Pinterest as a Visual Archive of Computing History

Posted on February 5, 2013 by Blake Patterson

A couple of years ago, a social network based around the photo pinboard concept went online. Known as Pinterest, the site enables users to setup an account and “pin” photos from around the net to their own set of “boards,” setup by the user under categories of their own, personal preference. You’ve probably heard of it.

At first glance, just wandering in, Pinterest seems like a portal to the world of catalog living…and largely it is, I think. It’s mostly filled with fashion, interior design, scenic vistas around the world, cute little animals — that kind of thing. I signed up and started pinning a few photos here and there, and then more or less left it alone.

Some time later, I was examining a set of excellent photos of a rare, vintage computer someone had placed on their website, and I started saving a few of them to the local Pictures folder on my Mac for safe keeping, as was my habit upon finding a truly great photos capturing a piece of computing history. (There just aren’t enough high quality photos of some of these great machines of decades past.) It was then that it dawned on me that I could pin these photos to my Pinterest boards, preserving them for not just myself but others as well, in a public place (in case the original website went offline — Pinterest saves the images locally), while at the same time actively promoting them to followers.

I setup a series of boards to categorize the types of hardware I wanted to save, and thus began my new process of archiving vintage computer photos. It wasn’t long before I realized how valuable a process this is for photosets that are part of eBay auction items. After a few weeks or months, photos for ended auctions are usually gone, and there are so many vintage computer items passing through eBay that some truly excellent photos are popping briefly, only to disappear forever.

Here’s one example, the Acorn Phoebe. And another, a Heath Zenith Z-90. And, here is a Pravetz 8C. Or, how about this rare 80-column display card for the TI-99/4A? Try to click through to the source — all of these images appeared online and then quickly went off into nothingness. But they’re still here in my Pinterest boards, and you’re looking at them. What’s more, the eBay situation has evolved into a new activity that I quite enjoy: scanning eBay specifically in search of a great shot or two to capture every day. It’s an eBay activity that’s a little easier on the wallet than my typical use of the site…

So, Pinterest. Is it going to make an archivist of computing history out of you? I hope you enjoy the photos I’ve pulled together.

Posted in Just Rambling | 2 Comments

An Inside Look At OS/2…And Why It Failed

Posted on November 26, 2012 by Blake Patterson

Just a quick post to point folks to a two-part look (from The Register) at the situation that was the OS/2 operating system and why it failed, from the perspective of an IBM insider. It’s well worth a read.

Released 25 years ago, OS/2 was a team effort between IBM and Microsoft to replace DOS and Windows with the PC operating system of the future. It was highly advanced in many ways, but also severely stymied by ill-made decisions on the parts of “business people” at the top, and developers as well.

I tried out OS/2 v2.1 and v3.0 “Warp” back in 1994-1995 on my 486 PC, but it never really worked out for me due to hardware incompatibilities in the first case, and its heavy use of resources and awkward interface in the second. My greatest involvement with OS/2 would have to be when I worked for the University of Virginia Medical Center Computing department back in 1997 and shared on-call, evening support for a hospital room allocation application running at the UVA Hospital, custom written for OS/2 by a staff doctor.

OS/2 now exists as eComStation, published by Serenity Systems. It’s certainly an interesting part of computing history.

Posted in Other Platform, Windows | 1 Comment

A Phone Call I’ve Remembered These 28 Long Years…

Posted on November 14, 2012 by Blake Patterson

My first home computer was the TI-99/4A from Texas Instruments. I wanted to get a “real computer” (I had an Atari 2600 at the time), I bugged my parents, and I got to choose from what was on the (1982) market — within a certain price range. I recall choosing the TI mainly because it looked futuristic, the C64 looked ugly, and the Atari 400 had a lame keyboard. (the Atari 800, Apple II and IBM PC weren’t even in the running — too expensive.) I got it on Christmas morning, 1982. [The photo up there to the right is one I took of the TI-99/4A I received that Christmas morning, on the bed in my room just minutes after I received it, during a brief early-’80s equivalent of a “time out” I was subjected to due to the apparently disconcerting fit of joy I demonstrated upon receiving said unit…]

