“Do you have any Videosoft cartridges? Color Bar Generator?” As I spend a few minutes thumbing through a vendor’s large array of cartridges for sale, I hear a voice from behind. I’d have to put the matter aside and wait for another opportunity to address the issue.įast forward a few months later, and I’m standing on the showroom floor of Vintage Computer Festival 9.0. I tried to track down the man in the magazine, but all my leads ended up nowhere.
That discovery sent my mind spinning with questions, chiefly among them: Why are there so few African-Americans in the electronics industry? Honestly, I didn’t know any black engineers or scientists to ask. Frankly, it shocked me - not because a black man was there, but because I had never noticed his absence. It might seem crazy, but after reading through hundreds of issues of dozens of publications spanning four decades, it was the first time I had ever seen a photograph of a black professional in a computer magazine. There I discovered, among a story on a new computer business, a picture of a black man. One day, while rapidly flipping through a 1983 issue of Popular Computing, I encountered a photo that stopped me dead in my tracks. For days I sat on my office floor and thumbed through nearly every issue, finding page after page of priceless historical information. In late 2006, I received a large collection of vintage computer magazines from a friend.
