I’m not sure if I’ve ever mentioned my Arctic 81 website here on Technologizer. It’s home to Arctic Adventure, a text adventure game I wrote in Level II BASIC for the Radio Shack TRS-80 when I was in high school. It was published in a book of type-in adventures in 1981, though my triumph was lessened by the fact that I never got a copy of the book. After I was informed that a devastating bug had somehow snuck into the print version, I kind of wanted to forget the whole thing.

Arctic Adventure indeed slipped to the back of my brain until 2021, when—having procured a copy of the book—I typed it in, fixed the bug, expanded the gameplay, and figured out how to make it all work in a web browser. Its relaunch got quite a bit of attention from people charmed by the notion of me finally debugging it after 40 years.

Anyhow, I’m bringing this up now because there’s breaking Arctic Adventure news. A clever programmer named Jim Gerrie has ported the game to the Radio Shack MC-10, an ultracheap home computer from 1983 that I only vaguely remember. Jim went back to the code from the book as the basis of his adaptation, so this new version is actually much closer to the 1981 original than my 2021 revision. I have it up and running on Arctic 81, where it’s accompanied by some information on the MC-10.

Arctic 81 also has an even earlier game I wrote, maybe when I was still in junior high—a slot machine simulator—along with a 1980 text adventure by my friend Charles. It may be a quixotic little site, but I wish more people who lived through the BASIC era shared their creations and stories. If these memories aren’t documented, they’ll be lost to history.

It never occurred to me that the software I wrote in the glory days of 8-bit computing might interest anyone a few decades into the future, so I didn’t bother to file it away. But I do have two cassettes containing a puzzle game I programmed for my Atari 400. (Atari expressed interest in publishing it, but I didn’t manage to implement their suggestions for improvements.) I have failed to get that one to load on an actual Atari computer. However, it’s apparently possible to digitize and then decode old program tapes using modern software running on a non-vintage PC. Remind me to give it a try sometime. If it leads anywhere, I’ll post the results on Arctic 81.

When I got my first job in technology journalism, my grandmother used to call the magazine where I worked “your catalog.” I winced. But in retrospect, she wasn’t that far off. Back then, if you wanted to buy a computer product—this was the early 1990s, before the web changed everything—the odds were pretty decent that you started by buying a computer magazine.

If you remember the computer magazines of this era at all, you recall how thick they were—hundreds and hundreds of pages an issue in the case of the most successful ones. The majority of those pages were ads, not editorial content. And a sizable chunk of those ads were catalog-y in the extreme. Pages and pages were devoted to lists of products and prices in teensy type, with 1-800 numbers you could call to place an order.

About a gazillion mail-order houses did business this way. The April 1991 PC World, for instance, includes advertisements for outfits such as Advanced Computer Products, Arlington Computer Products, Bulldog Computer Products, Computer Bazaar, Fast Micro, Kenosha Computer Center, NSI Computer Products, Paradise Computer Products, Telemart, and United Computer Express. Only the names and slightly varying levels of ad-design proficiency served to distinguish most of them.

But I regarded three of these companies as the industry’s giants. Whether they were the biggest, revenue-wise, I’m still not sure. It was their sustained prominence in major magazines, with multi-page spreads, that made them feel like behemoths.

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The raccoons who made computer magazine ads greatRead More »

Apologies for the continued self-indulgent excavation of my own work, but after indexing my TIME.com columns and preserving my tweets, I’m back with links to the 952 posts I wrote for my PC World blog Techlog between 2004 and 2008. Until now, I’ve considered them to be more or less lost. At some point after I left PC World, the publication decided to pull the plug on its blogs, which were hosted on an increasingly archaic platform called Moveable Type. I’m not postive when it happened—possibly during a redesign of the site in 2012—but was ages ago. And I might have been the only outsider who noticed or cared.

Even the Wayback Machine’s copies of the blog were broken, due to its inability to deal with the navigation menu we’d constructed. If you found one Techlog post, there was no obvious way to click around to all the other ones. All you got were broken links. Recently, though, I made a discovery. By manually editing the Wayback URLs, it was possible to get to all my blog posts after all. They were all there—just hidden, as if they’d been stored in rooms without any doors or windows.

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My mid-aughts PC World Techlog tech blog, available again at lastRead More »

On March 7, 2007, I tweeted—though it wasn’t yet called that—for the first time. I remember feeling like I was late to the platform: If I understand how member ID codes work, I was the 817,268th person to sign up.

I didn’t really figure Twitter out until some point in 2008. Once I did, it became one of my primary modes of communcation. I had loads of fun and my share of glory. Early on, for example, TechRepublic named me as the #1 techie to follow. (I can’t prove it, as any evidence long ago vanished from it website.) I came up with the idea for TWTRCON, a conference about using Twitter for business that drew the likes of MC Hammer and Martha Stewart as attendees. And then there was Animoji Karaoke, the Twitter fad I launched.

Over the years, I pretty much accomplished everything I wanted to on Twitter except hitting 100,000 followers, a dream that seemed within my grasp until I was almost there and my count began to slowly roll backwards. But from the start of the Elon Musk era, using Twitter—I’m done with calling it “X”— has felt like habituating a once-wonderful restaurant whose new chef has been intentionally poisoning the stew.

As Musk wrecked the joint, I tweeted less and less, until my feed consisted of little more than sporadic complaints about Twitter and heartfelt salutes to recently-deceased celebrities. Even tweeting links to my own stories felt increasingly pointless: the site sends few clicks nowadays, which would seem to belie the theory that it’s some sort of essential news source for hundreds of millions of people.

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My Twitter archive, 2007-2024—preserved and de-ElonizedRead More »

Okay, maybe “lost” is overstating things. Still, I tend to forget about most of the stuff I write the moment I’m done with it. So I certainly don’t have vivid recollections of writing my weekly Technologizer column for TIME.com, which I did from September 2010 until February 2012.

But when I was freeze-drying the Technologizer website, I created an index of every Technologizer post. It dawned on me that the index was far from complete, because quite a few of the words I wrote under the Technologizer banner were published on TIME.com, not Technologizer.com. And at first—before I joined TIME‘s staff— they appeared every Tuesday (later shifted to Thursday) in TIME.com’s Business section.

Technologizer on TIME wasn’t too different from Technologizer.com. I probably stuck more consistently to addressing a big, mainstream audience, and tried to cover the big topics of the day: smartphones, tablets, social networking, the evolving PC, and various things that seemed interesting at the time, such as Quora, OnLive, and Blekko. My wonderful editors, Jim Frederick (whom I still can’t believe is gone) and, later, Doug Aamoth, barely touched what I wrote. I think most of the headlines are mine, and nearly all of the topics are—though Jim did ask me to write about a dust-up behind the scenes at TechCrunch. It wouldn’t have occurred to me to cover that, and the piece turned out quite well.

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Behold the lost TIME.com Technologizer columnsRead More »