We need to make a move to bring back Ansi Graphics and Door Games! Many nights did I sit up trying to get my Ansi to animate when a user logged on my BBS.
Fantasy Uprising (1992 - 1995)
Conservative Hippie (1995 - 1998)
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Bootstrap
Step 1.
Throw the front panel switches, about 100 of them in sequence to perform IPL for bootstrap loader.
Step 2.
Insert punched tape into punched tape reader.
Hit Go button.
let reader read about 20 feet of 1/2" wide punched taped.
Got a green light?
Yes, Hit go button to IPL from disk.
No go to step one.
Ah… those were the good ole days…
This seems to me to be an extension of something like the web archive project, but I suppose this has some real thinking behind it - not just archiving a bit of everything, but saving the important bits for historical purposes. A nice idea, but I won’t be donating as I think there are easier ways of doing it - maybe google will introduce such an archive in the future?
that pictures freakin awesome.
History is an important thing, even if it’s seems useless for most.
That funny someone quoted archive.org link. Once we used it to show our customer how ugly their website was before we handle it.
It actually helped us refreshing his memory and calm it down while he was shouting us about the artistic direction took (which he has previously validated of course…)
I personnly keep some old machines in my parents house, a 1990 Apple Macintosh, 1984 Amstrad CPC464, some old PCs too… I will probably never power them on again, but I’m pretty sure my future kids will look at it sayig "wow ! how an hawful period it was ", has we propably sais about typewriters and various machines from the pre-computer era 
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Talking about the 1980’s as “pre-history” is a gross exaggeration, even on the timescale of computer technology. BBS’s don’t even qualify as being particularly ancient technology, let alone pre-historic. The internet (ARPANET/MILNET) was invented in the late 1960’s, and twenty years earlier there were computers made of relays and vacuum tubes. The Turing Test dates to 1950. Maybe Charles Babbage would qualify as computer pre-history.
This seems like a great project. I began surfing the web around the early 2000… when ICQ and Geocities ruled the Internet (well, maybe not ruled… but you get the point). And now it seems ages ago, but I know that was just the beggining of the web as we know it. Who didn’t have a Geocities website backt then? Nice post Jeff!
Jeff, thanks so much for this. You’ve brought many people to my kickstarter page and given the endeavor a real boost.
I’ll write a few weblog entries at http://ascii.textfiles.com which will explain my thoughts behind this project why I decided to go about things this way.
And thanks to everyone who is showing up and pledging. You’ve really made a difference in my life.
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