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Yaakov Kirschen’s other legacy

26 points| Kirkman14 | 10 months ago |jns.org

6 comments

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hackerknew|10 months 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|10 months 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|10 months 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|10 months 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...

Kirkman14|10 months 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.