Computer folklore and other geeky things

comp.society.folklore info and archives

I'm the moderator of comp.society.folklore (which unfortunately doesn't get much traffic these days), so here's

a disorganized and slightly incomplete archive of comp.society.folklore
an even more incomplete archive of the previous incarnation of comp.society.folklore
a copy of the c.s.f charter, kindly provided by Greg Berigan

I've also archived a lot of postings from the other computer history newsgroup, alt.folklore.computers, and here are some of the more interesting ones that were posted earlier than the middle of 1996 or so.

Spacewar

Here is the origin of Spacewar, by one of the game's coauthors, from the August, 1981 issue of Creative Computing.

TECO

Here is a copy of a 1964 manual for the legendary TECO text editor. This is not the original version, but it's the earliest surviving TECO documentation that I am aware of.

Amiga's Joyboard and joysticks

Everyone knows about the Amiga Lorraine, which was eventually released as the Commodore Amiga. Less well known is what else Amiga was doing at the same time.

Here are two ads from the October, 1983 issue of Enter, for the Joyboard and some of their more conventional joysticks.

From the Bell System Almanac

For several years the Bell System distributed "almanacs" with information about their history and latest technologies. Here are a few pictures of what they were proud of in 1937:

Terminals and fax machines

and in 1942:

West coast voice network

(The illustrations are deliberately antique looking!)

An X11 painting

Are you envious of Plan 9 users because their window system is named after a movie and yours isn't? Well, envy no more, because it turns out there's an X11 painting! That's niftier than a movie, right? (Marty Busse informs me that there are actually two X movies, though neither of them has 11 in its name: X, the Man with the X-Ray Eyes and X the Unknown.)

Pointers to information on terminals

If you are interested in terminals you might want to read Richard Shuford's archive of video terminal information or Eric Raymond's termcap and terminfo database.

What changed in various BSD releases

If you want to know what changed in each of the early Berkeley Unix releases, you can find out on the Berkeley Unix Versions page.