About Stone Tools

Stone Tools is a blog about the productivity software of the 8/16-bit home computing era, written by Christopher Drum. If you want a blog about retro-gaming, you'll need to look elsewhere. If you want to read about someone examining the Y2K bug in database software of the 80s, you've come to the right place.

This blog is free

All blog posts are free to everyone; there is no difference in content between those who pay and those who don't. That said, paid subscriptions to support my research are gratefully, humbly accepted.

I wish you'd cover...

I work many posts in advance, but am always interested to know what readers would like to see covered. I follow a <software title> on the <hardware type> format.

Some titles are not full-featured enough to warrant entire posts (like VIC Mail for the Commodore VIC-20). I give special consideration to titles that try to do something a little different in their genres, were trailblazers, or otherwise have interesting stories attached to their histories.

You can send suggestions to stonetools @ christopherdrum.com

Who is Christopher Drum

I started in journalism, transitioned into graphic arts, and finally turned software engineer. I've published a number of projects over the years that have delighted a handful of very specific nerds, with a focus on the deconstruction and resurrection of historically signifcant software. All published software is free, open-source, and available on GitHub.

Software of note

• PicoCalc, a 99.5% feature-complete clone of VisiCalc
  • Hacker News thread here
• PEZ, a single portable Zork executable which runs on any 64-bit machine
  • Development blog post about it here
  • Hacker News thread here
  • Mentioned on a podcast here
• Status Line, a z-machine interpreter for playing classic text adventures
  • Status Line Classics, Infocom games modified from original source to look and play great in Status line
• Mystery House Remodeled, a ground-up recreation of the first graphic text adventure
  • Development blog post about it here
  • Versawriter8, a bespoke tool for re-drawing the images of Mystery House
• Eliza8, scriptable clone of Eliza, built from first principles and Weizenbaum's original notes (note, this was before the original source code had been found)

Other projects

• Pirouette, a bubble universe art exploration toy
• Continuum, a pedantic recreation of the OMNI Magazine font (coming soon)