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atariaction · 4 months

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Kay’s 2023 Wrapped

Well, that about wraps it up for 2023, which means it’s time for my letter summarizing the computer history work that I did in the past year. I’ve been writing these letters since 2016, making this my eighth annual letter. I wish I had started this tradition in 1996, the year that my computer history efforts began when I launched the Digital Antic Project, which grew into Classic Computer Magazine Archive.

My goal this year was to publish six interviews on Antic: The Atari 8-Bit Podcast. I published just one. (It was a good one, with Rodrigo Castro about Atari in Chile. Why not six? My Internet Archive work and, simply, a lack of momentum on interviews. Once the process is going, it’s going! But getting that engine re-started is hard.) My goal for 2024 is to publish 15 interviews, which I fully expect to actually do. Between us over the years, Randy Kindig and I have published 436 interview episodes on Antic. Our collective goal is to reach 500 by the end of 2025. So to keep my end of the bargain, that means I’ll publish 15 interviews in 2024.

Scanning, though! I turned all sorts of rare paper material into easily-searchable digital material at Internet Archive. I scanned a lot of Atari newsletters, including many from Hughes El Segundo Employees Association Atari Computer Enthusiasts, South Bay Atari Computer Enthusiasts, and West LA Atari Users Group.

In other scanning news — let’s talk about MicroTimes. MicroTimes was a California-focused computer magazine that was published from 1984 through 1999. It was there in the thick of it, published in the state that brought us Silicon Valley. I wrote for MicroTimes for a few years starting in 1992. So I am especially proud of this: 41 issues of MicroTimes magazinewere added to Internet Archive in 2023, bringing the collection to 62 issues. Here’s the long-story-short summary of 10 years of effort: I made this happen. I willed it to happen. More issues will be added in 2024.

I also added two more books to the collection of Russ Walter’s Secret Guide To Computers at Internet Archive. The newest additions are hard-to-find editions from 1976, about BASIC programming and computer applications.

My Scantastix project (if you don’t know what that is, here’s a short article describing it) did some great work: we scanned 321 items totaling 22,577 pages. The scans include some rare Microsoft material, even rarer pamphlets and manuals for Compucorp computers (have you ever heard of them? The computer that came with them is on its way to Vintage Computer Federation) and so many Apple II manuals. Check out all the latest additions here.

Also, a weird scanning side-quest happened this year: My friend Cabel Sasser handed me a pile of more than 50 DAK catalogs, which I scanned for him, then he wrote a blog post about them that blew up the Internet for a few days. It’s a fun read.

Once again, I processed and edited videos of the presentations at Vintage Computer Festival West 2023and VCF East 2023. And I helmed a project to rescue audio from VCF West 2003. These were recordings that were made of talks twenty years ago, then the tapes were lost, then found, then given to me, then it turned out that the tapes were recorded terribly. It took a small team of people to get any sound at all from those tapes then turned into something listenable. They include the voices of C. H. Ting, Jef Raskin, John Ellenby, and Gary Starkweather, who have all passed since these were recorded.

When I interview a programmer, I ask the person if they have any source code. I interviewed Jay Jaeger, creator of the Atari Program Exchange version of Space War, in 2016. At the time he said he had the source code… somewhere. I contacted him from time to time to ask about that source code. (I have a “nag list” of people that I contact from time to time to ask them about some material or other.) Patience and persistence paid off. Just a few days ago, in December 2023, he found the assembly language source code and sent it to me to share.

A bit of personal archiving: I write for Juiced.GS magazine, which focuses on the Apple II. I uploaded all of the articles I've written for Juiced to Internet Archive, spanning 2015–2022. There are some interviews, some product reviews, and some nice little reminisces about the old days of microcomputers. (I released them under a Creative Commons license, so if you want to republish an article in a non-commercial computer club newsletter or something like that, go for it. My agreement with the magazine says that they get exclusive rights to articles for a year. So my 2023 articles will be shared online a year from now. In the mean time, it’s a good magazine: if you like Apple II, subscribe!)

My work at Internet Archive as the curator of the Digital Library of Amateur Radio & Communications is certainly one of the reasons I’ve had less time and energy for computer archiving. 2023 was my first full calendar year in this role. I hit my one-year anniversary in August! But there’s sometimes a nice overlap between the two efforts. For instance, in 2023 I archived several ham radio related programs for Atari computers and a few for DOS machines and even a handful for CP/M that were rescued from 8-inch floppy disks.

There’s something else, something that I’ve been teasing for years. In my 2018 letter I wrote “There’s a particular archiving project happening in 2019 that is really big and really important for microcomputer history. I’m not ready to talk about it, but hold your breath and cross your fingers.” Then at the end of 2019 I wrote: “That project depends on the help of one person who has been battling ongoing health issues. It is still very much at the front of my mind, and *crosses fingers* will move ahead this year.” It didn’t, and it couldn’t, but with patience and persistence, it’s finally happening. It’s already started, and I can’t wait to have something amazing to show you in 2024. Keep holding your breath and crossing your fingers just a little while longer.

