NOT EVERY 70s MIXTAPE PLAYED MUSIC.

When I was a kid, I had a Commodore VIC-20 and played Zork over our dial-up modem until my Dad got a bill from Compuserve. The early Internet was not cheap.

The VIC-20 had a tape machine to load and save programs onto audio cassette. There was a mall near my house with a "computer" store selling cassette games on consignment. They were sealed in Ziploc bags with a little hand typed ruled notecard and hung on a punchboard behind the counter. That punchboard was our 70s not-so-free suburban GitHub.

At the time, the audio cassette was a self-publishing miracle. We recorded ourselves, the dog, the TV, whatever. But somewhere, people were making computer programs... all by themselves.

In my head, I could picture a guy in a kitchen getting yelled at by his wife for stealing all the Ziplocs. He would stay up late and type out the game's description on a ruled notecard, careful to not wake up the kids. As he headed to work the next morning, he swung by the game shop and dropped of his latest consignment.

Now, each time I find something special on GitHub I think about the mall and those cassettes. Maybe I miss the goofy notecards. Or maybe the Ziplocs. But I'm feeling nostalgic and am using this site as a giant mixtape of random projects.