Science fiction and technology writer
The most magical moment of my life was on Christmas Day, 1979. I was seven years old, and our family was visiting Uncle Allan’s house in Burnaby. I had been playing on the Heathkit H-89 computer for hours when my dad said it was time to go home. I pleaded with him for more time with my uncle’s magical machine. I still remember him smiling at me and explaining that what I had been obsessed with all…
I've been working my way through the beginnings of the personal computing industry, starting in late 1974 with the introduction of the Altair 8800. For several episodes now, I've been talking about computers that most people have never heard of, from companies that are long extinct. But now I'm at the start of 1976, and a curious new company has formed out of one man's desire…
The year was 1987. I was in eleventh grade, going to Eric Hamber Secondary in Vancouver. When the weather turned nice, I would sometimes walk home from school. I’d head up to the Oakridge Mall at 41st and Cambie with one destination in mind: Johnny Zee’s Arcade. Bus fare for students was 55 cents in those days, which gave me two quarters to spend on arcade games. My favorites were R-Type; a…
In my post about my year in Valheim , I had one section that I always felt strangely bad about: “At first I labelled many of my cottages in Valheim as Keats, but finally settled on just one that was on its own small island. But I didn’t end up spending a lot of time there. Hanging out in the virtual Keats didn’t feel like the real one. Some memories have to remain just memories.” Why did that make…
The saga is complete! In this final installment, I discuss how the Internet changed post-dotcom collapse, explore how Google works and how it rose to power, and discuss the rise of social media and smartphones. https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/09/a-history-of-the-internet-part-3-the-rise-of-the-user /
The second part of my History of the Internet is up on Ars Technica! You can read it here: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/06/a-history-of-the-internet-part-2-the-high-tech-gold-rush-begins / It was super fun writing this article. As I was firing up emulators for old computer hardware and operating systems and installing old browsers, it felt like I was getting pulled back in time. Back to…
This is a great story of a computer and an electronics pioneer who are almost totally unknown today. But Dan Meyer and the humble SWTP 6800 profoundly changed the entire landscape of the personal computing industry. They split the market into two parts: one who craved compatibility, clone hardware options, and the widest possible array of add-on hardware, and the other who valued innovation,…
The first of my three-part article on the history of the Internet is up on Ars Technica! It's getting some great reviews, including a video review from Vint Cerf, the father of the Internet and co-creator of TCP/IP. Which is really cool. Check it out: https://drive.google.com/file/d/19htTKvmifeHH3mTj6fw5rmWAhA19O-bJ/view Part 2 is on its way!
I was going to do a series of blog posts (you can read the first one here ) about developing my "reimagined" Balablox, the most obscure game of all time. I also wanted to make it really polished and refined, with a full options screen with customizable controls and everything. But years passed. And I was at a game developer conference and someone asked if I had published any games, and I had to…
Introduction I never liked survival games. I preferred story-driven role-playing games, like the old Ultima series, Fallout, and Mass Effect. But when Microsoft laid me off in January 2024, I found myself with a lot of time on my hands and no income. While I waited, perhaps in vain, for my industry to recover, I figured I should take a look at my gaming backlog. Surely there must be some titles in…
This one's a doozy - welcome to the crazy world of personal computers in the 1970s. This story has it all - bad managers, overworked engineers, mandatory "training" based on crazy cult-like seminars... and it ends with the most bizarre implosion in the history of tax evasion. Plus, some computer history! The IMSAI was the world's first personal computer clone, a 100% compatible copy of…
This article was deeply personal to me, because my life overlapped with so much of it. It starts out with the earliest networked computers (PLATO, and the Arpanet) and goes through BBSes, Usenet, web-based forums, and social media. It's a wild ride. Check it out! https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/04/first-post-a-history-of-online-public-messaging
It's an exciting beginning for me, the culmination of a dream I've had for a long time, to chronicle the entire history of personal computing. Enjoy and don't forget to like the video and subscribe to the channel!
