ANTIC The Atari 8-bit Podcast

>Maybe PC collecting, restoring etc. will be as big a deal but it's just early on the curve still

It is a fairly big deal for a lot of us, just in this room I'm sitting in I've got 3 vintage machines from the late 70s to early 80s, and 3 generations of Windows machines (95, 98, XP), alongside my work and personal computers. There are vintage computer fairs the world around, there are vintage computer clubs (ours here in the general Indy area meets monthly) the world around, there are numerous podcasts and some sizable YouTube content creators too.

There is even a healthy level of developing new software and hardware for vintage computers and consoles.

https://atariage.com/ is a quick look at (mostly, but not exclusively) Atari related for example. Then you have

YouTube creators like:

- LGR https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCLx053rWZxCiYWsBETgdKrQ

- Gaming Historian https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCnbvPS_rXp4PC21PG2k1UVg

- Modern Vintage Gamer https://www.youtube.com/c/ModernVintageGamer

- Adrian's Digital Basement https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCE5dIscvDxrb7CD5uiJJOiw

- 8Bit Guy https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC8uT9cgJorJPWu7ITLGo9Ww

- Nostalgia Nerd https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC7qPftDWPw9XuExpSgfkmJQ

- This Does Not Compute https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCEp20NgOZHmgWdbQdHSxgjw

- Noel's Retro Lab https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC2-SP1bYi3ueKlVU7I75wFw

- RMC - The Cave https://www.youtube.com/user/RetroManCave

- My Life in Gaming https://www.youtube.com/c/mylifeingaming

etc. A lot of the above channels have videos restoring vintage hardware, or doing dream builds with vintage hardware.

Podcasts like:

- ANTIC The Atari 8-bit Podcast https://ataripodcast.libsyn.com/

- Floppy Days Vintage Computing Podcast https://floppydays.libsyn.com/

- Amigos Retro Gaming Network https://player.fm/series/amigos-retro-gaming-network-amigos-...

- Retro Computing Roundtable http://rcrpodcast.com/

- Sprite Castle https://podcast.robohara.com/category/spritecastle/

- RetroMacCast https://retromaccast.libsyn.com/

etc

Hardware and software developers/stores like:

- https://retroradionics.co.uk/ (bought a brand spankin' new Joystick for my Atari machines from them in December, it's very nice)

- https://atariage.com/store/ (you say you want to play Halo on your 2600?)

- https://lotharek.pl/

- https://www.atarimax.com/

- https://newstuffforoldstuff.com/index.py

etc

There is also a very healthy vintage computer preservation community on the Internet Archive - preserving magazines, zines, newsletters, manuals, schematics, software, etc.

- https://archive.org/details/vintagesoftware

- https://archive.org/details/atari_2600_library

- https://archive.org/details/softwarelibrary_c64

- https://archive.org/details/commodore_c64_manuals

etc.

Here's an idea that we've implemented where I work: when coming up with working names for projects or whatever, go out of your way to name them after notable women in STEM. Bonus, purposely retire the example women that everybody knows -- that means no "Project Lovelace" or "Ada", no "Grace Hopper" network optimization effort, none of that.

Make it a rewarded challenge for people to spend time finding out, bringing forward, and celebrating the contributions of amazing women.

Feel free to be expansive in what you consider technology and STEM. For example, women who've written music on music synths: Wendy Carlos, Imogen Heap, etc.

Or videogame designers: Carol Shaw, Dona Bailey, Joyce Weisbecker,...actually here's a list [1]

Cryptography: Dorothy Denning, Margaret Rock, and so on. [2]

Make it a point to explain the history of the person you named the project after as part of your project charter and when you onboard new people onto your project, explain the history of the name to them and why you are making it a practice to name projects in order to celebrate the contributions of women in technology.

It doesn't have to be a long, drawn out affair. But I can tell you that (from first hand experience) this type of celebration can have amazing effects on mixed gendered teams. I've never seen so many talented women staff suddenly get so supercharged. It's honestly amazing and incredibly humbling and it will absolutely become a continued practice wherever I go.

The number of times I've also heard from women staff "if I had only known about so many of these women growing up, I might have made different choices in life"....you can feel the unfed hunger for recognition.

You can do variants on this approach for many underserved and underrepresented groups of people. It actually becomes kind of fun for people to spend time learning about what people other than Turing, or Babbage, or some mythological God figure (or Star Wars/Trek character) and how they contributed to where we are as a species today.

Get cheeky with it. Instead of "Beatrice Cave-Brown-Cave" turn it into "Project Brown Square Cave" and have a designer make a cool logo design, or "Pamela Hardt-English" into "The Angled Heart Project" and make an 8-bit pixel art version of a heart or something. Make memes out of Margaret Hamilton's smiling face and send it around as a local meme when somebody does something really cool. Keep all references to women associated with positive/cool/etc. things. Never use them as a degrading joke, or to make fun or somebody or something.

Pick women who are currently in STEM, e.g. Katie Bouman is a great name for an effort to add better visibility into the workings of a tech stack.

