Unearthing a Forgotten Computer
Currently focusing on the history of video games in Switzerland (link), I haven’t had much time to dedicate to research on the DAI in recent months, but this project is far from dead! Before the summer break, I want to give you a quick update. Continue reading “Our Growing Collection of DAI Documents”
L’Ordinateur Individuel (O.I.) is a magazine that played an important role in the microcomputer culture of the 1980s, both in France and beyond its borders. It has columns dedicated to Belgium and Switzerland. So it’s no surprise to find a number of references to the DAI in the pages of the O.I. I’ll try to systematically examine the treatment of the machine we’re interested in, but for now I’d like to dedicate this short post to an article that tells us more about the origins of the DAI. Continue reading “The American roots of the Belgian micro”
Marc Vandermeersch, who was active in the DAI user community in the 1980s, has shared with us some exclusive photographs. Here are four of them. They are from the international meeting that took place on October 20th 1984 in Nivelles. Thanks to him for sharing and explaining the pictures!
They include a DAI with an open plastic shell (to improve it? to explain a modification? to repair it?) and DAI models that appear to have been tampered with (one in a white box and the other in a rack). Continue reading “Memories of the international meeting of DAI users in Nivelles in 1984”
While digging through magazines created by user clubs of DAI computers, we stumbled upon lists of their readers. While this information looked very interesting at first glance, we had to find a satisfying way to analyze this trove of data. While this effort is ongoing, we will discuss here the challenges involved in analyzing this data and propose to use maps to visualize the geographic diversity and scale of the DAI’s network. We thus hope to draw what was the DAI computer by mapping it as a constellation of who made it what it was. In other words, those who produced it, those who sold it, those who worked with it, or, simply said, those who loved the DAI. Continue reading “Mapping DAI magazines’ Readership”
Disclaimer : 1. this paper is a translation of a french post previously published on my personal blog “Carnet de jeu !” (link). 2. All quotes from French sources have been translated by me.
The DAI, the first and only microcomputer manufactured in Belgium, is a high-end personal computer, marketed since the end of the 1980s. I share here the results obtained by going through issues of a famous French video game magazine. Continue reading “DAI in the French magazine “Tilt”: what a limited corpus tells”
