Bobby Prince has died

Bobby Prince, '90s FPS game musician extraordinare and longtime id Software associate, has died at 81. Now, early on, there were things like Commander Keen and Eat Your Vegetables, which were cute and amusing yet almost completely orthogonal to his later output. Correspondingly, his transitional work in Wolfenstein 3D was fine (especially The Ultimate Challenge) but clearly all of a particular genre, and his otherwise solid contributions to Duke Nukem 3D and Rise of the Triad ended up overshadowed by Lee Jackson's (exhibit A: Grabbag; exhibit B: Prince's main theme but Jackson's KISS OFF).

Doom, on the other hand ... well. It's not just that these were solid gamer tracks, it's that they sounded good on just about anybody's sound card. We had high quality MIDI on Mac while you schlubs struggled with Sound Blaster Pros and it still didn't sound like a$$. That's talent. While everybody will name At Doom's Gate (E1M1) as his best, I claim it is only merely his most memorable, and solely because everyone on the whole stinking planet has played it at least once. Instead, I proffer I Sawed The Demons (E2M1), Untitled (E3M1), and the reworked Wolf 3D holdover Evil Incarnate (Doom II MAP31) as his heaviest and meatiest, Donna To The Rescue (E3M2) as his funkiest, The Demons from Adrian's Pen (E2M2) and They're Going To Get You (E2M4) as his creepiest (I love the "car going out of control" feel to E2M2, as Prince himself called it), and Sign of Evil (E1M8) as the first track that legitimately had me scared as the doors slide open and the Bruiser Brothers emerge to kill. If that one didn't make you wet your pants back in the day, maybe this remix will. The Doom port for PlayStation didn't want to pay him royalties so they cheaped out and brought in Aubrey Hodges. Good music but hardly worthy of the Master, and to an otherwise excellent port's detriment.

I'd say rest in peace, but given the infernal subject matter that just doesn't seem adequate.

Hedley Davis has died

A more obscure Commodore employee (where he apparently met his wife), but still quite influential during the Amiga era. Along with more pedestrian units such as the Amiga 3000 and the monochrome Amiga 2024 monitor, my favourite device he worked on was the 1987 prototype SX-500. That's exactly what it sounds like: an Amiga 500 crammed into a portable SX-64 case, even keeping the same 5" colour screen and basic keyboard layout. The picture here is a bad scan of a bad film picture I took at VCF 5.0 and I need to figure out where those original photos went. Dale Luck has this unit and hopefully it still works, but neither Thomas Rattigan nor Irving Gould would have ever released an adventurous product like this, and perhaps it was just as well. Later he worked on the Xbox and, my favourite console of its generation, the Xbox 360 (PowerPC for the win), on which my wife is slowly learning to play Portal and getting abused by GLaDOS on a regular basis, and in retirement taught at the University of Delaware. He passed away last week at the age of 68. Rest in peace.

Hideki Sato has died

Remember when Sega made consoles? Hideki Sato remembered, because he was involved in or designed all of them — from the 1982 SG-1000 under Sega Enterprises Ltd. president Hayao Nakayama, later reworked as the SC-3000 home computer, to of course the extremely popular Mega Drive/Genesis and the technologically overwrought Saturn, to the flawed but ahead-of-its-time 1999 Dreamcast, the very last console the company released to date and one of my favourite machines. Joining Sega in 1971, he later became acting president from 2001 to 2003, and finally retired from Sega in 2008. I can think of no better summation of his career than his own, a detailed retrospective on each machine translated from the Japanese. He passed away this weekend at the age of 77 (X.com link). Rest in peace.

Stewart Cheifet has died

Very sorry to hear about the death of Stewart Cheifet at 87, long-time host of Computer Chronicles, which for a long time was the undisputed best show on computers on American public broadcasting. I watched it on PBS TV as a kid, and candidly I didn't understand much of what was going on at the time, but I learned a lot and rewatching the episodes now really demonstrates what a treasure trove of pithy information and industry commentary they were. Gary Kildall, of Digital Research fame, was his co-host in many 1980s episodes and the most notable of an august crew that also included George Morrow and Paul Schindler, but Cheifet was the linchpin and carried the show on his formidable shoulders from its 1984 start until the final episode in 2002. The most amazing part of his work, however, is what happened after: the vast majority of the program is preserved for posterity at the Internet Archive, not just with his blessing, but with his active participation. For any computer historian and student of the early industry, the show is not to be missed. Rest in peace.

