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Breaking news: A chapter and a recorded seminar

Last week was productive for research on DAI, as two new scientific documents are now available.

On Thursday, October 17, I had the opportunity to participate in the Belgian video game history seminar led by Björn-Olav Dozo. This seminar is in French, public, broadcast live, and recorded. The production is masterfully handled by Alexis Messina. As a researcher, it’s rare to have the opportunity to share one’s work in such good conditions, so I warmly thank Björn-Olav for the invitation, and the technical crew for the great work. The seminar took the form of an interview, during which I traced my career before presenting my ongoing research (done in my spare time, so far!) on the DAI Personal Computer. Trigger warning: since the interview format is quite specific, and my research is still “in progress”, I hope I didn’t make too many approximations. While I had previously presented some preliminary results in other contexts, this was the first time a recording exists.

Aside from my presentation, the seminar produced seven videos featuring interviews with individuals who are or have been active in the Belgian video game industry. A fantastic resource! Check it out here.

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In parallel, I also received my copy of a new book titled Fragmentos y microhistorias del videojuego Europe, edited by Óliver Pérez-Latorre, Víctor Navarro-Remesal, and . I contributed two small pieces, one of which relates to DAI, within a broader article on the history of Belgian video games written by Björn-Olav Dozo (everything connects!). Ironically, the first written scientific production modestly tracing a few milestones in DAI’s history is not published in French, Flemish, German or even English, but in Spanish. I am very honoured to be part of this beautiful table of contents.

Looking forward to the next episodes!

The American roots of the Belgian micro

By Pierre-Yves Hurel

(French version below)

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”

Memories of the international meeting of DAI users in Nivelles in 1984

By Pierre-Yves Hurel

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”

Mapping DAI magazines’ Readership

By Olivier Gason

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”

DAI in the French magazine “Tilt”: what a limited corpus tells

By Pierre-Yves Hurel

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”