The 1970s Personal Computer Company You Never Heard Of

An OSI C1P: Ohio Scientific, Inc., Challenger 1-Port (via Vintagecomputer.net )

I lived through the personal computer revolution of the 1970s and early 1980s as a single-digita and double-digit youth. I used a Commodore PET and Radio Shack TRS-80 (models 1 and 3) in junior high, spent way too much time at a local computer store using their Apple IIs and other computers, and owned my very own OSI C1P (Ohio Scientific Corp.) in 1980.

I’ve also read dozens of books about personal computer history, some written contemporaneously, and some decades later. When Ben Zotto contacted me last year about a manuscript for a book about Sphere Computers, a Utah-based PC pioneer, my reaction was, “WHAT? WHO? WHEN? WHAT? UTAH?” Then I settled down and edited his book, now titled Go Computer Now! after the cheery headline on one of the many ads Sphere flooded magazines with during their

Books

Dig into iOS 26 and iPadOS 26 with My New (Beta) Book!

Every year, Take Control Books releases two ebooks early about Apple’s upcoming operating systems, and year is no different!* Joe Kissell’s Take Control of Tahoe (macOS 26) and my Take Control of iOS 26 and iPadOS 26 have just shipped! Even though those operating systems are still in beta testing, we know many readers have installed the public betas while others want to know more about what to expect.

Both books are 1.0 versions; at no cost, all buyers get the 1.1 release on the “day and date”—the day when Apple ships the production versions of iOS 26, iPadOS 26, and macOS 26 Tahoe in September. (That date isn’t yet known.) You also receive free all future updates to this title, too.

Each book is $9.99, but you can purchase the two together for $14.99—25% off! (Use that link or code

Books

New Week, New Work: Six Colors, Take Control

This week I made two big changes in my career that I’m happy to share.

First, I’ve taken the title of Executive Editor at Take Control Books, a publisher I’ve worked with from their launch in 2003 by Adam and Tonya Engst and since 2017 for Joe Kissell and Morgen Jahnke. Over that time, I’ve written so many titles I can’t remember them all, partly because of updates, mergers, and splits of books into new works.

As executive editor, I will take on more editorial responsibility, particularly with editing books, but also in updating titles where the author has opted to move on to other projects, such as iOS 18 and iPadOS 18, a series updated each new operating system revision for many years by Josh Centers. To help Take Control Books expand, I’ll be consulting with Joe on how to find new readers

Bookselling

$5 Take Control Sale to Celebrate 20th Anniversary

To celebrate its 20th anniversary, Take Control Books is discounting all titles it offers to just $5! This includes eleven books by yours truly! No coupon is needed. The sale ends on 26 October 2023 at the end of the day Central Time. What’s that again? This:

$5 off all Take Control Books!

My current eight actively updated books. Four were updated in September and October. The rest will receive updates in the next few weeks and months.

Back in 2003, Tonya Engst of TidBITS asked if I wanted to be part of an experiment in ebook publishing. Several computer book authors and I had been talking about whether someone could launch an author-oriented publishing company that split profits fairly due to a far lower overhead for ebooks. Tonya and her husband, Adam, decided around that time to take the plunge—I can’t recall if inspired by that

The Proof Is in the Printing

I’m currently in Lewiston, Maine, with Marcin Wichary, the author and designer of Shift Happens. I’ve been his editor and project manager. Having worked with Marcin for years on the text, we shifted into crowdfunding (raising over $750,000) and now into production. After we talked to many printers over a couple of years and received lots of bids, Marcin opted to go with Penmor Lithographics, a company in the United States we knew we could go “on press” with—we could actually travel to them and view the pages as they came off a press.

If he had selected a printer outside the U.S., it might have been more expensive or impossible to do a “press check” like this. We would have entirely relied on a printer rep managing our interests to ensure everything went as desired during the printing process. (We were also concerned about

History

A Growth Industry: Typewriter Stores

Three typewriters stores within an hour’s drive of each other

In the small city of Bremerton, Washington (pop. 44,000), a ferry ride away from Seattle, the shock is not that a typewriter repair and retail store has kept its doors open. Rather, it’s that there are two in the same city—and that another just opened about an hour’s drive north, in the even tinier tourist town of Port Townsend (10,000).

