digital Chocolate that same year. Just recently, Hawkins announced he was stepping down as CEO of Digital Chocolate to face an as-yet unrevealed future.

In late May of this year [2012 — Ed.], on the occasion of EA’s 30th anniversary, I spoke with Hawkins over the telephone and via email about the creation of Electronic Arts, the design of its early games, and at some length about the negative criticism the company tends to attract today. Along the way, we touched on the personal source of his creative spirit and about heady days as a close friend of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs.

[ Continue reading VC&G Anthology Interview: Trip Hawkins on 30 Years of Electronic Arts (2012) » ]

Play it again, Samtronic

I ran across this ad for CasaBlanca’s Intelli-Touch, “the world’s first computerized ceiling fan,” in a 1985 issue of Home magazine that I found in my mom’s house.

My mother has subscribed to house decorating magazines for as long as I can remember, and Home is only one of many (other examples: Better Homes and Gardens, Southern Living). I never thought that I’d feature a scan from one, though.

But this ceiling fan ad was too fun to pass up. It reflects a time when you could slap the term “computerized” on any electronically-controlled consumer product (even if it didn’t actually have a computer inside, which was often the case) and use it as a marketing angle.

The robotic take on Humphrey Bogart’s classic film reminds me of those famous Maxell ads. Perhaps the same people were responsible for both campaigns? I don’t know, but frankly, this would have terrified me if I had seen it as a kid. Luckily, I found it when I was 34, so I’m only slightly afraid.

Discussion Topic of the Week: If you woke up one day and everyone looked like a metallic, boxy robot, what would you do?

10 DAYS OF VINTAGE: Day 7

When I write articles about the history of technology — which, I’ll admit, is fairly often — a few readers will sometimes say, “The author is obviously too young to remember X or Y,” or “He forgot to include X.” Sure, I don’t know everything. But most of the time, if there is ever an omission of something notable in one of my articles, a) I know about it, and b) it was done for a good reason.

(That reason, by the way, is usually brevity — editors almost always trim things out to make the article shorter. The second most common reason is that the omitted info, while generally understood to be true, is actually false.)

When the occasion warrants it, and if time allows, I do the most exhaustive research I can manage on a topic. While browsing through my old writing files recently, I came across a fairly vivid illustration of this: a very detailed timeline of CD technology that I created while writing an feature about the 30th anniversary of the CD Player for TechHive back in 2012.

During that process, I set out to understand the history of the CD Player and the Compact Disc medium as much as possible so I could explain it with confidence. One of the best ways to do that — to cover 30+ years of history and get it all straight — is to make a timeline. So that’s what I did.

The published article on TechHive includes key selections from this timeline at the bottom, but not everything. With the hope that my more detailed CD timeline might some day help future researchers, I am publishing it below, complete with sources when available.

This kind of thing makes me wonder how many other man-hours of journalistic research lay just out of reach because there is no proper context in which to share it. In this case, I’m lucky to have the VC&G Anthology series.

[ Continue reading [ VC&G Anthology ] A Detailed Timeline of Compact Disc Technology (2012) » ]

In October 2008, I created a slideshow to celebrate the 25th anniversary of Microsoft Word for PCWorld.com. It included slides on the history of the software and some oddities as well — remember Clippy?

While researching the slideshow, I contacted Charles Simonyi and Richard Brodie — two early Microsoft employees who worked together to create the first versions of Microsoft Word. While working at Xerox PARC in the 1970s, Simonyi and a colleague named Butler Lampson created Bravo, the world’s first WYSIWYG word processor. After that, Microsoft hired Simonyi largely based on that experience.

Conducting original interviews for a web slideshow was very unusual in 2008 — heck, it’s unusual today. But sometimes you need to go to the source to get some facts straight, and that’s what I was doing, as you’ll see below.

To create this short composite interview, I took two separate email interviews and combined them into one document for easy readability. While it is edited to appear like a conversation, neither man was aware of the other’s answers.

10 DAYS OF VINTAGE: Day 6

[ Continue reading VC&G Anthology Interview: Charles Simonyi and Richard Brodie, creators of Microsoft Word (2008) » ]

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.

10 DAYS OF VINTAGE: Day 4

In early 2009, I undertook my most ambitious slideshow up to that point: The Ten Greatest PC Games of All Time for PCWorld.com.

After playing dozens of games, reading opinions on forums and blogs across the Internet, and consulting every previously published list of greatest PC games I could find, I made a rough list of about 50 games. Then I stuck them in a spreadsheet and rated them based on various criteria.

During the process, I also surveyed several well-known PC game developers (and Dan Bricklin) for their nominations of Greatest PC Games. I did the best I could, and of course, the result reflected one man’s opinion. Here’s what I came up with:

#10: TradeWars 2002
#9: Myst
#8: The Sims
#7: StarCraft
#6: Rogue: The Adventure Game
#5: M.U.L.E.
#4: SimCity
#3: Sid Meier’s Civilization
#2: Doom
#1: World of Warcraft

It pissed everybody off, of course.

(Well, just about everybody. Fellow journalist Jenn Frank and her mom liked it. But that was about it.)

Editors who had not been consulted were livid that I was apparently speaking on behalf of PC World with such an important-sounding list (not my intention), and people all around the U.S. were upset that I didn’t include Half-Life or X-Com: UFO Defense.

Meanwhile, readers in the UK cried for blood and shouted, “Where is Tomb Raider??!!” I just scratched my head on that one — apparently it’s a national classic over there.

It didn’t help that my editor had changed the title to “The 10 Best PC Games Ever.” After about two dozen angry comments, I got my editor to change it back to “greatest” — the difference being that I was going after influential and culturally important games — not necessarily the “best” games to play today. (I also regretted not making a title slide for that slideshow for the first time, so it always says “best” on there.)

The piece got syndicated on MSN and everywhere else, so the title change didn’t propagate there. Hate seethed at me from all corners of the globe. I honestly don’t enjoy making people upset, but man, it was fun to watch people go apeshit over a slideshow.

[ Continue reading [ VC&G Anthology ] Developers Cite The Greatest PC Games of All Time (2009) » ]

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) » ]