savetz

savetz , 6 days ago to random

We’ve finished digitizing all of the The Famous Computer Cafe tapes. In the end, we recovered 52 1/2 episodes, a perfect time capsule of the world of microcomputing spanning November 17 1984 through July 12, 1985. They’re at http://archive.org/details/famous-computer-cafe

Hundreds more episodes are still lost, so keep an eye out in the world for more Famous Computer Cafe tapes: they’re on 10.5” NAB reel-to-reel tapes, and may still be in or around the Los Angeles area.

Newly added episodes:

John Shirley, who was president of Microsoft. He died in 2013.

John Reese, head of Tronix and Monogram Software, talking about home banking and “Dollars and Sense” software.

A banger of an episode with journalist Steven Levy (author of Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution); Sid Meier of Microprose, talking about F-15 Strike Eagle); and Dave Johnson of IBM, discussing voice response systems.

Christopher Miles of Crystal Network, which was some sort of online service that I couldn’t get my head around.

savetz , 1 month ago to random

TLDR: Help digitize 54 episodes of The Famous Computer Cafe, a 1980s radio show about computers that featured many notable interviews. https://gofund.me/87eb1a5b

In 2020 I learned about the Famous Computer Cafe. I got a little obsessed with it. The Famous Computer Cafe was not a restaurant, but a radio program that was broadcast from 1983 through early 1986. The program aired on several radio stations in southern and central California. It included computer news, product reviews, and interviews.

The program was created by three people who were the on-air voices and did all the work to create the program: finding advertisers, buying air time, doing research and interviews. In 2020 I interviewed all three and published those interviews on the Antic podcast.

To me, the most exciting thing about the show is the interviews. The list of people that the show interviewed is a who's-who of tech luminaries of the early 1980s. Computer people, musicians, publishers, philosophers, journalists. ...