As you might have seen in previous posts, my stuck-in-quarantine project has been restoring my C64 so I can play around with it.  Part of that involves figuring out what you can reasonably use such a venerable computer for in 2020.ev, besides playing old games.  Word processing and suchlike are a given, though I strongly doubt that I could get my Commodore playing nicely (or even poorly) with the laser printer in the other room.  Also, the relative scarcity of 5.25" floppy disks these days makes saving data somewhat problematic (though I've got a solution for that, which …

(Note: This post is well beyond the seven year limit for spoilers.  If you haven't seen 2001 or 2010 by now, I can't help you.)

Many years ago, as a loomling, one of my very first memories was of seeing the movie 2010: The Year We Make Contact on cable.  That the first 'real' record I ever listened to was the soundtrack to that movie should come as no surprise, but that's not really relevant.  I was quite young so I didn't get most of it, but I remembered enough about it that it gave me some interesting questions (so …

Thirty-two years ago (plus a day or two - real life happens) two computer hobbyists stuck at home in a blizzard not unlike snowpocalypse named Randy Suess and Ward Christenson created something wholly new, which geek history remembers as the bulletin board system. At the time, the idea was revolutionary - with a computer, an auto-answer modem, and some disk space you could set up forums for people to leave public and private messages to one another. As disk space became less expensive, file archives were often added for people to trade files. By the mid-1980's boards were all over the place …

Over at textfiles.com, Jason Scott is adding to his already voluminous archive by acquiring and putting online the contents of archive CDs, such as the shareware, text file, and artpack CDs that we used to burn our connection minutes on downloading files. Herr Scott says that, because he's downloaded these collections of files from the Net there's no way of knowing if they're complete, but you're likely to find something that you remember from back in the day.

As always, he's accepting donations of files to add to his collection.