Recently in reminisce Category

I was a computer user from an early age. Our first machine was an Atari 800, complete with a tape drive. It was a sort of hand-me-down machine, so we were using it many years after its heyday.

I can remember my dad spending days typing in a long BASIC program that had been published in a computer magazine (ANTIC?). I think it was probably for a game. That sort of thing was common for computer hobbyists in the 70s and 80s.

Anyway, for all the advantages of digital communication, one thing is clear: digital files are more ephemeral than we realize.

Most of the emails, projects, and stuff from my early computing days are gone. Even modern stuff like webpages can disappear suddenly. For example, with very little warning last year, Yahoo killed the once-popular GeoCities. Millions of people had created homepages there over the years.

Among my own lost projects is a choose-your-own-adventure style game I wrote for the TI-8x series of calculators when I was in high school. It was called "Doom at West" and was related to my "S.S.S." stories. I loaned my own calculator to my younger brother when I was in college. He lost it and by extension all the stuff on it.

Seeing the work of digital historians like Jason Scott has motivated me to preserve what I can of my own old digital stuff, and to share at least those bits that might be of some small interest to other people.

So here are a few little archives I've put together that you might want to check out:

BBS-related

• ANSI art - A collection of ANSI advertisements I made during my years as a BBSer in the late 1990s.
• Politics Online Magazine - A short-lived monthly political magazine distributed on St. Louis BBSes
• SRE Text Series - A series of sci-fi stories I wrote based on the BBS door/game "Solar Realms Elite."

High school

• Hazelwood West 'Net Gazette' issues from 1997-98

Today I posted my second multimedia project for stltoday.com. It's a trivia quiz about Mister Rogers' Neighborhood.

The show has always had a special resonance for me. Long after I had stopped watching it, bits of it remained strongly in my memory.

Advertising often sticks with us in powerful ways, whether we want it to or not.

I have always had a mind for jingles, and I can remember a lot of old commercials and songs. But it has always struck me as peculiar that I could remember a jingle for the Dallas Times-Herald.

It was almost two years ago that I got in touch with Ed Richter.

He was a first cousin to my great-grandpa Frank Becker.

At that time I had made a lot of progress in developing my Becker family tree. As I was looking at all these first cousins, I realized that Ed was still living. On a whim, I wrote him a letter, and asked if he would be interested in some of the family history stuff I had uncovered.

I was excited to hear back from him and eventually to meet him in person. As it turns out, he lived only about 15- minutes away -- just a straight shot down Chambers Road.

We talked on the phone and met at his house several times. He remembered quite a bit about his aunts and uncles on the Becker side, even though he wasn't especially close to them. I learned things from him that never would have turned up in old censuses or church records.

During the time I knew Ed, he was diagnosed with cancer. At the end of March 2009, he died. But I didn't know about it until recently -- and I feel pretty bad about it.

If you are related to me and you are part of our family tree on Geni.com, you should login and check out some of the videos I have posted there from my Dad's 50th birthday.

This weekend Yoli and I celebrated our fifth anniversary. Ours is a little atypical ... the celebration spreads out over 3 days since that's how we got married. Day One, the wedding ceremony in Bolivia; Day Two, the flight back to the U.S.; Day Three, the actual legal marriage in Coral Gables, Fla. and the start of our honeymoon.

It's always fun to remember those times and laugh about all the visa paperwork, the way I massively sunburned my legs the day before the Bolivian ceremony, and how cold it was during our honeymoon at Clearwater Lake in Piedmont, Mo.

Five years later we've got our own house, two beautiful girls and another baby on the way, good jobs that we enjoy, and family and friends we love.

It's probably appropriate that our anniversary is always so close to Thanksgiving. Indeed we have so much to be thankful for.

My great-uncle Bill (William) George died this morning.

I didn't know him very well, but the times I remember meeting him, I liked him.

I remember once visiting his house in Arkansas probably when I was in my teens. Turns out that he and aunt Betty liked Star Trek. They had recorded "Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan," my favorite movie of all time, once when it was broadcast on CBS. This was a big deal to me. I already had the movie on VHS. But the network broadcast had included a lot of deleted scenes (they used to pad out movies to make them fill a longer time slot) which I had never seen before. Thanks to Uncle Bill and Aunt Betty I got to! It was many, many years until I could see that stuff again, when a "director's edition" of the movie was released on DVD.

After my Papa died, I realized how much uncle Bill reminded me of Papa: his face, his voice. This was somehow comforting to me.

Uncle Bill was a pilot and flew his own planes. I always hoped I could fly along with him someday. When I was in my teens I was fascinated by the notion of getting a pilot's license myself. Unfortunately I never got to go up with him in a plane.

He also liked to buy old houses, fix them up, and sell them to make money. I remember that for a while he was doing that with my mom's sister, my aunt Karen.

I have fond memories of driving to the old plane-watching lot at Missouri Bottom Road and Lindbergh Boulevard. We would sit up on the roof of the car with lots of other families and marvel as the planes roared right over our heads. In fact, this is one of the fun things Yoli and I did together during her first trip to the U.S.

But then came the billion-dollar boondoggle, as I like to call it; or Bridgeton's Bane, to put a Tolkien-esque spin on it. I am referring to W-1W, the runway expansion plan.

The old plane-watching lot was torn up, major roads were rerouted, and an unnecessary runway and tunnel constructed.

Which brings us to today.

Today, Jadzia and I were watching Mr. Rogers. Early in the show, Mr. Rogers took us to see how the Postal Service makes postage stamps. Whenever we watch Mr. Rogers, I always try to do something afterward with Jadzia that connects with the episode. So when we were done watching, I remembered my little stamp collection. I dug it out from the basement and showed it to Jadzia. Yoli gave us a magnifying glass so Jadzia could really inspect the stamps. (Truth is, she still doesn't quite get how to use a magnifying glass)

Anyway, as we went through the book, I saw my old stamps with new eyes. I realized how I am connected to the places represented by these stamps in ways I didn't know about when I was a kid collector.

When the day comes that the Renaud Empire is firmly entrenched across the globe, one of the significant changes it will lead to is the re-establishment of the Atari computer.

Yes, those who know me well know that I always have been (and will be) an Atarian. True, I eventually became a Mac user. But in the same way that I am a Texan-in-exile who lives in St. Louis, I am also an Atarian-in-exile forced to use a Mac.

And so it was with great joy that I stumbled onto the weblog called "Dadhacker" written by a former engineer from Atari. He has some amazing stories (very well-written). Here are just two:

Donkey Kong and me - He tells how he got hired at Atari and his first project was porting Donkey Kong from the arcade to the Atari 8-bit computers.

The Atari ST - He describes Atari's implosion in the early 80s, leading to the takeover by the Tramiels. He surived the Tramiels' purge and helped with the launch of the Atari ST line of computers.