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Some time ago, there was a thread with Kevin Kelly talking about how he had the Electronic Whole Earth Catalog lying around, but how to get it online? About 6 people hopped in; we helped him transfer the CD-ROM. Now it's running at the Internet Archive:

archive.org/details/the-el…
It will take a while for you to get it running. It's 430mb of Hypercard Stacks (over 9,000 cards!!) on this thing. I would highly suggest running this in Incognito/Private mode so nothing else collides with it. Thanks to @mrstephencole
for doing the final bit of making it emulate
Officially, Stewart Brand considers Whole Earth a relic of its time that we have, as a Whole World, entirely outgrown. But information in context is always interesting, and this CD-ROM was a monumental achievement.

newyorker.com/news/letter-fr…
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Jason Scott
@textfiles
20 years ago, I was dealing with interesting posts of people who were SYSOPs of BBSes in the 1980s/1990s, to the BBSLIST.TEXTFILES.COM project, where I asked for stories and thoughts. The result of this, ultimately, was the BBS Documentary. I also checked what BBSes remained.
The easiest way to figure that out is checking the FidoNet Nodelist for who remains. At some point, your BBS would join the FidoNet out of necessity and ease. I considered it such an important part of the BBS story that I made an episode about it.

So, 20 years ago, there were about 200 BBSes in North America that were on the Fidonet. Considering that my BBS List work had shown at least 105,000 one existed, I thought this was a pretty low number. I think there are 200,000 in total, many to still track down.
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Jason Scott
@textfiles
Tales from the Frontlines of Emulation:

Meet DEXTER. DEXTER goes into a Dragon's Lair (and Space Ace and Firefox and Cliffhanger and etc.) arcade machine and completely replaces the laserdisc, allowing the game to run even with that hardware dead.
DEXTER is designed to have the same hookups to the laserdisc player that the arcade machine expects - it just snaps into it to replace them. The arcade machine has no idea it's not using new hardware. The game plays the same.
Like a lot of these custom solutions, it does runs of the boards, then sells out the batch, then does another, and you ride the waves over the years. I can't imagine you have one of these machines and don't know DEXTER, but if you don't: laserdisc-replacement.com
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Jason Scott
@textfiles
Story time, Friday Vintage Gaming edition.

I bump into many figures from The Old Days of game development. Names big and small. I always ask about interviews or collaboration, just in case. One said no, and I will always remember why.
He worked at a big name company in the 1980s. You'd recognize the company, but I don't really want folks going on a hunt. This guy was a programmer as well a project manager, and he's gone on to many other things. I asked him if I could interview him some time. He said no way.
He said that at one point, working on a game many of us know, a programmer had a breakdown. Too many 20 hour days, too many weeks of endless, relentless pressure with management coming by threatening that they had to make the deadline.

His family checks him into a psych ward.
Read 5 tweets

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