Meet these women. Many of them are still alive. I know that the ANTIC podcast [3] has many dozens of amazing interviews as does Matt Chat [4]. Even though these are mostly about games and computing, many of the women featured went on to some pretty great careers. (ha! The most recent interview as of this comment on Matt Chat is Annie VanderMeer, a game designer)

Make this an official policy. There's enough recognition for men already -- we're good.

1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_women_in_the_video_gam...

2 - https://cryptologicfoundation.org/what-we-do/stimulate/women...

3 - https://ataripodcast.libsyn.com/

4 - https://www.youtube.com/user/blacklily8

5 - and some more if you need https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_computing

I've been really interested in early-80s to present PC history recently. There's actually a fair amount archived on it, but you'll sometimes have to approach things from the point of view of a historian rather than just a reader of history. My recent bent has been studying Atari, but there's lots of other resources available if you look. For whatever reason, videogames seem to have the lions share of work being done right now. I'd say that the archival and research phase is currently happening right now, with histories finally starting to be really written.

For anybody interested in business (like the HN readership) I really recommend studying not only about the history of Apple, but the history of its early competitor Atari. Equally as interesting and represents a kind of alternate universe where the Google of its time failed spectacularly. The reasons why are complex and very informative, especially the Tramiel years.

Some samples:

There's not many books looking back, but there are a few and they're quite good:

http://www.amazon.com/The-Future-Was-Here-Commodore/dp/02620...

http://www.amazon.com/Atari-Inc-Business-Complete-History-eb...

http://www.amazon.com/Edge-Spectacular-Rise-Fall-Commodore/d...

http://www.amazon.com/Steve-Jobs-Walter-Isaacson/dp/14516485...

Classic magazines:

https://archive.org/details/computermagazines

There's also plenty of old shows both archived, and made more recently, some with a stunning number of important interviews

https://archive.org/details/computerchronicles

https://archive.org/search.php?query=creator%3A%22Dr+Sparkle...

https://archive.org/details/thescreensavers

https://www.youtube.com/user/MrGameSack

https://www.youtube.com/user/tezzaNZ

https://www.youtube.com/user/blacklily8

And there's a vast retrogaming/retrocomputing podcasting phenomenon going on right now, often with even more amazing interviews

http://ataripodcast.libsyn.com/

http://www.retronauts.com/

and a larger list https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8544576

What's nice is that this all happened recently enough that you can actually go to the primary sources and read/listen/talk with these events as they happened, but can now look back informed by decades of the aftereffects.

>I’m not going to code up my website on an original Macintosh.

Yet people still make games, and hardware, for cold hard cash for vintage systems like the Commodore and Atari computer lines.

For example https://atariage.com/store/ is full of newer titles and in the various forums you can find all sorts of modern hardware and titles being discussed, and sold, for various vintage systems https://atariage.com/forums/

Some of us find these machines very practical, some are even still being used in commercial settings. At some point I recall one of the people being interviewed on ANTIC The Atari 8-bit Podcast ( https://ataripodcast.libsyn.com/ ) mentioning they either recently stop using, or were still using, an Atari computer in a commercial setting because if it isn't broke, don't fix it.

I mean, people even still make peripherals for these vintage machines. I had a brand-spanking-new-from-the-factory joystick show up just this past week for my Atari machines from https://retroradionics.co.uk/

Sure, you might not create a flashy website for a client, or some machine learning, design the next app to IPO at a billion for, or develop the next social media platform on one but they absolutely still have a practical, functional, use for many users.

I think this bit was really interesting analysis:

"Amiga’s financial difficulties provided the opportunity of a lifetime to a bunch of folks that may have struggled to get in the door in even the most junior of positions at someplace like Apple, IBM, or Microsoft."

It reminds me a bit of the recent realization Google has had (after trolling through vast amount of employment data) they see virtually no difference in performance from people with high pedigrees that people without.

http://www.the-american-interest.com/2013/06/24/google-is-no...

It's a lesson that seems to keep getting relearned over and over again. Hire the individual, not the GPA, not the degree, not the school.

These guys produced an amazing machine virtually on a shoe-string.

It also comes up a lot in some circles that the Amiga was spiritually the follow-on to the Atari 8-bit computers, not the ST. A podcast I've been listening to recently has some wonderful interviews with some of the industry people from that time period and there's some great insight into this transition.

http://ataripodcast.libsyn.com/

There's an absolutely fantastic podcast called "ANTIC The Atari 8-bit Podcast" [1] I listen to. The show started off a bit slow, a normal old-guys-talking-about-old-hardware. But somewhere along the way they started hunting down people involved with Atari or Atari products back in those days and have started amassing an impressive collection of sometimes incredible interviews. It's a treasure trove of oral history of the late 70s and early-to-mid 80s computing movement.

I don't know how they find these folks, but the interviews can be absolutely awesome. Sometimes people who's names I never knew, but who's companies or products I absolutely remember give detailed background on the goings on of early computing in a way that's just really amazing. There's hundreds of interviews now.

Their non-interview shows are mostly about the three hosts talking about the modern Atari 8-bit scene. New hardware, new software and so on. Devices for using the internet, SD cards and such on these ancient machines.

I never had one of these boxes, and only ever saw one a couple times, but I've grown to deeply respect the thought and engineering that went into these machines.

1 - https://ataripodcast.libsyn.com/