1984 not only brought us the Mac, it brought us an 8-bit app that made it easy to resist purchasing a Mac.

Apple wasn't alone in creating a beloved visual programming environment only to yank it away at the height of its popularity.

A productivity suite that willfully rejects common notions on how such software should behave, on an operating system most haven't heard of, running on a processor 30 years ahead of its time.

While resurrecting a 40-year old defunct magazine, I accidentally-on-purpose resurrect a 40-year old software rivalry.

VisiCalc started it, but 1-2-3 finished it. "It" being the discussion of what a spreadsheet can be, and also VisiCalc itself.

Exploring retro productivity software from the 8/16-bit era. No games, just work.

CP/M and dBASE were industry giants with everything to lose, and they did. For a time they were the power couple to beat.

It's no Toaster, but it doesn't need to be to hold its own. Possibly one of the most impressive cover disk giveaways in history?

In a supreme act of hubris, I use 80s "expert system" AI technology to turn a C64 into a rain predictor. Will it fair better than a coin flip?

Imagine an oven bakes gorgeous cakes, but gives random, severe burns. "When do the burns outweigh the beauty?" is posed by this cute word processor

Early AI on microcomputers focused heavily on "expert systems," tools to capture domain-specific knowledge and democratize it amongst the plebians. In a supreme act of hubris, I'm going to use that sa...

There are people whose impact on our life is not understood until we hear of that person’s passing. Time keeps ticking, we know rationally that everyone dies, and yet there are those whom we hear the ...

View Stewart Cheifet's obituary, find service dates, and sign the guestbook.

How do we approach the challenge of helping non-programmers build software? Do we throw up our hands at today's complexity and say, "Just let an AI do it." Or, do we make tools so *compelling* a novic...

There was a time when society was hell-bent on getting "computers in the classroom." It was going to utterly transform learning! The drive fell short of that goal, but it did deliver us a sharp little...

Obsession takes many forms. Some of us sift through decades of ancient software for a blog, while others spend decades reinventing the same software repeatedly. Outliner software seems to attract the ...

Computing history is full of "what if" scenarios. What if Babbage built a working analytical engine? What if IBM adopted CP/M over DOS? What if Atari delivered their promised TT line on time and becam...

In 1978, Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston took out a loan to fund development of "Calcu-ledger," the very tool that could project if taking out a loan were fiscally prudent. In 2025, VisiCalc still has ...

In the 70s and 80s, the "office of the future" remained tantalizingly close, ever slightly out of reach, but definitely almost here. I'll commandeer the family C64 and rebuild my business into a "pape...

YouTube video by This Week in Retro

A disillusioned filmmaker turned beach bum turned a hobby project into millions by creating the first word processor for home computers. His creation was so compelling a jewelry salesman reinvented hi...

Back when EA was cool, they packaged their software in album-style sleeves and promoted their developers like rock stars. I was a Dan Silva groupie.

A blog about the productivity software of the 8/16-bit era. No games, just work.