An Exploration of Lotus Agenda 

Kevin Lipe, in a follow-up post to his Pocket 8086 series here on 512:

I’d been Agenda-curious for a long time, but never tried to actually use it for real. I booted it up on my Pocket 8086, watched cards crawl into place, watched queries resolve themselves into slices of sense, and realized with annoying clarity: none of the modern “task management” apps I’ve used—not Todoist, not OmniFocus, Amazing Marvin, Remember the Milk, not Microsoft To Do—could do any of this. Not really. Agenda wasn’t “a to-do list.” It was a cognitive environment, a place where items could belong to more than one thing at once, where priorities didn’t march in a line but emerged from the way pieces related to one another.

Continue reading →

Project 8086 Part II: Real Mode Productivity; or, 8,086 Reasons to Get a Newer Computer

MS-DOS Correspondent Kevin Lipe reporting again from the trailing edge of computing. When I was last with you, we discussed the Pocket 8086. If you don’t remember what the Pocket 8086 is, or who I am, or what any of this has to do with everyone’s favorite Apple blog, I’d refer you to part one of that series, as it will sort of answer maybe two of those questions.

I was pretty ambivalent about whether the Pocket 8086 was good at what it was trying to do, because I didn’t really think there was much of a goal for the project other than “hey this is cool.” But as someone who always loves a good deep dive into old software tools to see what I can learn about how to work with new ones, I have to admit that I felt a strong urge to see if I could actually find some thing to use it for.

Continue reading →

A Brief Overview of the Pocket 8086; or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Windows 3.0 in Real Mode

Editor’s Note: This is a guest post written by my buddy Kevin, and is the first in a series covering a weird and wonderful corner of retrocomputing.


I’m Kevin Lipe, 512 Pixels’ somewhat-official MS-DOS correspondent. Long time reader; second-time guest post.

I’ve only ever written for this site about software that’s as old as I am, and this series will be no exception.

Stephen and I have been friends for a very long time (ask him about buying forkbombr.net from me for two slices of pizza in 2008), and for most of that time, I’ve been obsessed with retrocomputing in all its various forms and fashions.

Continue reading →