fp.

Jewish cartoonist Yaakov Kirschen died on April 14 at the age of 87, and he is (rightly) being celebrated for “Dry Bones,” his great life’s work. But I would like to highlight his lesser-known legacy: as a tech innovator who tried to bring humor and humanity to the cold silicon world of computers in the 1980s.

hackerknew•9mo ago

Wow, thank you for posting this. I had no idea that the creator of Dry Bones also had worked on such creative and innovative software projects in his lifetime.

Kirkman14•9mo ago

You're very welcome! I've been studying his work for many years. It may not have succeeded financially, but you have to admire his passion in each of his projects.

hackerknew•9mo ago

The music creator application looks interesting, but I could not get it to play anything: https://archive.org/details/1989-the-music-creator-v13

Kirkman14•9mo ago

Yes, the Music Creator has been very tricky to run in emulation on my Mac. Originally, I could not get the installer to work in DOSBox, but it did work in QEMU.

After installing the TMC software to a hard disk image, it ran for me in both emulators. However, it wouldn't play music in QEMU -- though the same hard drive image will play music for me in DOSBox!

So, yes, it works for me locally in DOSBox. But for reasons I don't understand, the music does not play in the Internet Archive’s version of DOSBox.

The original installer files can be downloaded here: https://breakintochat.com/blog/2022/11/29/unearthed-kirschen...

hackerknew•9mo ago

oh wow, that is awesome that so much has been done to preserve the work of Kirschen.

Tiny C Compiler

SectorC: A C Compiler in 512 bytes

Speed up responses with fast mode

Brookhaven Lab's RHIC concludes 25-year run with final collisions

The F Word

You Are Here

Software factories and the agentic moment

OpenCiv3: Open-source, cross-platform reimagining of Civilization III

Hoot: Scheme on WebAssembly

Stories from 25 Years of Software Development

FDA intends to take action against non-FDA-approved GLP-1 drugs

First Proof

Show HN: A luma dependent chroma compression algorithm (image compression)

Show HN: Browser based state machine simulator and visualizer

Al Lowe on model trains, funny deaths and working with Disney

Vocal Guide – belt sing without killing yourself

Show HN: I saw this cool navigation reveal, so I made a simple HTML+CSS version

Start all of your commands with a comma (2009)

I write games in C (yes, C) (2016)

The AI boom is causing shortages everywhere else

Microsoft account bugs locked me out of Notepad – Are thin clients ruining PCs?

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback

Selection rather than prediction

72M Points of Interest

Coding agents have replaced every framework I used

Unseen Footage of Atari Battlezone Arcade Cabinet Production

A Fresh Look at IBM 3270 Information Display System

France's homegrown open source online office suite

Learning from context is harder than we thought

Where did all the starships go?

Tiny C Compiler

SectorC: A C Compiler in 512 bytes

Speed up responses with fast mode

Brookhaven Lab's RHIC concludes 25-year run with final collisions

The F Word

You Are Here

Software factories and the agentic moment

OpenCiv3: Open-source, cross-platform reimagining of Civilization III

Hoot: Scheme on WebAssembly

Stories from 25 Years of Software Development

FDA intends to take action against non-FDA-approved GLP-1 drugs

First Proof

Show HN: A luma dependent chroma compression algorithm (image compression)

Show HN: Browser based state machine simulator and visualizer

Al Lowe on model trains, funny deaths and working with Disney

Vocal Guide – belt sing without killing yourself

Show HN: I saw this cool navigation reveal, so I made a simple HTML+CSS version

Start all of your commands with a comma (2009)

I write games in C (yes, C) (2016)

The AI boom is causing shortages everywhere else

Microsoft account bugs locked me out of Notepad – Are thin clients ruining PCs?

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback

Selection rather than prediction

72M Points of Interest

Coding agents have replaced every framework I used

Unseen Footage of Atari Battlezone Arcade Cabinet Production

A Fresh Look at IBM 3270 Information Display System

France's homegrown open source online office suite

Learning from context is harder than we thought

Where did all the starships go?

Yaakov Kirschen’s other legacy

Comments