I had a lot of fun with the TI, and was able to expand it significantly, making it the gift focus of my birthday and the following Christmas. (I even sold my motor dirtbike, powered by a lawn-mower engine, to a neighbor for $99 so I could buy the TI Extended BASIC cartridge.) It was an extreme thrill to have my own floppy drive and store programs on disk rather than tape. Just holding a floppy disk, back then, was awesome, somehow — it was utterly foreign and the experience is hard to describe. Unfortunately, Texas Instruments crashed and burned terribly in the face of the competition in the home computer market and, in early 1984, Montgomery Wards was selling remaining 99/4A units for $25, as I recall. Because of all this, I wanted to jump to another computer, and my parents were behind it, having read about the TI’s woes in the paper and seeing how hard it was getting to find TI-related items in stores.

So, we listed the lot for sale in the local paper.

I got a few calls from people asking after the system’s details and the solidity of our asking price as days passed, of course. And then…one day…I got this unusual call I’ve remembered these 28 long years.

A man rang and indicated he wanted to ask about the TI system for sale, and so my mom gave me the phone. I have no idea who he was. I told him to fire away. He then began to explain to me that he was a happy TI user and had a great fondness for the platform. He then asked me if I was sure I wanted to sell the system. I explained to him that, given TI’s market exit, I wanted to jump to a different platform (the new Apple //c, which my parents agreed to go for, given Apple’s growing educational reputiaton). He acknowledged that, but wanted to tell me a few things about the TI, before I sold.

He informed me that the TI-99 was the first 16-bit home computer (news to me!), and spoke of the power that 16-bit offered vs. everyone else’s 8-bits. (He failed to mention the dubious bus architecture TI’s engineers were forced to bestow upon the system.) He then told me about this 256-bytes of “Scratchpad” memory that was in the TI that let special things happen. I, in my mind, pictured a little text editor with a yellow paper pad allowing 256 letters to be written, I recall — I pictured it vividly. I later learned that the 256-bytes of “Scratchpad” memory was the only proper 16-bit memory in the TI’s abysmal architecture, and it was often used for pseudo CPU registers, as the 16-but TMS9900 CPU had no actual registers, but used attached memory for that purpose, in the name of multi-user, context-switching efficiency. (Have a chunk of memory for each users’ “registers” and switch from one chunk to the other with just one pointer — it was inherited mini-computer DNA from TI.)

The guy talked to me for about a half an hour and laid on this-after-that win that the TI offered, and then asked me, at the end, if I was sure I wanted to sell. The entire purpose of his call was to convince me not to sell the TI. But…I was still sure. If I had been a little more tech savvy at that point, I might not have been sure. If I had been a lot more tech savvy at that point, I still would have been sure. :-) It was a dead platform, and one that had been poorly architected, though that really was due to some internal roadblocks at TI and not the machine’s engineering team.

It was such an unusual call that I’ve remembered it for nearly three decades. I’d love to meet that man today, if he is still alive — we’re obviously kindred spirits. My mother, I recall, was highly concerned that an adult male called to chat with 11-year-old me for so long. I assured her it was ok. Anyway, we sold the TI system to the brother of a stock car racer who wanted to use the system to calculate engine and suspension stresses in TI Extended BASIC. I’m not sure if he got that going or not. [Early-1984 TI-99/4A buyer in Yorktown, VA — ARE YOU OUT THERE??!!]

Anyway, I got the Apple //c in April or May 1984 and, I must say, preferred it strongly to that TI-99/4A, my first computer. Still, the TI holds fond memories, and I put together a full system some years ago, that sits on my desk today. I fire it up for the occasional game of Parsec or Ant Eater.

Things in computing were so much more fun, back then. Really, they were.

Posted in Down Memory Lane, TI-99 | 9 Comments

One of the Finest iPad Apps Is No More – Thanks for the Update, Twitter

Posted on October 1, 2012 by Blake Patterson

I know this is my vintage computing blog, but sometimes I need to stray off just a little. (That’s why I took pencil to the masthead logo a year or so ago…) Right now, I just need to vent my frustrations with Twitter Inc. for pushing the turd that is the latest version of the Twitter iOS app into the App Store.