Rebecca Heineman has died

"Burger Becky" did a lot of great games, first at Interplay (Bard's Tale, Wasteland), then later at Logicware, where she and others did some great Mac ports including Jazz Jackrabbit and their Half-Life MacOS port which never actually saw the light of day, the infamous 3DO port of Doom, and of course the initial work on the IIgs version of Wolfenstein 3D. Naturally these are just the highlights that come to mind of a very long tenure in the computer gaming world. She was very complimentary of TenFourFox back in the day when I was still developing that, and I'd long hoped she would release Mac Half-Life like she did 3DO Doom for the archivists to pick over. Sadly, word has come out that she has finally succumbed to some sort of aggressive form of pulmonary adenocarcinoma. It's not a good way to go, and I hope her last moments were at peace.

They call it Mister Pibb (again)

As Pibb is the official beverage of Old Vintage Computing Research, no doubt to the profound chagrin of the Coca-Cola Company, I feel compelled to offer a public service announcement.

Old and busted:

New hotness:

Yes, Mr Pibb (technically mr P!BB, though Coca-Cola is inconsistent on their own brand name) is back and Pibb Xtra, the face of Pibb since 2001, is relegated to the dust heap with Peppo. This explains why I had been unable to buy any more Pibb Xtra for the past month or so — Coke was probably depleting their stocks for the switchback. Since Old VCR's northern HQ is relatively close to a Coke bottling plant, I was able to pick up two fridge packs at Safeway today, though not exactly what I was expecting!

The end of AOL dialup

America Online has ceased offering dialup access since first doing so in 1991 (using GeoWorks), and presumably any systems attempting to dial in will no longer be able to make a connection.

We actually had a fairly long history with AOL and its predecessors in our house. We got a copy of PlayNET as a door prize at the local Commodore computer club meeting (dunno where that went) and my folks initially signed up for AOL's C64-based predecessor, QuantumLink — which I was quickly banned from after they got the first monthly bill. However, when in the mid-1990s my dad decided we should be online again (I already was myself using the dialup at UC San Diego), I suggested AOL to them since it was the easiest approach. It covered the entire family: I used it on medical school away rotations when I didn't have a local POP number to call into the university, back then on my PowerBook 1400. In fact, the last time I used it was in July 2006, when I drove across the United States from San Diego to Bangor along US Highway 6. Wi-Fi was certainly not universal at the time and neither was cell coverage, so it was the least difficult option to use when local network access wasn't available. Here's me logging in on the iBook G4 from Ely, Nevada.

You can see the AOL login screen faintly on the iBook's LCD. The last time I remember using AOL was on the same trip from a later stay a few days later in Warren, Pennsylvania. I don't have any pictures of that, but I distinctly remember doing so, because it made uploading images to the road"b"log impractical due to the poor quality of the phone lines at the motel. Still, I could log in and read my E-mail from my servers in the apartment over SSH, so it achieved its purpose.

Although at least one client re-creation exists, it would be more interesting to see someone develop a new AOL server using modern modem emulation tools that the AOL clients can talk to. Much as QuantumLink's server responses can now be simulated, facilitating a fan recreation, and because some pieces of the old PlayNET and QLink architecture underlaid AOL, it should be possible to do the same. Although some work exists on AIM, the instant messenger component (I certainly remember plenty of unsolicited chat requests), the whole experience really ought to be preserved in some fashion because for at least a few years it was the most common way people connected to the Internet no matter its warts. However, as there's obviously no way to serial-snoop the real thing now, hopefully someone at Yahoo/Verizon can leak the source code or protocol description so it can be resurrected. Though I certainly see no reason to use the dialup service as anything other than a historical simulation now that we have hotspotting and ubiquitous Wi-Fi — and my parents cancelled their dialup account after they got cable Internet — I also point out that my mom still has the same AOL E-mail address she had back then, and it still does the job for her.

