Veteran journalist Ernie Smith has written the newsletter Tedium since 2015, covering “the history of things that usually don’t have histories written about them.” Smith recently published an article on ACCESS.bus, which he described as a “forgotten attempt” to create a universal serial bus standard for computer peripherals before, well, the Universal Serial Bus standard. Apparently, ACCESS.bus was so forgotten that the only video evidence Smith could find of its existence came from a 1994 Computer Chronicles episode.

Founded by Frank Cifaldi in 2017, the Video Game History Foundation (VGHF) is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization dedicated to “preserving, celebrating, and teaching the history of video games.” On January 30, VGHF library director Phil Salvador announced the “early access” launch of the organization’s new digital library. According to Salvador, the searchable online platform features a “curated selection” of materials from VGHF’s physical archive, including over 1,500 out-of-print video game magazines, directories and maps from the first 12 years of the Electronic Entertainment Expo, and the personal papers of retired video game producer Mark Flitman.

In June 1978, George Morrow and Howard Fullmer made a formal presentation at the National Computer Conference in Anaheim, California, proposing an official standard for the S-100 bus. The S-100 bus originated nearly four years earlier with the MITS Altair, the Intel 8080-based microcomputer kit famously featured on the cover of the January 1975 issue of Popular Electronics. The Altair’s success among the small community of computer hobbyists spawned a number of early companies dedicated to either cloning the Altair or producing peripherals compatible with the S-100 bus. This included Morrow’s Thinker Toys (later renamed Morrow Designs, Inc.) and Fullmer’s Parasitic Engineering, Inc.

On Saturday, October 4, 1953, the NBC Radio Network debuted a new program called College Quiz Bowl, which pitted teams of four students from two universities against one another in a general trivia conquest. Each school participated remotely from their local NBC affiliate, while the moderator, Allen Ludden, read the questions from network’s flagship station in New York City. The winning team received $500 and remained on the program until they were beaten.

Computer Chronicles returned for its sixth season in October 1988 with an episode covering the second Macworld Expo of the year, which was held from August 11 to 13 at Boston’s World Trade Center and Bayside Exposition Center. The show featured approximately 350 companies displaying products over 1,200 booths. The three-day attendance was estimated at around 40,000 people.

The Boston Macworld came at the mid-point of Apple CEO John Sculley’s tenure with the company. Steve Jobs was long gone, although as we’ll see later he was about to launch his comeback. The Macintosh II’s success finally enabled Apple to make significant inroads into the business market and report record sales in 1987. HyperCard, the software development tool that was the talk of last year’s Boston Macworld, continued to attract interest, even if it hadn’t quite taken the larger computing world by storm. And there was a growing sense that Apple could become the dominant personal computer company of the 1990s, especially as IBM and its clone makers continued to battle over new standards for the PC platform’s system bus.

Since June 2022, I’ve published compilations of Computer Chronicles Revisited posts as standalone ebooks, which are available in EPUB format on this website and the Internet Archive. Today I released Computer Chronicles Revisited, Volume 7 (1988), covering the second half of the fifth season of Computer Chronicles, which originally aired between January 1988 and June 1988.

Here is a listing of the chapters in Volume 7:

1. The New Amigas
2. CD-ROMs
3. Tax Preparation Software
4. Shareware
5. The Commodore 64
6. Multitasking Operating Systems
7. Business Graphics (Macintosh)
8. Business Graphics (PC)
9. Input Devices
10. Laptop Peripherals
11. Add-On Boards
12. Investment Software
13. Personal CAD Software

The fifth season of Computer Chronicles came to a close in June 1988 with an episode focused on computer-aided design (CAD) software. As is true with many major developments in the history of computing, CAD originated in military applications. Indeed, the first use of the term “computer-aided design” is credited to Douglas T. Ross, the head of the Computer Applications Group at MIT’s Servomechanisms Lab in the 1950s, who used CAD to describe a 1959 contract to design automated control systems for the United States Air Force.

Tim Slater, a guest in our next Computer Chronicles episode from June 1988, gave an interview in 2022 to The Sunny Harris Show! with Samuel K. Tennis podcast about his career promoting the concept of technical analysis as an investment strategy. In brief, technical analysis is where you base investment decisions on the performance of a stock over time–i.e., its price fluctuations and volume of shares traded–without assessing the underlying merits of the company. As Slater explained to Sunny Harris, his mentor in technical analysis didn’t even know the names of the companies he analyzed. His staff simply brought him the charts of the company’s stock performance without any identifying information.

Last year, I acquired a copy of the 1984 Morrow Pivot Owner’s Handbook, the manual for the portable MS-DOS computer manufactured by Morrow Designs, which was written by John VanderWood and illustrated by Bill McCarty. Of course, Morrow Designs founder and chairman George Morrow was a longtime Computer Chronicles contributor. Morrow’s first appearance on the show was on a January 1985 program where he demonstrated the Pivot.

I’ve scanned the full manual, which you can download here or at the Internet Archive. This is actually the second edition of the manual. Notably, this edition contains several “inserted” pages with point numbers, such as “7.1” and “7.2.” This was likely done to avoid the additional time and expense of redoing the manual’s index, which in those days still had to be done by hand.

Since 2013, Randy Kindig, Kay Savetz, and Brad Arnold have co-hosted ANTIC The Atari 8-bit Podcast, which focuses on the Atari 8-bit line of personal computers produced between 1979 and 1992. In addition to their regular monthly podcast, the ANTIC catalog includes more than 450 interviews with individuals who worked at Atari and other companies involved in the 8-bit computer industry of the time.

I wanted to point out two recent interviews conducted by Kay Savetz with Frank Foster and Robert Moore, which he published earlier this month. Foster and Moore were two of the principals behind Hybrid Arts, one of the first companies to develop MIDI music applications for both the Atari 8-bit line and the 16-bit Atari 520ST. Moore appeared in a September 1986 Computer Chronicles episode to demonstrate Hybrid Arts’ EZ-Track, a consumer product that enabled ST users to send commands from an ST directly to a Casio keyboard; and ADAP, a high-end digital audio workstation that provided what Moore described as a “tapeless recording studio.”