I made my first tweet over four and a half years ago and, presently, Twitter is the thing on the Internet that I find the most useful and fulfilling. When I signed-in to twitter for the first time, there was no iPad (and the iPhone was brand new), but the iPad quickly became my device of choice for interacting with Twitter, and with the Internet in general, really, when I’m not working (writing, coding, etc.).

Over time, various apps arrived that provided a better Twitter experience for iOS users than that of the Twitter website. Now, I’m not going to go into the whole history of the iOS Twitter app landscape as I’m prone to do (I just deleted a paragraph, in fact, where I had begun to do so…sigh…), but suffice it to say that, on the iPad, Twitter (the app from Twitter Inc., themselves) that sprang from their purchase of Atebits’ Tweetie a couple of years back, was — until quite recently — the best iPad Twitter experience out there. Its interface was, I will say, perfect for the multitouch, 10-inch tablet. It featured panes of information that could be slid to the fore or conveniently out of the way such that amazingly efficient use of the device’s screen could be made. The interface felt very (literally) hands-on, lending to a surprisingly immersive experience for a Twitter app.  Twitter on the iPad was what you used to show off the device to curious friends. It felt like the future.

No more.

When version 4.3.2 of Twitter was replaced with version 5.0 in the App Store on September 18th, all that was nearly magical about its interface was gone, replaced by a new, dramatically less functional interface the motivations behind which I will surely never understand. This past weekend, I updated Twitter on my iPad and, when presented with this new interface, I was nonplussed. My first thought was that somehow, perhaps resulting from an App Store glitch, a very old version of Twitter had been installed on my iPad by mistake. As I moved through the app, I became more and more alarmed as well as confused as the apparent fracture in functionality that first greeted me grew into a mighty, gaping chasm upon further inspection.

One set of screenshots that compares the Twitter landscape view of version 4.3.2 to that of the new version 5.0.2 should really be all one need see to at least get some small taste of the incredible step backwards in interface design with which Twitter, Inc. has saddled its once elegant iOS client.

A failure of interface

The upper screenshot shows the dynamic interface of the earlier Twitter, where panes could be slid onto and off of the screen at will, to give focus to whatever area of information is of current interest. The in-pane web view shown can be slid left to reveal the rest of the page, tapped into full-screen for dedicated viewing at a larger rendering, or slid right to reveal more of the far-left action bar. In the new Twitter shown in the second screenshot, there is no left/right sliding to make use of the iPad’s large screen. Those light grey areas forever letterbox the comparatively small stream of tweets at the center. A click on a web-link always takes over the screen to a full-screen rendering; gone are the three in-pane webpage view sizes that gave such a nice feel to the Twitter experience on the iPad. And the list goes on.

A 2011 video from Twitter, Inc. does a fairly decent job of showing off many of the features of the interface they’ve discarded (though, only the portrait orientation is demonstrated, unfortunately).

Twitter is the app I use most on my iPad. I’ve deleted version 5 and re-installed version 4.3.2, and will sit on this version for quite some time, I imagine. I am in hopes that the folks over at Twitter Inc. have been hearing the tweets of disappointment from those of us who appreciated the impressive work they put into the “old” Twitter app, and will re-consider the direction they’ve gone with version 5. It truly is a monumental step backwards.

[ It seems worth mentioning here, given some of the response tweets I’ve gotten over the weekend, that I do own Tweetbot for iPad and I have used it. It is a very nice Twitter client, my “second best” choice on the iPad, in fact, and far nicer than the new Twitter version 5. I feel, however, that its interface on the iPad is well behind that of Twitter version 4; it does not utilize the screen in as efficient a manner. That said, Tweetbot is by far my favorite iPhone twitter client, and I use it hourly. So, no, I do not want to “just use Tweetbot instead.” And, while I’m on this sidebar, I’ll mention that for the desktop and laptop, YoruFukurou is my client of choice. ]

Posted in Just Rambling, Other Platform | Tagged , , , , , | 2 Comments

The Tandy CoCo to Get Its Own ‘Soul of a New Machine’

Posted on September 23, 2012 by Blake Patterson

Ever since reading The Soul of a New Machine, Tracy Kidder’s Pulitzer Prize-winning account of the creation of a 32-bit minicomputer, I’ve been a hound for any such works offering behind-the-scenes looks at such periods of silicon genesis. They are, to me, the very most interesting things to read.