If this works, you should be seeing a new blog post! I migrated all my websites from AWS to Linode. It's a lot cheaper, and I really like the simplicity of Linode server management. Onwards to new things! EDIT: Just checking image uploading! Still works!
In a previous article I posted my thoughts on Facebook's sad attempt at a Metaverse, and how it was already failing shortly after launch. Some time has passed, and I have an update, courtesy of journalist Paul Murray: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/mark-zuckerberg-metaverse-meta-horizon-worlds.html "After a certain number of hours in Zuckerberg’s personal universe, you find yourself…
The third and final article in my History of the ARM chip series is now live on Ars Technica! Read it here: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/01/a-history-of-arm-part-3-coming-full-circle / This article focuses on how ARM changed the world, from the iPhone to the Game Boy Advance to smartphones and Apple's new computers based on the M1 chips. It ends with a look at how ARM managed to…
A second article in less than a week! This one's about the revolutionary yet forgotten computer from Apple, the Lisa, which was announced today, forty years ago. https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/01/revisiting-apples-ill-fated-lisa-computer-40-years-on With this second article, I had the strange feeling of being bumped off the front page of Ars Technica by... myself. My editor called it…
This morning I was happy to find that Part 2 of my History of ARM article is now live on Ars Technica. You can read it here: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/11/a-history-of-arm-part-2-everything-starts-to-come-together The first part was mostly a technical story of talented engineers who created something amazing. The second part is the story of how the ARM company was able to bring this…
The original game, running on my Heathkit H-89 A while back, I wrote about the most obscure video game ever made , called Balablox, which I wrote when I was 15 years old in 1987. At the end of the article, I teased the possibility of a modern rewrite. I’ve been working on that project, on and off, for about half a year now. My goal is to get it finished this year, for the 35th anniversary of the…
I'd like to tell you a story about the most obscure video game ever made. Only one person in the world has ever played it, and until now, only one person in the world has ever even seen it or heard about it. It's a game called Balablox, from 1987, and it ran on one of the most obscure computers ever, the Heathkit H-89. This one, in fact: I got this computer in 1979, when I was 7, and…
Sorry, Mark, nobody wants to join you here. In a previous post called Why the Metaverse will never happen , I dissected the idea of the Metaverse as an impossible and ill-defined dream. Basically, the Metaverse has to be universal (like the Internet itself) or it isn’t a Metaverse at all, but just another Second Life clone. But tech companies will never agree to adopt a common framework that they…
I'm excited to announce that Ars Technica has published the first part of my three-part series on the history of the ARM chip. You can read it here: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/09/a-history-of-arm-part-1-building-the-first-chip / If you've ever wondered how your smartphone became so smart, it's because in 1983, a tiny computer company in England decided they would do…
John Cleese playing Monty Python’s Dennis Moore, in a sketch where he discovers that the redistribution of wealth is harder than he thought. The concept of digital money isn’t new. In fact, we all use digital money every day. The reason we can rely on numbers in a computer to safely represent our wealth is because we have laws that safeguard its handling, and centralized banks that must obey those…
My new article made the front page of Ars Technica this week! It's about the forgotten orphan of Apple gadgets, the Newton! This is my first article on Ars since 2018, so I'm happy to see it's getting a good reception. Check it out! Remembering Apple's Newton, 30 years on
In 1980, Douglas Adams wrote The Restaurant at the End of the Universe . In this excerpt, Ford and Arthur have time-traveled back to prehistoric Earth, which has just been invaded by a colony ship comprised entirely of people with useless jobs. “How can you have money,” demanded Ford, “if none of you actually produces anything? It doesn't grow on trees you know.” “If you would allow me to…
This is a little something I whipped up on paper and then made real with a great little program called Affinity Designer. I started with a stylized representation of an old 1970s all-in-one computer, something like a TRS-80 Model III, or my own Heathkit H-89. Then I replaced the floppy disk drive on the right with a stylized book, to indicate the "history" portion of the site. Micro, History? Get…