RIP Bill Atkinson

As posted by his family (Facebook link), Bill Atkinson passed away on June 5 from pancreatic cancer at the age of 74. The Macintosh would not have been the same without him (QuickDraw, MacPaint, HyperCard, and so much more), nor would Magic Cap have been a thing. Rest in peace.

The "35-cent" Commodore 64 softmodem

Rockwell famously used 6502-based cores in modems for many years, but that doesn't mean other 6502s couldn't be used. If only there were a way to connect a Commodore 64's audio output directly to an RJ-11 plug ...

Of the many interesting posts from Usenet's more golden days, one of my favourites was John Iannetta's "35-cent modem," where the SID chip provides one-way data modulation to a receiving modem connected via the C64's sound output. While I remember him posting it back in 1998, I never actually tried it at the time.

Wouldn't you know it, but it came to mind the other day when I was looking at a recent haul of Convergent WorkSlate stuff I've got to catalogue. Officially the WorkSlate's only means of telecommunications is its 300 baud internal modem. While we have a 9600bps way of wiring up a Workslate to a modern computer, it's always nice to have a simpler alternative, and I figured this would be a great challenge to see if John's old program could let my Commodore SX-64 talk to my WorkSlate. Spoiler alert: it works!

Ward Christensen dies

There was initially some issue verifying this, but there appears to be direct confirmation now that Ward Christensen passed away October 11 at the age of 78, co-founder of the pioneering Computerized Bulletin Board System in February 1978 with Randy Suess — now believed to be the first BBS — and developer of the XMODEM transfer protocol. Although his notional job was at IBM, where he worked for 54 years, he became better known for his prolific public domain software output which was widely used in the early 1980s and his innovations with computer-based telecommunication. He was reportedly found dead at his Illinois home after a welfare check on October 13. Ars Technica has a nice summation. Rest in peace.

The Living Computers Museum finally isn't

First off, apologies for a quiet month as I've been dealing with family matters which hopefully are now on a better footing (more articles are in the hopper). Unfortunately, the same apparently can't be said for the once-great Living Computers Museum + Labs in Seattle, established by the late Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen and closed in 2020 during the COVID pandemic after his death, at least some of which is going up for auction. The specific pieces have not yet been announced by Christie's, but will ostensibly include his personal DECsystem-10, a 1971 KI10 DEC PDP-10 from the MIT AI Lab which is the first computer he and Bill Gates ever used. (There's just something about your first. I still have my actual first computer too, and with only around 1500 systems built the unit at the LCM was apparently the exact machine they used also. Here's a picture of it from when it was in residence at the LCM and used to develop a replica.)

Obviously, while I think it's a crying shame, the estate can do what it likes with its own stuff and I hope the machine, plus the other 149 pieces reportedly to be auctioned off, goes to someone who appreciates it. (Bill Gates himself perhaps.) What's more problematic is the people who donated systems and peripherals with the expectation they would remain there in some capacity, especially since the museum reportedly didn't accept items as long-term loans. (Wikipedia has a substantially complete list of those items.) That's not per se an unreasonable position, and one that helps protect the museum, but it's also one that leaves their prior owners with no firm recourse for recovery before they get liquidated or scrapped in a situation like this. Throwing them away is bad enough but if those items also go up for sale, though doing so may be technically legal depending on how the transfer was written up, it's pretty darn sleazy. Allen's estate, notably his sister Jody who is the trustee and executrix, would then be profiting off items donated in good faith on the understanding that they would be in a museum. That's bad and they should feel bad.

But then perhaps museums aren't what they used to be. On cctalk someone mentioned the now defunct? National Museum of Communications in Irving, TX which downsized in 1998 by taking about five commercial dumpsters' worth of radios and other items to the dump. It looks like one guy ran that shop and it probably became too large for him to handle, a story which is probably more common than most of us know, though it's still bad news for the equipment that got junked — some of which was almost certainly rare or irreplaceable, even if specific items themselves weren't particularly valuable. Every collector has had well-intentioned dreams at one time or another of opening our own museums, not realizing that they turn into massive sinks of time and money and regulatory filings, and they're never as much fun to operate as the private computer room or display case you used to have in your house. Situations like this should also remind us that donating our own beloved items to any institution in the hopes they'll "survive" us is no guarantee they'll remain there either.