Over the past decade, I’ve found and enjoyed quite a few such stories regarding a variety of platforms and technologies. Of course, not every system of my personal interest has been covered in this manner. One of those without a nice, public genesis chronicle is the Tandy Color Computer, which is a platform I added to my own collection only recently. I’m pleased to report that this won’t be the case for long.

Notable CoCo-scene personality and all-around super-nice guy Boisy Pitre, who I recently covered here in regards to his fascinating Liber809 project, has partnered with video game historian Bill Loguidice from Armchair Arcade to bring forth a book chronicling the history of the Tandy Color Computer.

Pitre and Loguidice have interviewed many individuals from the old days at Tandy, including all members of the CoCo engineering team, in order to render what will surely be a most fascinating history of of a machine that certainly deserves to have its story told.

In part two of a recent series of RadioShack Memories videos capturing a discussion between Pitre and former Tandy engineer Jerry Heep, Pitre explains the motivations behind his coming book. (Part one and part three are worth a look, as well.)

It seems that Pitre and Loguidice are aiming for a release at the end of this year, and I’ll let you guys know when it lands. I’m very much looking forward to it.

For those who share my interest in such things, some of the other books of this sort that I’ve enjoyed are:

[ Photo courtesy of Christopher W. (moparx) ]

Posted in News, Tandy / TRS-80 | 2 Comments

Susan Kare’s 32×32 Pixels of Steve Jobs…On My Flesh and Forever

Posted on September 11, 2012 by Blake Patterson

I got my first geek / tech tattoo back in 2007. I decided to go for an icon that captured both gaming and the element of retro: the ubiquitous Space Invader. I put a call out for opinions on just which Invader to get, and I had it inked. Three years later, I decided to let the world know I have a chip on my shoulder (as if my Twitter feed isn’t enough), and had a 6502 indelibly laid on my flesh. (Ok, it’s an approximation — 40 pins seemed a lot.) Dave Waugh down at Jinx Proof tattoos in Georgetown did the work, and I love them.

Now, anyone who has followed my writing across any of the sites I’ve run since the web began knows that I’m a rather devout Apple fan. I’ve owned lots of Apples over the years, and that’s because I love them. Given this and my recent interest in tattoos, I’ve wanted some kind of Apple-related tattoo for some time. On October 5th of last year, Steve Jobs passed and, unsurprisingly, it affected me deeply. With his passing, it became obvious to me that I wanted my “Apple tattoo” to be an homage to this man who so powerfully influenced my life and shaped my career.

After a bit of contemplation, the perfect Jobs tattoo design popped to mind. Early GUI work at Xerox PARC has long fascinated me, and its delivery to the consumer market, first with the Apple Lisa and later (and far more significantly) with the Macintosh in early 1984, is a major — perhaps the major — moment of paradigm shift in technology over the last quarter-century. Icons were in and the command line was out. But, somebody had to draw all those pretty pictures.

That person was Susan Kare.

Born in Ithaca, New York in 1954, Kare joined Apple in 1982 after receiving a call from high school friend Andy Hertzfeld, major designer of the Macintosh system software and co-founder of Radius, General Magic, and Eazel, suggesting she come to the Cupertino-based company to design user interface graphics for the upcoming Macintosh. While at Apple, Kare created all of the Mac’s bitmap icons, as well as several fonts, including Chicago, Monaco, and Geneva. Her business card read “Macintosh Artist.” Later, When Steve Jobs left Apple and formed NeXT, Kare came along to become the company’s Creative Director. She, later, produced icons and pixel art for both Microsoft (for Windows) and IBM (for OS/2).