The term “Microcomputer” was born in the 1970s, along with computers it described. It distinguished these machines from “minicomputers”, which were the size of refrigerators, and “mainframes”, which were the size of rooms. Sometimes entire floors. But while minicomputers were just smaller mainframes, microcomputers were a completely different thing. Banks and governments used mainframes, as they…
Well, it's been only a little over a month since New World was released, and the bloom is already off the rose. A combination of crazy bugs and a rapidly-dropping player base (going from nearly 1 million concurrent players shortly after launch to under 250,000 today) has the future of the game already in question. Seems like the post-mortem might come sooner than I thought! EDIT: As of…
If you’ve been following technology news over the past six months, you’ve undoubtedly heard the term “Metaverse” being promoted from many sources. Last October, Facebook announced it was changing its name to “Meta”, and Mark Zuckerberg released a video explaining how the company was going to start building “the Metaverse” and how awesome it was all going to be. But what exactly is the Metaverse?…
August 13, 1982. A young, precocious ten year-old boy finally convinces his family to let him tape record the evening meal. Thirty years later, a much older boy finds the tape in a closet and decides to try and preserve long-lost family memories. (Digitizing and cleaning up the audio was an interesting process, and I’ll blog about that later). I was a bit of a twit back in those days, a bit of a…
New World is a massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) for the PC, made by Amazon Studios. It was released on September 28th 2021, and the big story surrounding its launch was the fact that the game servers were so overwhelmed that people had to spend hours and even sometimes half a day sitting in a login queue. Scaling issues with game servers on launch day are common, and harder…
Eagle-eyed viewers of this blog have already noticed the shiny new banner up top, along with a nice new headshot of yours truly. That photo is courtesy of a good friend of mine, expert photographer Stephen Mirowski. I've been neglecting my blog while I concentrated on my newsletter, Arcade Dreams, and other personal projects. I think it's time I changed that. Blog writing isn't a…
Last week I read an abolutely amazing article on retro computing. The author took a trip through the world of emulation, making stops at significant signposts in computing history such as the Amiga, LISP machines, and the NeXT computer. In doing so, he also found a way back to his childhood. I was deeply moved by this article and it inspired me to do a little emulating of my own. But first, a…
Titan is one of the most interesting places in the solar system. It’s the largest moon of Saturn, and its cloud-covered atmosphere is nearly as dense as Earth’s. If you landed on Titan with nothing more than a (very) warm coat and an oxygen mask, you could walk around the orange-colored landscape. In No Time on Titan, a short story set in the same universe as my Silicon Minds series,…
I've got an exciting announcement! My friend Zach Weddington, who did the documentary Viva Amiga that I reviewed for Ars, just launched a Kickstarter for his next project. And I'm on the team! I've been hired as a writer for the project. It's called Arcade Dreams, and it's a documentary series covering the history of arcade games, from the penny arcades of the 20s to the…
I remember my mother cutting out the snippet in TV guide and showing it to me excitedly. “I think this show is right up your alley!” She was absolutely right. It was the summer of 1988. I had come home to the small town of Gibsons, BC after graduating from high school. I was working at the public library to pay for university, but I got off work just in time to watch this crazy new British sitcom.…
For most of my life, I’ve tried in vain to explain why I love cities. Despite numerous and obvious downsides—the noise, cost of living, the pollution, the unending crowds—I’ve never wanted to leave the city I was born in: Vancouver, BC. Many New Yorkers have an even stronger version of this sentiment. But it took author N.K. Jemisin to express the feeling I never could properly quantify. Her…
The really cool folks at The Imaginaries Podcast interviewed me about my latest novel, and we had an amazing conversation about artificial intelligence and what it means to be human. The hosts, Kend and Tony, are super fun and smart people, and we had a great conversation together. They really know their science fiction, and they've had some incredible guests over the years, so I'm…