We're amateurs, though. Paul Allen, on the other hand, was not an amateur and was an incredibly wealthy man who had to have some awareness of estate planning, and one who knew his cancer was likely to return. It is widely reputed that the LCM was expensive to run and hard to manage even with his sizeable fortune and a lot of diligent volunteers. Now his collection and quite a few artifacts I imagine some folks would like back are in the hands of his sister, who allegedly doesn't have any interest in them other than the price they might fetch. Let that be a lesson to us that no one and nothing lives forever.

So long, Z80

You can still buy 6502s from Western Design Center and others, but Zilog's getting out of Z80s (PDF), announcing earlier this week that after June 14th you won't be able to buy them anymore (specifically the last-part-standing Z84C00 which comes in various speeds from 6-20 MHz) and what you buy you can't return. This covers the Z84C0006VEG, Z84C0006PEG, Z84C0010PEG, Z84C0008AEG, Z84C0020VEG, Z84C0008PEG, Z84C0010AEG, Z84C0008VEG, Z84C0010VEG, Z84C0010VEG00TR (!), Z84C0020AEG, Z84C0020PEG, and Z84C0006AEG. Get 'em while they're hot. The Z180 and eZ80 are not affected by this announcement.

Niklaus Wirth dies

Reported yesterday. The first computer program I remember in school was Apple Presents Apple, which was written in UCSD Pascal; the first actual compiler I ever used was Turbo Pascal 5.5 (purloined from a campus NetWare server), and the first actual compiler I ever used on the Mac was MacMETH, which is Modula-2. I owe a lot of my computing experiences to Niklaus Wirth. Godspeed.

program wirth(input, output);
begin
end.

RIP, Don Lancaster

Heard earlier this week that Don Lancaster, best known to us retrocomputing denizens as the man who developed the TV Typewriter, died at the age of 83 on June 7. That's my copy of one of his classic books (after the TV Typewriter Cookbook) for building a TVT 6 5/8 on anything with a 6800 bus like the 6502 and, yes, the 6800. This was a CPU-driven display that uses lines on the address bus to control the image: you lost 36K out of your addressing range as any address stored to or read there would be passed to the display interface, but gained an entire viewing screen in exchange. Even a barebones 1K KIM-1 could display a 32x16 text screen at $0200 to $03ff and it could be built out of just a handful of chips:

Haven't gotten around to building one of my own but I really should; it would be a fitting bit of fun. Cheap video was hardly enough to keep him occupied; he had an almost intimidating number of links up on his home page which fortunately seems well preserved for posterity. Godspeed and rest in peace.

RIP, Bob Applegate

It's hard to do two memorial posts in one weekend. If you use a KIM-1 or related 6502 single-board computers, Bob Applegate's hardware (sold as Corsham Tech, though I remember when it was k2ut.org) was the best, including his virtually essential I/O card. I had made an order from him about a month ago. By then he told me the leukemia was bad and he was no longer assembling items, just selling what he already had in stock, so I bought a couple remaining boards from him to assemble myself. His family posted word this weekend that he died in his sleep on June 13 at the age of 60. It's another loss for the vintage tech community, especially for those of us who loved the great stuff he was doing with those venerable machines. His family has posted a memorial. Godspeed and rest well.

Goodbye, computer cat

I had Iris from when she was four months old — that's a grab from a video on my Palm Zire 72 from January 2006 — to yesterday, when she died peacefully resting in her box on her window ledge, two months shy of her 18th birthday. It was hard to take that on Father's Day weekend after Dad passed away from COVID in October 2021. I'll have something brighter to post here in a few days, but not today.

She always loved computers. They were warm.

A minor memorial for Leo Laporte's terrestrial AM radio show

Yes, Leo Laporte will still be broadcasting, just not on terrestrial AM radio. But this is the last weekend of the Tech Guy Show on AM radio (the next couple weekends are reruns), something of an institution here in greater Los Angeles where he's been a Saturday morning fixture since 2004 on KFI, the 50,000-watt talk radio blowtorch of southern California (syndicated on Premiere Radio Networks from the iHeartMedia evil empire). After 1,954 episodes, the toll-free call-in number 1-88-88-ASK-LEO will be retired and it'll be back to podcasts.

