Yaakov Kirschen’s other legacy

26 points by Kirkman14 1 year ago | 6 comments

hackerknew 1 year ago |

Wow, thank you for posting this. I had no idea that the creator of Dry Bones also had worked on such creative and innovative software projects in his lifetime.

Kirkman14 1 year ago | |

You're very welcome! I've been studying his work for many years. It may not have succeeded financially, but you have to admire his passion in each of his projects.

hackerknew 1 year ago |

The music creator application looks interesting, but I could not get it to play anything: https://archive.org/details/1989-the-music-creator-v13

Kirkman14 1 year ago | |

Yes, the Music Creator has been very tricky to run in emulation on my Mac. Originally, I could not get the installer to work in DOSBox, but it did work in QEMU.

After installing the TMC software to a hard disk image, it ran for me in both emulators. However, it wouldn't play music in QEMU -- though the same hard drive image will play music for me in DOSBox!

So, yes, it works for me locally in DOSBox. But for reasons I don't understand, the music does not play in the Internet Archive’s version of DOSBox.

The original installer files can be downloaded here: https://breakintochat.com/blog/2022/11/29/unearthed-kirschen...

hackerknew 1 year ago | | |

oh wow, that is awesome that so much has been done to preserve the work of Kirschen.

Kirkman14 1 year ago |

Jewish cartoonist Yaakov Kirschen died on April 14 at the age of 87, and he is (rightly) being celebrated for “Dry Bones,” his great life’s work. But I would like to highlight his lesser-known legacy: as a tech innovator who tried to bring humor and humanity to the cold silicon world of computers in the 1980s.