Digital Deli: A 1984 Menu of Early PC Culture and Hacker Lore
Digital Deli, 1984 book by early PC hackers and enthusiasts
I invite you to explore Digital Deli, a 1984 anthology capturing the vibrant spirit of the early personal computer revolution. This collection features essays from pioneers like Steve Wozniak and Tim Leary, covering everything from the rise of the Altair to the ethics of software piracy. It offers a unique glimpse into the lifestyle, technology, and future predictions that defined the dawn of the microcomputer era.
The computer is not just a machine; it is a new medium for the human mind, offering a path to personal freedom and a new way of thinking.
- lutusp
I wrote one of the chapters in Digital Deli (https://www.atariarchives.org/deli/cottage_computer_programm...), in a computing world that bears little resemblance to the present.
Am I exaggerating? You decide. I wrote a popular program for the Apple II (Apple Writer). International best-seller, translated into five languages. It was a word processor that included a macro language.
Are you sitting down? Hand-coded in assembly language, my program ran in eight kilobytes of memory. That left 24 kilobytes for a document, on a computer with 32 kilobytes of RAM.
In the present, I watch my GPU complain that it's run out of VRAM, and I lament that I only have 24 gigabytes available. That's a million times more memory than the Apple Writer document size, but hey -- not enough.
Over a span of just 36 years.
One more story. In the early 1980s, Tom Clancy (Hunt for Red October) called me and asked how to recover content from a disk his computer couldn't read any more. It was a full chapter of his Red October book project, written on Apple Writer.
I said, "Use your backup disk." Clancy replied, "What's a backup disk?"
True story.
- garganzol
Potentially interesting website, but it's impossible to use due to ads plague.