RIP Sir Clive Sinclair

In the US the name Sinclair is more associated with gas stations and partisan media outlets than computers. We had only the Timex Sinclair series States-side, of which the major models were the T/S 1000, a rebadged ZX-81, and the 2068, which was an upgraded but partially incompatible ZX Spectrum. (There was also the T/S 1500, a more upmarket version of the T/S 1000 roughly analogous to calling the Cimmaron by Cadillac a more upmarket Cavalier, and two minor non-American spinoffs of the T/S 2068, the TC2068 and UK2068.) These sold quite poorly in the United States because of the dominant position of the obviously superior Commodore 64 (I'm bracing for the comments from Martin), despite at least one retailer selling T/S 1000s at firesale prices so customers could get a rebate on a Commodore purchase. (Commodore reportedly used some of them for doorstops.) In the UK and Europe, however, they were a hit because they were cheap, and they introduced a generation to computers that may not have been able to afford them otherwise. My T/S 1000's keyboard has crapped out and I'm not even sure where my 2068 is, but on the announcement of Sir Clive Sinclair's death from cancer at 81, hats off, gentlemen, and godspeed.

So long, Fry's

I can't say I'm surprised to hear that Fry's Electronics is closing their doors. Back in the distant pre-pandemic year of 2019, I went to a Fry's in Fremont to pick up some replacement parts since it was on the way. The store was dead. Dead, dead, dead. I counted more staff than customers and I figured that store was ripe for closure; now that everyone is ordering everything online, and particularly their tech-savvy customer base, it was inevitable that COVID-19 would kill them too. The stores were too big and had too much stuff that people only needed intermittently.

But I do have very fond memories of Fry's. I grew up in San Diego, and they took over the Incredible Universe location off Murphy Canyon Road when Tandy got rid of the brand in the 1990s. I bought a lot of classic Mac peripherals and upgrades there, many of which I still have, including hard disks, processor cards and 3D accelerators. If I needed a SCSI cable or a modular jack or some wacky board, they probably had it. I also spent a lot of time in their CD section; for the last few years they were blowing them out at $5 a pop, which was great, since I'm apparently the last person in America to actually buy discs. They also had 3D Blu-rays and were one of the few stores to keep carrying them in any quantity even after the major film studios largely stopped producing them domestically. And of course who can forget the long junk food aisle of temptation we all had to walk along to check out?

My other favourite Fry's include Roseville, CA, with the locomotive sculpture bashing through the front (probably my favourite store display). Here's a couple from there in 2018:

Also North Sacramento, CA, ended up there a lot when I was still regularly going to Sacramento on official business; Sunnyvale, mostly because of pleasant memories going to Halted Electronics down the street which also closed, of course; and Las Vegas, with the big slot machine. I also remember the Fry's in Anaheim with the space shuttle and my wife's new favourite book:

but all I have of the San Diego store was this blurry picture I took of their lock screen showing everlasting disdain for the competition,

plus Fountain Valley, San Marcos, Woodland Hills (all Southern California) and Fremont.

I don't think any of these are likely to remain retail stores. In the future post-pandemic days, this sort of boutique electronic sales will entirely be ruled by Pacific Rim dropshippers sending directly from Guangzhou, and it'll be the same stuff for less. But I'll miss the experience, though. Kids in a candy store never had it so good.

RIP, Curt Vendel

Very unfortunate to hear about the sudden passing of Curt Vendel, a great figure in the Atari scene. The best Atari Flashback (2600 clone) was the second one where he learned from the error of using the "NES on a chip" in the first Flashback, and instead designed a system so compatible you could put a cartridge port in it and play your old VCS games (and a system so easy to hack that the board has specific solder points and guides you how to make the modification). Probably his most lasting contribution to vintage computing was the Atari History Museum he founded in 1988 with over 15,000 files, folders and documents, plus two entire room-sized archives of schematics, mechanical drawings, artwork and design film, some of this even salvaged from Atari's own dumpsters. He was only 53. Rest in peace.