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From the Past: The Internet Archive has added a remarkable new piece to its growing collection of digital artifacts from the past. The organization is now hosting several episodes of The Famous Computer Cafe, a radio program that covered computers and IT when they were still a novelty.
Archivist Kay Savetz recovered 53 episodes of The Famous Computer Cafe (TFCC), a 1980s radio show about the emerging world of computers and technology that aired from 1983 to 1986. TFCC was broadcast by various radio stations in California and serves as an intriguing time capsule of the early days of home computing.
The show was preserved by its creators on reel-to-reel tapes, but over time, both the tapes and the program were believed to be lost. Savetz rediscovered several of these tapes in a private sale and launched a GoFundMe campaign to raise the funds needed to digitize them. Once the digitization process was completed, Savetz made the episodes available through the Internet Archive with the permission of the show's original creators.
As explained on the Internet Archive blog, The Famous Computer Cafe offers valuable insights into how computers were viewed in the 1980s. The show features technology news, software and hardware reviews, advertisements, and more. One of the most fascinating aspects, according to the blog, is the interviews with now-famous IT personalities – TFCC had many guests on air before they became the tech luminaries we know today.
The list of technology personalities interviewed by TFCC hosts includes computer entrepreneurs, musicians, publishers, journalists, and even philosophers. The episodes now hosted on the Internet Archive contain interviews with Bill Gates, Douglas Adams, Timothy Leary, Jack Tramiel (Atari), and Bill Atkinson (Apple). In a 1984 episode, Gates explained what an operating system is, discussed MS-DOS, mentioned the first game in the Flight Simulator series, and predicted that "graphical applications" would soon become as ubiquitous as computers themselves.
The TFCC episodes recovered by Savetz span from November 17, 1984, to July 12, 1985, meaning that many more tapes and episodes are still considered lost. During its four-year run, TFCC interviewed notable figures like Ray Bradbury, Robert Moog, Donny Osmond, Gene Roddenberry, and many others.
A recent episode of the Radio Survivor podcast featured an interview with Savetz and TFCC co-creator Ellen Fields, exploring how the show was created and how Savetz partially recovered it earlier this year.