Happy New Year! Here's another exciting VIDEO episode of Knotty Geeks! In this episode, we explore the INSIDE of a Starbucks, as we discuss Microsoft's peculiar position with Windows 10. Starting with a story of how Windows 10 ruined one woman's Christmas, we go back to look at why Microsoft made such drastic changes with Windows 8 in the first place, and how that affected the…
I just finished reading Agency , and my head is still spinning. That’s a good thing. Agency is the latest book by author William Gibson, released on January 21, 2020. It’s a science fiction novel set in multiple time periods that are in communication with each other, and features two main protagonists: one human and one artificial intelligence. The book follows up the events of Gibson’s last…
I'm excited to announce that my latest novel, Silicon Minds of Mars , is now available for purchase, for a limited-time only price of $2.99, from these fine bookstores: Amazon Books Kobo Books Barnes and Noble Booksellers Apple Books Silicon Minds of Mars is a science-fiction thriller set on the Red Planet in the year 2072. Mild-mannered writer Mike Lee is whisked away on a spaceship to…
You might notice a neat little lock icon in the upper left of the URL bar, courtesy of Let's Encrypt, a non-profit organization that hands out encryption certificates for websites. You just have to install open-source software on the server, which proves you are the owner of a website, and you can automatically get a certificate. It was super quick and easy to set up. Here's the guide I…
If you look to the left of this post, you'll see a change in the signup form for my newsletter. I've switched email service providers, so the newsletter will look slightly different. I've also decided to spice things up in the newsletter itself, so from now on everyone who subscribes gets a free copy of Starfarer, my short story about a very unique first contact. In addition,…
I just got back from an adventure on the high seas. My two favorite aunts found a space-themed cruise sailing from Southampton to New York on the Queen Mary 2, and invited my wife and I to join them. The ship was magnificent. Commissioned in 2003, the QM2 is the last ocean liner remaining in service. With a sleek design evocative of the old White Star liners, the ship plowed through the Atlantic…
One of the most common questions new authors have is this: how they can be certain that their story is finished? By finished, I mean it needs no more major revisions, just a final scan for typos and grammatical errors. This is one of the hardest questions to answer, and it doesn’t get much easier with experience. It has been said that “art is never finished, only abandoned,” and this is true to…
Last week, I had the honor of presenting the final few chapters of Silicon Minds of Mars to my writing group, the Simon Fraser University Science Fiction Union (affectionately known as SFU^2). I always get a bit anxious at the end of any story, because that’s when the chickens come home to roost: if the ending doesn’t work, the whole story probably doesn’t. But fortunately, everyone seemed…
My upcoming novel takes place on Mars in 2072, a time and place where general artificial intelligences have been recognized as independent beings worthy of the same protection as humans. The way this works is that a new AI (one, say, that was developed by a corporation for a specific purpose) needs to take the “Turing-Mayer” sentience test. If they pass, they are allowed the freedom to choose…
Like many people, I’ve always had a romantic attachment to Mars. As a young boy watching Cosmos, I felt the same feelings of awe and wonder that Carl Sagan described when he first read the John Carter books by Edgar Rice Burroughs. Even though Mars was revealed to be a cold, barren wasteland by Viking and subsequent landers, it still felt like a magical world, a place that could one day be called…
You eagle-eyed observers out there will have noticed that I haven’t been posting as much on my blog lately. To some degree this is the nature of blogs themselves— unless they are an actual business, there are going to be natural gaps when the author’s interest waxes and wanes. Many people think that the age of blogs is over. If nobody cares about anything except Twitter and Instagram anyway,…
I've finally moved the server for jeremyreimer.com to a more modern AWS instance. The original was set up in 2013 and ran on a t1.micro, which is no longer supported. The new instance is a t3.nano, which has even less memory than the micro instances but is faster than the old t1. Why use such a small server? It's not for the cost savings. Instead, it's a good way to test my newLISP…