Big Blue Disk Ep 3 (January 1987) 

As someone who grew up in and around Gary Indiana, I cannot tell you how much I would love to sit down with Kimberly Jackson and ask her about her experiences with dial-up modems and BBSes in the mid 80s.

that comet orbit application is an absolute burbling gem, a missing-link fossil with the Apollo program in its heredity, and its line of descent pointing directly to Kerbal Space Program and any number of space physics sims. beautiful.

Ha ha I was already opening a tab to go looking for episode 2 before my eyes wandered far enough down to notice the explanation of its absence.

Moral of the story: People in the 80's were gullible idiots and were excited about literally anything "new", seemingly interactive, on a screen. I say this as somebody born in 1981. :-D

I remember disabling Numlock with a Basic's POKE command so it wouldn't require the user to do it in order to use the arrows... man I feel old.

Man, that Randy Cox sure is salty! "This is the first program that I've had any trouble with on my PCjr!" Won't be the last, Rando.

i used that exact phonewords program SO MUCH in the 90s. i still have a local copy that i drag up on rare occasion.

I had some software from The Weather Channel(cable-tv) that was similar but better looking for vga displays... I think it was called hurricane tracker but i'm not sure and it included a bunch of previous hurricane tracks... Does anyone know what the software might have been called.? I can't find it anywhere

I realize I'm 3 years late, but both of these are great and I'm kinda sad there were only two.

Gosh I remember having to get out of 40 column mode on the PC Jrs in our computer lab any time I wanted to do any editing in LOGO. Then I'd have to change it back to actually run my programs, for some reason I still don't quite understand (unsure if it was a compatibility problem or a hardware limitation). If there's a "retro" IBM I want to get my hands on, it's probably that one, even though I know it's not especially beloved for various reasons (this probably being one of them).

Capturing the Suez Canal hahaha how that’s aged

wow! i was waiting to find this for so long !. my first IBM pc compatible was one of this if you hold a key for too long (even when playing a game) you will get a "buffer overflow" message and the computer could crash. this was a problem you have to be careful not to hold a key for too long !.

Staying in text mode would mean that it's inherently easy to port to other architectures. Not that anyone would want to...

i wonder how the cross software education applications on apple stack up to these. Like, animations, etc. those were really very nifty!

Hello, storm chaser here. I suppose that hurricane tracker might be worth demonstrating previous storm tracks as case studies perhaps, but in practice, none of those weather tools are useful in the field, and I doubt any storm chaser at that time aside from the funded Nat Geo professionals even wanted to have a big old IBM PC in their car.

This was fascinating. Thank you for making this video. Someone finally uploaded #2 to Internet Archive in 2022. Will there ever be a video about #2 for the sake of some semblance of continuity? 😛

Can't wait for the next one.

ah, the true power of human kind, the isolation of "if then"

Someone commented: "Can't wait for the next one", but this was 4 years ago... perhaps he is still waiting...

as a fellow strabismus haver i feel the pain(?) of not being able to enjoy stereoscopic 3d

Back when double spacing after a period was not only still acceptable, but expected.

Dammit I just spent ten minutes trying to find episode 2 😡 😝

Where's Episode 3?

When's the next installment?

Gee, Spell-A-Vision looks like a game for the ZX Spectrum, and it sounds like one too.

This must be before the Tandy 1000 came out and show how a PCjr should work.

The Mac didn't have color originally BUT the Apple IIGS DID have a GUI and it WAS in color in 1986! 😁😁🤔🤔🤪🤪 I remember that my area code was 804, but then they changed it to 757… so there's that… 🤔🤔 I know I'm pretty old! 46! 😮😮

I wonder if some of these programs use 40 column mode because they're ported from Apple II or some other 8-bit machine?

YAY!!!

Kramden ... Crammed in

~57:00, I'm pretty sure that program only had one programmer.

I liked your coverage of this shareware Eyewitness News. :)

29:32, "app"? Sacrolige! I don't think they called a program an app back then.

~20:30, i don't really understand the composite graphics. I only remember 8, 16, 256 color etc. I'm aware of the composite video plug but i don't think that's what you're referencing...

Well, now I know that if the heat index is 78 degrees Fahrenheit and the relative humidity is 15%, I'm going to die. Edit: never mind, I didn't notice at first that it actually showed a lower temperature and then switched to a higher one. I'm guessing he input different values the second time and just cut that part out cutting directly to the 144° screen with the audio overlay being constant.

They just wanted to have fart noises when you move the pieces

10:58 The first wojaks

I feel that you don't really like Atari-like sound effects...