Stone Tools

I shared this last month, and it seemed to resonate with people, so I'll share again and maybe new eyeballs will see it this time. I'm continuing to build a body of work on my retro productivity software blog, Stone Tools.

https://stonetools.ghost.io

Previous articles which resonated with HN were on Deluxe Paint and VisiCalc. The latest post, "HyperCard on the Macintosh," seems to be making the HN rounds currently. Bret Victor himself chimed in on the HyperCard article over on Mastodon, filling in some nice historical footnotes. https://posts.dynamic.land/@bret/115716576717006637

Unlike many (most?) other retrocomputing explorations, I specifically do not look at games nor do I tie myself to any particular machine, though I'm focused on the 1977 - 1995 period. I spend a minimum of two weeks with each productivity title, trying to learn it, building things with it, and generally trying to understand its approach to solving problems. I'd characterize my writing tone as casual, conversational, and decidedly light-hearted.

Each piece of software (so far, knock on wood) gets me thinking about some other aspect of related computing history, so I explore that as a tangent. With the Superbase article, I talked about "the paperless office." With the VisiCalc article I considered its impact on less obvious industries, notably hog farming.

I hope the passion and effort I put into the articles comes through. If you're interested in computing history beyond just the games I think…