About Stone Tools

Stone Tools is a blog about the productivity software of the 8/16-bit (roughly) home computing era, written by a human, Christopher Drum. If you want to read about retro-gaming, please look elsewhere. If you want to read an examination of the Y2K bug in database software on a Commodore 64, you'll feel right at home.

This blog is free

All posts are free to everyone; there is no difference in content between reading the site, tipping, paying for a subscription, or reading the RSS feed. That said, paid subscriptions to support my research are gratefully, humbly accepted; there are fees associated with running the blog, after all. Maybe you'd like to reward someone who fights hard against the onslaught of AI-generated historical slop? Maybe that's worth a few dollars in these frustrating times?

I wish you'd cover...

I am always interested to know what readers would like to see covered. I follow a <software title> on the <hardware type> format.

Some titles are not full-featured enough to warrant entire posts (like VIC Mail for the Commodore VIC-20). I give special consideration to titles that try to do something a little different in their genres, were trailblazers, or otherwise have interesting stories attached to their histories.

You can send suggestions to christopherdrum @ stonetoolsblog.com

Who is Christopher Drum

I started in journalism, transitioned into graphic arts, and finally turned software engineer. I guess I can add "blogger" to the list now? I was also a topic of conversation on This Week in Retro, as "Someone You Should Know."

I've published a number of projects over the years that have delighted a small handful of very specific nerds, with a focus on the deconstruction and resurrection of historically significant software. Everything is free and open-source on GitHub.

Software of note

Other projects