Digitizing "The Famous Computer Cafe" radio show

TLDR: Help digitize 54 episodes of The Famous Computer Cafe, a 1980s radio show about computers that featured many notable interviews.

The project is fully funded (!) and I am keeping it open for any additional costs. See the update below.

In 2020 I learned about the Famous Computer Cafe. I got a little obsessed with it. The Famous Computer Cafe was not a restaurant, but a radio program that was broadcast from 1983 through early 1986. The program aired on several radio stations in southern and central California. It included computer news, product reviews, and interviews.

The program was created by three people who were the on-air voices and did all the work to create the program: finding advertisers, buying air time, doing research and interviews. In 2020 I interviewed all three and published those interviews on the Antic podcast.

To me, the most exciting thing about the show is the interviews. The list of people that the show interviewed is a who's-who of tech luminaries of the early 1980s. Computer people, musicians, publishers, philosophers, journalists... IBM’s Philip Estridge, Microsoft’s Bill Gates, Atari’s Jack Tramiel, MacPaint’s Bill Atkinson, Infocom’s Joel Berez, Star Trek’s Gene Roddenberry, musician Herbie Hancock, EA’s Trip Hawkins, Douglas Adams, Stewart Brand, Timothy Leary, Ray Bradbury, Robert Moog, Donny Osmond. The list goes on. By mid-1985, the show had run more than 300 interviews.

But all the episodes (except one) were lost years ago. We thought they were gone forever.

Until now — thanks to extraordinary luck, I have purchased 35 reel-to-reel tapes that should contain roughly 54 episodes.

Buying the tapes was a gamble. There was no guarantee that they weren’t blanked or recorded over. But, it appears that the recordings survived! I have hired a trusted, professional digitizer to digitize them (I can handle 7.5” reels myself but don’t have the equipment for these hefty 10.5” reels.)

According to the labels, these tapes should have interviews with Bill Gates, Timothy Leary, Douglas Adams, Bill Atkinson (creator of MacPaint), Steven Levy (journalist), Jack Tramiel (Atari), John Reese (Tronix), Joel Berez (Infocom), and many more. They aired Oct 1994 through July 1985. Here's the inventory of the tapes I bought.

I am raising money to pay for these tapes and for them to be professionally digitized. I paid more than $1,000 for 35 reels and now need to pay for the digitizing. I just got word that there may be a few more tapes available, which will add to the expenses. (The fundraising goal covers purchase of the tapes, shipping, and digitization. Only if funding exceeds that will I get paid for my time managing this project.)

I am asking the retrocomputing/computer history community to share these expenses to preserve an amazing part of computing history that was thought to be lost forever. Once digitized, the recordings will go online for free at Internet Archive, where they will be machine-transcribed and full-text searchable.

You can listen to the first two episodes that we’ve digitized right now. They probably have’t been heard since they were first broadcast. The December 7 1984 episode includes an interview with Steve Roberts, who was riding around the United States in a teched-out, computerized recumbent bicycle. The January 9 1985 episode includes an interview with Barbara Elman, publisher of Word Processing News.

In addition to the interviews, the advertisements are charming, and the computer news segments are a perfect time capsule of the excitement of the industry.

These found recordings are a fraction of Famous Computer Cafe episodes. Maybe this will prime the pump so more recordings will turn up. Or maybe this is a one-time jackpot.

Here's my 2020 podcast episode about Famous Computer Cafe. Here's the single not-lost episode is from Jan 2 1986, with an interview with Rich Gold, creator of Little Computer People.

Risks and challenges: I have a very long history of preserving computer history through interviews, digitization, and archiving. But there are risks and potential challenges with this project. The first couple of tapes that we’ve tested look and sound great! Still, this project is a bit of a gamble. Some of the tapes could be blank or unplayable. There are no guarantees.

I have the enthusiastic consent of the creators of the show for this project.

As a treat for those who read this far, here’s the first tape being digitized, and the moment we learned that I hadn’t spent a grand on blank media.