During the development of the Macintosh, Hertzfeld created a pixel editor for Kare to use to create the all-important GUI icons on a 32×32 pixel grid. And icons, she created. One night, he happened into her cubicle to find her laboring over an icon portrait of their project leader and Apple co-founder, Steve Jobs. The story is chronicled on his website, Folklore.org. Herzfeld was skeptical that a convincing portrait could be rendered in just 1024 pixels but, alas, she had done it. 1983 Steve Jobs was eerily well captured by her artistic skills in that small grid, and soon the rest of the Mac team was asking her to render likenesses of them in those tiny bitmaps.

I have long been impressed by Kare’s Steve Jobs icon and, given my deep passion for retro computing and admiration for the late Captain of Apple, it seemed Susan Kare’s Steve Jobs icon was the perfect image to have permanently emblazoned upon my skin as a salute to the man’s passing as well as the world-changing work with which he and his team gifted us.

Dave Waugh over at Jinx Proof did the work today (as well as refreshing my 6502 tat), and I am stunned by the excellence of it. I now wear one of Susan Kare’s most notable icons upon my person, and in a nicely visible spot on my right arm. And, I’m happy to share it with all of you out there.

So, what do you think?

UPDATE (April 2018): Susan Kare has seen photos of the 1024-pixel grid of ink on my right arm and does approve, I’m rather pleased to say. In fact, in the years that followed she used a photo of the tattoo in the conclusion of her EG 2014 talk, and has sent me a few “Kare packages” as a friendly nod. What a lovely individual she is.

Posted in Just Rambling, Macintosh | Tagged | 17 Comments

Three-Headed Beast Spotted Staring Across Martian Landscape

Posted on September 1, 2012 by Blake Patterson

Multiple monitors can be fun, sometimes. :-)

(Check out the Mars Curiosity 360-degree panorama here.)

Posted in Just Rambling | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Christmas Morning, 1979 — A Pivotal Moment Captured on Film

Posted on August 31, 2012 by Blake Patterson

I’ve owned a lot of computers over the years, and I still have quite a few. “Computing” has been my all-encompassing hobby / interest / passion for most of my life. When it was time for college, I got a BSCS degree and am, presently, 16 years into my CS career — and have been self-employed for the last year and a half, thankfully!

But, it had to start somewhere.

This week I was down in the Hampton Roads, VA area where I grew up, on a little trip with my family. While there, I stopped in to visit my mother. As we chatted, I noticed a polaroid sitting on her bookshelf. It was a photo of me, taken on Christmas morning in 1979 (I was 7). Our family photo boxes are full of Christmas morning pictures like this one, so it didn’t really strike me at first — I’m surprised I even picked it up. But, I did, and as I looked at it I happened to notice something in the background. It was my old Atari 2600 console, along with a black and white television I was given for Christmas that year. And, then it hit me.

This was a photo of me taken just moments after I received the first computer I ever owned. The overpowering force of my life grew from the seed of this moment, captured on (instant) film, so many years ago.

In truth, I didn’t hit the ground running. I got excited about the Atari 2600 when my uncle Alfred setup a 2600 in his river house in Deltaville, VA. We would visit, and I’d have a great old time playing Combat, the only game he had. My folks noted this, apparently, and got me an Atari and a TV to play it on (so as to not clutter the family TV with the console). When I look back, I think the problem was the TV — it was black and white, and Combat looked pretty weak on it. So, I didn’t really jump into the system, and it sat mostly dormant for a year or two. That’s when I started seeing some cool games other than Combat on friends’ Ataris down the block — on the family room color TV. So, I moved my Atari into the den, wired it up, and asked my mom to take me out to buy a game cartridge. I can’t be sure what the first one was, but it was probably PAC-MAN or Demon Attack.

I loved that Atari, but in time I wanted to move on to a “real” computer, to do things the 2600 couldn’t. So, in late 1982, I made the choice and told my parents which way I wanted to go. And, that Christmas, I got a TI-99/4A — but that’s another story…

Thanks for the present, mom and dad.

Posted in Atari, Just Rambling | Leave a comment

So Long, and Thanks for All the Games

Posted on August 26, 2012 by Blake Patterson

Last week I sent out a tweet marking a rather sad turn of events concerning one of the most notable game studios of all time. On further reflection, I wanted to say a few words here.

On Wednesday, Sony shut down their European development house SCE Studio Liverpool. But, those reading this blog will likely better know the studio by its previous name, Psygnosis.

