🎶 “Can you see the chart, Fernando?”

code adapted from : https://gist.github.com/eparadis/d4a242c8cc149f3583c303efa80532c4 ascii rendition of the mandelbrot set, rendered on thermal receipt paper, on aim-65

tiny ascii mandelbrot

There are absolutely “character actors” of fonts. It’s not that you know the name, but you know what they’ve been in.

I kind love the idea that the book could be just pure fiction—and writing it performance art!—but Sphere and their whole story is completely true! gocomputernow.com

GitHub - bzotto/mac-ascii-chart: Menu bar ASCII chart for macOS. No need for "man ascii" again! Menu bar ASCII chart for macOS. No need for "man ascii" again! - bzotto/mac-ascii-chart

Are you, like me, CONSTANTLY opening Terminal windows to type "man ascii" ? No more! The best thing Claude has ever made: github.com/bzotto/mac-a...

Go Computer Now! Book Go Computer Now! How Sphere Corporation Invented the Modern Microcomputer—Then Disappeared is the newly unearthed and riveting story of the small Utah computer manufacturer who burst onto the scene in...

My new book about Sphere, the forgotten but incredible 1970s computing pioneer is published and available! Curious? Grab a copy here: shop.gocomputernow.com/products/go-...

Oooh, snap!

@bzotto.bsky.social arrived in the UK

Get more from S.F. DISCO PRESERVATION SOCIETY on Patreon PRESERVING DJ & NIGHTCLUB AUDIO, VIDEO & PRINT HISTORY

SF Disco Preservation Society now has a Patreon. This guy has been doing the lord's work out there for a while.
patreon.com/SFDPS

That book on Sphere, the revolutionary late 70s personal computer you weirdly never heard of? It’s out! @bzotto.bsky.social did a wonderful job making a gorgeous book about a forgotten computer—a book you can, yes, now purchase! shop.gocomputernow.com/products/go-... I just got my copy!

She wisely tamped down my more outlandish design instincts but met me in the middle with the chonky Signetics page numbers and a very colorful dustjacket that pushed her own boundaries a bit. I love the result, and I hope it elevates the story told by this first-time author. gocomputernow.com

I thought the contrast there could be really compelling. And I think you can see this, most especially in the first ~40 or so pages in the book, which is a purely visual gallery of advertisements, marketing, and other bits and pieces of Sphere ephemera, made beautiful and riveting and surprising.

After I got a copy of this earlier work of hers, I immediately got in touch to see if she could help me with Go Computer Now! Sphere's brand and the contemporaneous ephemera I wanted to display is so inherently American-- scrappy, almost handmade-- and her work is so Swiss-- clean and modern.

Swiss Design Awards 2026

Sophie Wietlisbach, the designer of my new Sphere book, has just been named as a finalist in the 2026 Swiss Design Awards for her earlier project about Swiss type manufacture companies. swissdesignawards.ch/en/sophie-wi...

Friends and strangers are starting to send me pics of the Sphere book arriving at their homes, all over the States and in different countries! This is so cool! Also people are (pleasantly) surprised by how visual it is. If you missed the Kickstarter... shop.gocomputernow.com/products/go-...

Got my copy yesterday as well. Can't wait to dig in. #vintagecomputer #retrocomputing

I got my copy of the Sphere book today! Can't wait to read the story!

These colors, man. So good.

Banger thread, dude!

Expo'75 poster by Nagai

Kazumasa Nagai designed one of my favorite posters ever, for the Expo '75 world oceans exposition. Sorry to know of his recent passing.
EX
mikelynchcartoons.blogspot.com/2026/04/japa...

telling my kids this is the Centre Pompidou

I understand the criticisms, but this could really rejuvenate the mid-budget action movie industry

Manifesting shipments

In honor of Apple's 50th, here's my favorite early coverage of the company, from the Palo Alto Times. "It's like a car. People don't use them just to go places. They're used for other reasons, like to impress other people," said 21-year-old Jobs. =)

Sphere News: The Secret Minicomputer Inside Your Sphere Unveiling the extraordinary origins of Sphere's BASIC programming language.

One of the stranger mysteries about the Sphere computers has been their BASIC language. Slow, huge... but oddly powerful. Full details only emerged late, so barely in advance of the book's arrival, I present the wild story of Sphere BASIC: sphere.computer/news/2026-03...

Sphere News: The Secret Minicomputer Inside Your Sphere Unveiling the extraordinary origins of Sphere's BASIC programming language.

One of the stranger mysteries about the Sphere computers has been their BASIC language. Slow, huge... but oddly powerful. Full details only emerged late, so barely in advance of the book's arrival, I present the wild story of Sphere BASIC: sphere.computer/news/2026-03...

Tracy Kidder, Pulitzer-winning author who turned unlikely subjects into bestsellers, dies aged 80 Writer looked to topics such as computer engineering and life in a nursing home to produce richly researched books

I know at least two people whose career paths were influenced directly by reading a Kidder book. (And "The Soul of a New Machine" is not just an important work in computer history but also one of the greatest book titles and turns of phrase gifted to that world.)

www.theguardian.com/books/2026/m...

That’s a great tidbit of possibility!

Moritz also makes clear in The Little Kingdom that the resultingly very low cost to customers of the disk system threw gasoline on the fire of Apple II sales, clearing out what had been a worryingly growing inventory at the time. arguably apple’s story might have gone differently otherwsie

kids these days don't stay awake during the jaunt anymore