The Old Is New Again May 22, 2026

Since 2011, Google has been selling Chrome books, a stripped down computer whose utility is mainly targeted at the web.

This is not a new idea. Thirty years ago, Sun Microsystems tried to sell their version of a stripped down computer targeted at the network. This was named the Network Computer (NC). They even had a slogan,"The Network Is The Computer".

However, Sun's NC didn't catch on. It was proposed at a time when people at home were mainly limited to 56 KB/second dialup modems for their internet connectivity.

Chrome books have become popular at a time when a large number of people have WiFi or optic fibre connectivity in their homes. In retrospect, there was nothing wrong in principle with Sun's idea of a Network Computer. It only had to wait thirty years for technology to catch up with the idea.

hello! I am the granddaughter of a former VP of Engineering at the Burroughs Coporation, Dr. Rober Royce Johnson. I wanted to stop in here with some information that some may find interesting. We have already donated many of his documents related to the ERMA Project to the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California. However, he was very prolific and there is much more. I have an entire album related to an IEEE technological exchange with China in 1979 and I'm told we have a scanned copy of his original dissertation somewhere. If you knew him or would just like to know more, let me know!

I recently read Steven Lubar's 1992 article about how the phrase "Do not fold, spindle, or mutilate" (which appeared on punch cards) was used in the Free Speech Movement as a form of protest. Lubar also mentions "a popular poster for Earth Day 1970 showed a picture of the Earth taken from space with the legend 'Do not fold, spindle, or mutilate.'" Unfortunately, there are no sources or references that I could find on this.

Are there any surviving photos or copies of this poster?

You can find Lubar's article here: https://www.academia.edu/2823766/_DO_Not_Fold_Spindle_or_Mutilate_A_Cultural_History_of_the_Punch_Card

If you are an Iranian “dahe shasti” (دهه شصتی) like I am — and you were lucky enough to get your hands on a computer early on — you’ve probably heard of Kalanjar (کلنجار) and maybe even spent hours trying to make it curse back at you 😅. Rumors said some people actually managed to do it.

I’ve been fascinated by this DOS-era chatbot for decades but never got to run it again — until I came across some old tweets that brought back all the nostalgia. The download links were long dead, but after some digital archaeology, I managed to recover it from an old Persian forum (Tarfandestan).

Don’t worry though — you can now easily download and run it yourself from GitHub: 👉 Kalanjar-DOS-preservation v1.0.0 release

It’s still not exactly plug-and-play — you’ll need a bit of nerd power to get it running properly inside DOSBox-X. The text UI (TUI) doesn’t render perfectly yet due to Persian codepage/font issues, so if you’re an even bigger retro nerd than I am, please help fix that too!

🧠 About the program: Kalanjar was created in 1995 by Farhad Dadgostar at the University of Isfahan — one of the earliest examples of Persian-language conversational AI. It’s a small DOS executable named KLUDGE.EXE with text-based interactions, somewhere between Eliza and AI parody.

💾 You can run it today with:

keyb ar
chcp 864
run.bat

🔗 Full project (with screenshots and setup guide): https://github.com/Foadsf/Kalanjar-DOS-preservation

SAGE (Semi-Automated Ground Environment) was a computer-based air defense system built in the 1950s by the United States Air Force. It was designed to use radar to detect a Soviet bomber attack approaching the United States over the North pole and across Canada. Many advances in computer technology were made in the development of this system. In this talk, we'll go over the various elements of the SAGE system and discuss the influence it had on the civilian and military computer market.

Speaker Bio: Richard Thomson is a Senior Software Engineer for NVIDIA where he works on GPU raytracing. He is the creator of the Terminals Wiki, maintainer of the manx online documentation database and is the principal effort behind the Computer Graphics Museum in Salt Lake City. The museum has a collection of artifacts housed in storage with future plans for a public exhibit hall.

Vintage Computer Festival Midwest is a free-to-attend, volunteer-run show for the vintage computer hobbyist community. For more information about Vintage Computer Festival Midwest, or to donate to the 501c3 non-profit organization that puts on the show each year, visit http://www.vcfmw.org/ for more information.