The Olympic Peninsula is a hotbed of typewriter stores—probably among the densest number in the world—for no particular reason except the preservation of history and the personal interest of the folks running them. We’re not in a typewriter boom, unlike the resurgence of vinyl LPs or craft letterpress printing. However, it’s pretty wonderful to find that something that seems like a relic of the past has found a new audience

Security

Apple’s Weak Passcode Protection for Apple ID

I’ve often written the following sentiment: “The Apple ID is the pivot point around which Apple’s services and systems rotate.” Apple created a single, unified ID—with an unfortunate amount of legacy baggage from previous systems—to identify you uniquely across your devices and services, provide authentication, and manage delivery of data, including via iCloud.

Apple offers layers of protection for your ID. At one point, you could protect it with a password. For several years, however, Apple has more or less required all accounts to use two-factor authentication (2FA), where a code is sent to a device registered to the same Apple ID account or a phone number verified for that account to ensure that a login is really you. In January, Apple upgraded Apple ID security to allow the use of hardware security keys, another significant improvement. (You can read about how to use these keys

Technology

Apple’s Incremental Approach: 10 Years Later

For some reason, a number of people read this blog entry of mine from September 2013 in the last few weeks: “Explaining Apple's Incremental Approach.” My thesis was that general observers of Apple tended at that time to expect Apple would have something revolutionary at least with each annual announcements. Disappointment would follow in media coverage, on social media, and in blog posts and podcasts when they didn’t.

But I argued that Apple’s trick is continuous incremental improvement. The revolutions are far apart. I think I nailed it over the last decade. What has Apple’s single memorable launch been? The M-series Apple silicon chips that forced an industry and reluctant reviewers to consider that Apple could achieve super-fast performance with chips they designed. You could argue the Apple Watch was revolutionary, but its first iteration wasn’t that exciting, unlike the original iPhone. The Watch has been

Technology

Find Me on Mastodon

Twitter is in the midst of a meltdown and I can’t support remaining on the site any further. I’ve migrated to Mastodon, a micro-blogging service with a very different nature that works far better in many ways. It’s still evolving. Find me at @glennf@twit.social.

Cartooning

World Premiere of My Exhibition Video on Newspaper Comics

Please enjoy the world premiere of my video “From Artist’s Board to Newspaper Page: How Comics Were Made in the Age of Metal Printing, 1910s–80s,” made for the Billy Ireland Cartoon Museum & Library at the Ohio State University. I produced this video to explain the many, complicated steps between an artist drawing a strip through syndicate production of the materials sent to newspapers and newspapers’ adding those into their own layouts and printing newspapers. It’s elaborate, but shown here in a crisp six minutes using public-domain archival footage and images and video from my own collection.

I was asked to make this video by curators Ann Lennon and Caitlin McGurk for an incredible exhibition opening today, “Man Saves Comics! Bill Blackbeard's Treasure of 20th Century Newspapers,” which opened today! This is the first time I’ve had anything included in a museum exhibition, much less been

Books

The Latest Take Control Book Updates

Over this sultry summer, I updated eight Take Control books, including new editions of four of them. Starting with Take Control of Zoom, which I discussed in this blog a few months ago. I then spent months testing beta versions of Apple’s new iOS 16, iPadOS 16, and macOS 13 Ventura operating systems. (iOS 16 shipped last Monday; the rest are coming soon, but available in public betas.)

The seven other titles now ready for action are:

Take Control of iOS & iPadOS Privacy and Security: With this new edition, learn about passkeys, Apple’s version of an industry-standard, simple-but-powerful secure website login credential; eSIMs, programmable cellular modules that let you change or supplement service without swapping a card; better tracking protection with Limit IP Address Tracking; Lockdown Mode, for protection against targeted attacks; Safety Check, to block misuse of data by people you know; and hundreds of other

Technology

Zoom Book Updated to Third Edition

I started writing Take Control of Zoom in spring 2020 at a time when hundreds of millions of people suddenly found themselves requiring videoconferencing, and Zoom offered the best free or cheap deal that wasn’t tied up with corporate subscriptions. The book evolved as Zoom did: the company improving its security, enhanced privacy, and added much asked-for features—and some that nobody ever would have considered.

Last week, we released the third edition of Take Control of Zoom, now overhauled for changes large and small:

Hybrid work: With the return of many people part-time and full-time to offices, I’ve reworked the book with a new section on hybrid work and updated it throughout to deal with situations in which you might be in the same space as other people working—some of them even on the same Zoom call with you!
Livestreaming: I added an entire chapter on