Open Computing History Project

This month's featured interview revisits the early days of dial-up bulletin board systems through the recollections of a sysop who ran a two-line BBS out of a spare bedroom in Ohio from 1986 to 1991. The system, built around an IBM PC XT clone and a pair of 1200-baud modems, hosted a small but devoted local community of callers trading files, playing door games, and arguing about hardware on public message boards.

A visiting research assistant spent the summer running period benchmark programs across six home computers from the project's collection. The aim was to see how well the published magazine benchmarks of the time hold up when repeated on real hardware that is now more than 25 years old.

Our hardware group has written up the repair notes we have collected over the past year for membrane keyboards found in early 1980s home computers. Membrane keyboards were cheap to make and are now the most common point of failure in the machines we receive.

The notes cover the usual problems: cracked traces on the ribbon tail, keys that stop registering after the conductive ink wears off, and connectors that have corroded from years in a damp basement. For each machine we list what has worked for us, what has not, and which repairs we consider reversible.

The archive has received a nearly complete run of a regional home computing hobbyist magazine published between 1981 and 1986. The donor subscribed from the second issue onward and kept every copy in good condition, with only three issues missing from the five-year run.