Recently, I've been a little disillusioned with how retro-computing discourse feels dominated by two things: hardware and games. In an honest assessment of my own life with computers, there's so much more to it than that.

Productivity software (Deluxe Paint, VisiCalc, PageMaker, etc.) shaped how the world worked and, in my case, changed the course of my career. I wanted to understand this software more deeply, so I started a blog to do exactly that.

I do not write about games; I write about the other stuff.

Stone Tools revisits and re-examines productivity software from roughly 1977-1995, a fertile period when developers pushed machines to their limits, experimented wildly, and were still figuring out what kinds of software people even needed. The tone is lighthearted but open-minded: I spend weeks learning the software and use it for real work, while considering its modern-day utility (if any!).

This week's article is about "Electric Pencil on the TRS-80" - https://stonetools.ghost.io/electricpencil-trs80

The first article, "Deluxe Paint on the Amiga" was posted by someone recently and was nicely received. - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45144129

Other projects of mine that resonated with HN, for the curious. - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43677909 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37746663

I hope this blog is of interest and value to the community.

Ecco Pro was yet another such extremely useful tool. It started as a 16 bit app in 1993 and I used the 32 bit version until about 2009 (and then implemented my own https://github.com/rochus-keller/crossline/ which I still use daily).