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The Dawn of Starcraft: e-Sports come to the world stage
The lights of the metropolis shine brightly on the clear summer night. Down on the bay, a crowd gathers around a giant outdoor screen. Spotlights flood the area as the audience, now exceeding 50,000...
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“For the swarm!” Inside the world of professional StarCraft players
In the early 1990s, a favorite place to escape my troubles was the arcade in the Student Union Building at the University of British Columbia. Every lunch hour and every afternoon, when I should have...
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Butterfly milking and pig nibbling: building the strange world of Glitch
(credit: Photograph by c1.glitch.bz) Stewart Butterfield had a dream. He wanted to build a game that was different from anything else he had played. He wanted to start a company to build that game and...
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From Altair to iPad: 35 years of personal computer market share
How times change: Steve Jobs and Bill Gates in 1997. (credit: Nick Fitzherbert) Back in 2005, we charted 30 years of personal computer market share to show graphically how the industry had developed,...
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1998’s most intriguing OS, 15 years later: Hands-on with Haiku alpha 4
Remember me? An OS of yore Revived and open source freed Waiting to be usedRead 39 remaining paragraphs | Comments
View ArticleA history of the Amiga, part 8: The demo scene
Author’s note: The Demo Scene is the final piece in a long-running Ars series on the history of the Amiga. Genesis As computer games became more and more complex in the late 1980s, the days of the...
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Heirs of Infocom: Where interactive fiction authors and games stand today
Andrew Plotkin, Muffy Berlyn and Michael Berlyn await their release from The Lamp (credit: Jason Scott) In my review of Get Lamp, the documentary about text adventures, I mentioned that the original...
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A history of the Amiga, part 9: The Video Toaster
(credit: Jeremy Reimer) When personal computers first came into the world in the late 1970s, there wasn’t always an obvious use for them. If the market was going to expand beyond hobbyists and early...
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People still use the Amiga today, and new Viva Amiga documentary shows why
An example of the wonderful renderings you can expect in Viva Amiga. (credit: Zach Weddington) Many years ago when I began writing the History of the Amiga, I was surprised there were so few accounts...
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A history of the Amiga, part 10: The downfall of Commodore
Enlarge (credit: Jeremy Reimer) More than 30-plus years after it debuted, the Amiga continues to fascinate all sorts of computer lovers. For years our Jeremy Reimer has been thoroughly documenting its...
View ArticleThe A-EON Amiga X5000: An alternate universe where the Amiga platform never died
The Amiga computer was a legend in its time. Back when the Macintosh had only a monochrome 9-inch screen, and the PC managed just four colors and monotone beeps, the Amiga boasted a 32-bit graphical...
View ArticleA history of the Amiga, part 11: Between an Escom and a Gateway
Commodore International declared itself insolvent on April 29, 1994 under Chapter 7 of US bankruptcy law. Ordinarily, this would have been followed immediately by an auction of all the company’s...
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A history of the Amiga, part 12: Red vs. Blue
Enlarge (credit: Jeremy Reimer) The year 2000, which once seemed so impossibly futuristic, had finally arrived. Bill McEwen, president of the new Amiga Inc., celebrated with a press release telling...
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Half an operating system: The triumph and tragedy of OS/2
Update: It's the day after Thanksgiving in the US, meaning most Ars staffers are on the lookout for deals rather than potential stories. With folks off for the holiday, we're resurfacing this consumer...
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That time Roger Ebert said games will never be as worthy as movies
Enlarge / Film critics Roger Ebert (center) and Gene Siskel appear on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson on December 12, 1986. (credit: Gary Null/NBCU Photo Bank/NBCUniversal via Getty Images)...
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Remembering Apple’s Newton, 30 years on
Enlarge Thirty years ago, on May 29, 1992, Apple announced its most groundbreaking and revolutionary product yet, the Newton MessagePad. It was released to great fanfare a year later, but as a...
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A history of ARM, part 1: Building the first chip
Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson / Getty Images) It was 1983, and Acorn Computers was on top of the world. Unfortunately, trouble was just around the corner. The small UK company was famous for winning...
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A history of ARM, part 2: Everything starts to come together
Enlarge / The Acorn Archimedes 3000, released in May 1989. (credit: Wikipedia) The story so far: At the end of the 1980s, Acorn Computers was at a crossroads. A small team, led by Sophie Wilson and...
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A history of ARM, part 3: Coming full circle
Enlarge (credit: Jeremy Reimer/Waldemar Brandt/NASA) The story so far: As the 20th century came to a close, ARM was on the precipice of massive change. Under its first CEO, Robin Saxby, the company...
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Revisiting Apple’s ill-fated Lisa computer, 40 years on
Enlarge / Steve Jobs posing with the Lisa in 1983. (credit: Ted Thai) Forty years ago today, a new type of personal computer was announced that would change the world forever. Two years later, it was...
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