Founded in 1984 out of the ashes of Imagine Software, Psygnosis earned high praise for their large catalog of 16-bit game titles, released during the ’80s and early ’90s, that consistently demonstrated unusually high quality graphics and animation, especially on the Amiga platform. In 1993, to strengthen their coming Playstation console, Sony purchased Psygnosis and channeled the studio’s talents towards their new platform. Most notable among the console’s early releases was the futuristic racing game Wipeout, which sold many Playstations for Sony, one of them to me.

Psygnosis’ best known titles are probably the multi-platform hit Lemmings, Shadow of the Beast for the Amiga, and the Wipeout series. The first Psygnosis game I ever played was Barbarian on the Atari ST. It’s onscreen graphics were stunning, if the gameplay was somewhat disconnected, and the box art and pack-in wall poster by fantasy artist Roger Dean, whose work was featured in (and on) many Psygnosis releases, were striking. After I moved (back) to the Amiga, I often showed off the system’s capabilities to friends, demonstrating various Psygnosis games and their animated intro sequences. None were as impressive as Shadow of the Beast, however. The game’s controls may have been awkward and it didn’t offer the best gameplay, but the artwork, high number of onscreen colors, and amazing parallax scrolling were absolutely stunning.

The day the news broke about the closing of the studio, I tweeted a short list of some of my particular Psygnosis favorites (well, those that would fit in 140 characters, anyway). I’ll repeat those here, in no particular order.

It saddens me to see the Psygnosis story end, though, save for Wipeout (I bought a PSVita to play Wipeout 2048), my core connection to the studio is to do with games from decades past, which I still enjoy. But, then, 28 years is a pretty good run by anyone’s measure.

Posted in Amiga, Atari, Gaming, Multi-Platform | 5 Comments

A New Photo Panorama of The “Byte Cellar” for 2012

Posted on August 9, 2012 by Blake Patterson

I started this little blog back in March of 2004. That’s about a year after my wife and I moved into our current home in Alexandria, VA. The main requirement we held onto when looking for a larger home those years ago was: adequate room for a kid. There was a secondary requirement, but one that was more a concern of my own than of my wife’s: an office area with room for…more than just a few machines. I had started collecting vintage computers, you see, and I quickly came to find it to be quite a rewarding (and addicting) pastime.

Happily, we found the right house with the just the right bedroom setup for a child…and just the right basement space for a geek dad bent on reliving the good ole’ days of home computing. It took a little work to get things in order, however….


But, it all came together in the end. Well, “the end” is probably not the right phrase, actually. Since getting the computer room, which I affectionately call the “Byte Cellar” for obvious reasons, all setup, I’ve been on a constant “add a desk, add a system, rearrange things, swap out a system, repair a failure, clutter clutter, tidy tidy — repeat” routine. It keeps the collection running, changing, and interesting, I think.

A big part of the fun of it all is sharing my setups and projects with others by way of blog posts, lots of photos, and the occasional video. It’s part pride in getting these systems up and running all nice and tidy, certainly, but more to perhaps inspire other like-minded individuals to spend some time with these wonderful machines from a time when computing was just a lot more experimentation and downright fun.

I’ve got a pretty sizable Flickr gallery online that shows most of the systems in my collection in great detail. In addition to this, I’ve created a few full-room photo panoramas of the Byte Cellar, stitching together a series of shots as I rotate a camera about the room. I posted the first one in 2005 and a second in 2008. Things have changed so notably in the past few years that I’ve just made my third panorama and placed it online. Have a look.

I hope someone sees this latest glimpse into my retrocomputing insanity and goes out and grabs an Apple II. Or, maybe a TI-99. A CoCo 3 would work, as well!

UPDATE: Wow, it seems my latest panorama has made Lifehacker! Gee, now I wish I’d tidied things up a bit more before the shoot!

UPDATE: And now I’ve been featured on Engadget!

UPDATE: Oh no, now people are trying to move in!

UPDATE: Updated “The List” and added additional labels to the close-up panorama image.

Posted in Just Rambling, Multi-Platform | 4 Comments