Internet Archive preserves and releases 1980s PC radio show that interviewed legends including Douglas Adams, Bill Gates, Timothy Leary, and Jack Tramiel

The Internet Archive has announced the preservation and release of 53 episodes of The Famous Computer Cafe, a radio show that aired in California from 1983-86 and explored the topic of home computing. The show features industry news, adverts for technology of the time, hardware and software reviews, and interviews with a wide range of computing (and cultural) pioneers.

The show had once been preserved by its original makers on reel-to-reel tapes, but over the years these were apparently scattered and lost. The Internet Archive project to preserve the show began when computer historian Kay Savetz acquired several of these tapes at a property sale, and subsequently launched a crowdfunding campaign to digitally archive and make the show available again.  

«While full of time-capsule descriptions of 1980s technology news, the most exciting aspect of the show has been the variety and uniqueness of the interviews,» writes Savetz. «The list of people that the show interviewed is a who’s-who of tech luminaries of the 1980s: computer people, musicians, publishers, philosophers, journalists. Interviews in the recovered recordings include Timothy Leary, Douglas Adams, Bill Gates, Atari’s Jack Tramiel, Apple’s Bill Atkinson, and dozens of others.»

I adore old technology shows, particularly the thrill of listening to smart people try and puzzle-through where the field is going, alongside the nostalgic thrill of an age when people were asking just what computers were, as well as what they can do.

I listened to the episode of The Famous Computer Cafe where they interview a young Bill Gates. He turns up around ten minutes into the show, just after a review of the Muppet Learning Keyboard, which doesn't have very good key responsiveness and may leave a three-year-old bored. Gates was already semi-famous and fabulously successful at this stage, but computers simply weren't as mainstream news as they are now, and their purpose and potential still had to be explained in simple terms.

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