In the mid-1990s, my dad gave me a Hewlett Packard HP 95LX he bought from a friend and never used. The HP 95LX (1991) is a really cool handheld PC that runs DOS from ROM. While looking for 95LX software around 1997 (according to the file dates, although it’s very possible I grabbed them earlier), […]
I still love my dad’s handwriting. Here it is, folks: My CompuServe Information Service password that I used from 1993 until the late 1990s: “Needy-Sacred”. Feel free to log in as me the next time you get a chance. (I kid.) “Needy-Sacred” is an almost magical combination of words for me — probably because it […]
“Press <CR> for more” For my sixth grade social studies class, I wrote a report on Mikhail Gorbachev, former President of the Soviet Union. And he really was “former” then — the USSR had fallen apart just two years prior to my report in 1991. For that report — which I ran across recently — […]
Resistance is futile. (click for full advertisement) Long-time readers of VC&G may recall me talking about my adventures on CompuServe from time to time. Needless to say, they never looked like this. But I did have a few nightmares featuring enormous floating hive-mind spaceships hooked up to my computer when I was 12. On second […]
The Man with the Golden Gun I spent more hours on CompuServe in the early 1990s than I probably should have — considering it cost something like $4.80 (US) an hour. But of all the commercial online services at the time, CompuServe’s combination of history (it had been running since 1969), depth, and variety blew […]
I’m doing research on the history of commercial online services such as Prodigy, Compuserve, AOL, GEnie, Delphi, Q-Link, The Source, Dow Jones News/Retrieval Service, any videotex or teletext service, and many others for an upcoming project of mine. I would like to talk to, and perhaps interview, former employees of any of these online services […]
[ Please welcome Phillip Heller, VC&G’s newest contributor, who is a member of the Prodigy Preservation Project. Phillip will post more updates on his progress here in the future. –Benj ] Beginning in the mid 1980s, there were a number of online “walled gardens”. Among them were CompuServe, Genie, Delphi, Quantum Link (later PC-Link, AOL, […]
Echoes of Ancient Technicolor Greece Back in 1995, CompuServe and Fujitsu launched a graphical online chat world called WorldsAway. I used it from the very start (at least within a month of the launch, I think), and quickly became enveloped in the beautifully illustrated world and the sense of community it fostered. I’ve written in-depth […]
HP-95LX: Like a computer-shaped cookie that you can’t eat In case you didn’t know, the HP 95LX is a small, portable IBM PC compatible machine running a full version of MS-DOS that ran off of two AA batteries. It marked the beginning of HP’s palmtop computer line, which I wrote about recently in a slideshow […]
On January 30th, 2006, I posted my first entry in the Retro Scan of the Week column: “When to Use Low Speed Modems.” Below that first scanned image, I wrote: I found this amusing, so I thought I’d share it. More to come. I was right about that last sentence. Since then, I’ve shared weekly […]