If you support my archiving work on Patreon, thank you! Also please consider making a tax-deductible donation to Internet Archive, the non-profit online library that hosts all of my scans and interviews.

I hope we all have a pleasant and productive 2024. May your patience and persistence pay dividends.

#atari #interviews #computerhistory #internetarchive

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atariaction · 1 year

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Kay’s 2022 Wrap-Up

Greetings from the tail end of 2022. This is my annual letter summarizing the computer history work that I did this year.

When I wrote last year’s letter, I was in a bit of a funk. I wrote:

I doubt I will be as productive in 2022 as I was in 2021 … I can’t predict how much energy I will have to devote to these projects in 2022. I need a break from so many interviews (each is more time-consuming than you might guess), and spending hours processing piles of scanned documents does not appeal to me at the moment.

In retrospect, I was right — I produced less in 2022 than 2021, and I really did need a break from interviews and so much scanning. But 2022 ended up being a fairly successful year for my computer history efforts, some of it in ways other than interviews and scanning. 2023 promises to be at least as productive.

I published just four interviews on ANTIC: The Atari 8-Bit Podcast. There was Tom Zimmerman, who worked in in Atari's Corporate Research Lab on the unfinished AMY audio chip; Anthony Ramos, creator of the type-in game Creepy Caverns and the software for the Parrot audio digitizer; Michael Park, programmer of the Swan and Fujiboink demos; and Scott Savage, who built “Lefty,” a robot that played checkers. All four people gave great interviews!

I’ll certainly continue doing interviews in 2023. I don’t want to sound like I’m making excuses, but I will say that with 400+ interviews in the bag, finding people to interview is much harder than it used to be. The people who were findable have been found; the people who were agreeable to an interview have been interviewed. There are still more stories to be told, but the path only gets steeper. Let’s shoot for at least six interviews in 2023.

I did some solid software preservation work in 2022. With the help of 4am and John Keoni Morris, we preserved the only known copy of Glutton, an unreleased game for the Apple II.

I digitized the entire library of the Ol' Hacker's Atari User Group over a period of two months and made them available at Internet Archive. That collection weighs in at 1,281 .atr files, or 130 megabytes! My thanks to John Hardie at the National Videogame Museum for lending me that collection. You can find discussion of that collection in the AtariAge forums.

The scanners got a bit of a workout in 2022 as well. I scanned the complete run of ITEC (Information Technology Electronics Computers), a partwork magazine published by GEJ Publishing Ltd. in the United Kingdom from 1983–1984, as well as 11 issues of AppleLink Update magazine. I also found a cheaper way to scan large-format posters, which I used to make hi-res scans of a 1989 Ukraine Computer Exhibition poster and the 1984 Atari Final Legacy poster.

The rest of my output, I can only lump into an overarching category I’ll call Miscellaneous Computer History Preservation:

My pal in the Atari 8-bit world, Sal Esquivel, died in December. I did what I could to preserve his memory by archiving his YouTube videos into a collection at Internet Archive. I’m working with Allan Bushman to create a complete collection of Atari Program Exchange manuals and catalogs at Internet Archive. I put several of the Phoenix Software source codes (preserved by me years ago) up at GitHub for easier access: Adventure in Time, Queen of Phobos, and Birth of the Phoenix.

I edited the videos of the all the presentations at Vintage Computer Festival East 2022 and VCF West 2022, and made them available at YouTube and Internet Archive.

Having finished scanning every issue of Mid-Michigan Atari Magazine and Michigan Atari Magazine, I created a “complete collection” 1000+ page PDF which is either a) very handy or b) will hopelessly choke your PDF viewer.

Russ Walter has been writing and updating Secret Guide to Computers (later renamed Secret Guide to Computers & Tricky Living) since 1972. Currently in its 34th edition, Mr. Walter has kept the book updated as hardware, software, and operating systems have evolved. I worked with him to get as many editions as possible preserved and free to download from Internet Archive. Thanks to the Kahle/Austin Foundation for funding the scanning of those books.

A surprise came late in 2022 when I was offered a role at Internet Archive — it turns out that my years and years of preserving computer history taught me a few things, so now I am Internet Archive's Program Manager, Special Collections. My role is to curate the Digital Library of Amateur Radio & Communications. I’m having a great time doing that work. It’s the same sort of work as computer history, in a slightly different, but just as nerdy, field. It takes away from the time I can devote to computer history preservation, but it’s a change that I needed.

But! I’m excited for computer history projects in 2023! Having found the guy who wrote the line “Have you played Atari today?” I plan to publish an article or print interview about him and that famous tagline. I’ll continue filling out the Atari Program Exchange collection at Internet Archive. There are a lot of Apple II and Atari documents in a pile to get online for the Scantastix project. And, as I wrote above, I’ll shoot for six interviews.

Here’s to a productive and fun 2023. Let’s do this.

-Kay

P.S. Like many others in 2022, I moved from Twitter to Mastodon. You can follow me at @[email protected].

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