FEBRUARY

wishing you an early MALentines

Hi friends-

we’ve got some exciting (we think) news!

First,

our NeXT Cube is now in working order!

In the later part of last year, NeXT enthusiast Rob Blessin reached out to us about our out-of-service NeXT Cube and offered to repair & refurbish it for us. Over the next couple of months, he was able to do just that - including upgrading it with a ZuluSCSI HDD emulator that gives it 6 2GB hard drives, enough space to run just about everything ever released for the system. He made a great little video about the project if you’d like to know more - watch it here on YouTube.

We are so grateful and excited to have it back in the lab - check it out if you’re able to come by!

Second,

we are launching a book club! Or a reading group? A thing where we all read and talk about the same book, one book per month!

For February, we’ll be reading A People’s History of Computing in the United States by Joy Lisi Rankin.

Instead of set meeting times, we’re gonna try out setting up multiple spaces for asynchronous discussion of each title. Read as much or as little as you’re able of each book, share your thoughts where& how works best for you, or just follow along. Every book will get a post on Mastodon, Instagram, and BlueSky - look for the hashtag #MALbookclub. We’ll also make a blog post on the new Other Networks website. Which brings us to…

THIRD, and last, but not least by any stretch:

The ongoing Other Networks project now has a website!

Other Networks is about digging up alternative or even forgotten networks so that we can reimagine the future of the internet as the future of networks.

In advance of Lori Emerson’s upcoming book (Other Networks: A Radical Technology Sourcebook, published by Anthology Editions), Lori and libi have launched an online space just for sharing the research, events, and recipes related to the project. We're so excited for you to join us!

As always, thanks for being a friend of the MAL!

libi, Lori & the MAL team

p.s. -

We also put together a year-in-review post! Check it out if you’re interested in some highlights from 2023.