It was a startling realization: not all software has been preserved in an archive

[shukla7789]

When nostalgia hit me decades later, I began searching online for disk images of these old programs. But there weren’t any, except for one obscure German translation of “Murray” in monochrome.

I wrote about this predicament in 2014 on my blog, Break Into Chat, which put me in touch with Kevin Ng, who also had some copies. We each made digital images of our old floppy disks, preserving several original versions of “Mom” and “Murray.” But the monochrome version of “Mom” remains lost.

In the years since then, I have continued photo restoration service Kirschen’s other lost software, ranging from multiple Jewish and secular educational games for the Apple II computer, to his “artificial creativity” autonomous music composing technology for the Commodore Amiga and the IBM PC. Like “Mom” and “Murray,” none of it sold well, nor was it preserved despite good publicity.

With the help of three fellow retrocomputing enthusiasts in St. Louis, I recovered many of Kirschen’s games and programs from floppy disks Kirschen sent to me. Keith Hacke imaged most of the Apple II and the IBM PC disks, while I imaged the Commodore Amiga disks using hardware loaned by Dan Hevey and Scott Duensing.

I published the disk images with summarized histories on Break Into Chat. Then I uploaded them to the Internet Archive, making them playable in web browsers—but more importantly, preserving them for posterity.

I’m proud to have played a part in bringing this dead software back to life, and restoring a part of Kirschen’s legacy. I think this work is worth rediscovering today.


Mom and Me screenshot.
Take “Nosh Kosh” from 1983, for example. Essentially a Jewish take on Pac-Man, this is an action game designed to teach children about kashrut, Jewish dietary law. It was one of three games modeled on existing arcade classics made by Kirschen together with Gesher Educational Affiliates in Israel.

In “Nosh Kosh,” the player moves a kippah-wearing character named Chunky around the screen, trying to eat all the food items while avoiding three non-kosher bad guys: Peter Pig, Larry Lobster, and Freddy Frogslegs. There are three kinds of food—ice cream, meat, and carrots—but the player must wait a bit between eating the meat and ice cream, otherwise Chunky will yell “Oy!” and lose a life.


Nosh Kosh screenshot.
Or consider Kirschen and Gesher’s more ambitious “The Georgia Variations,” a choice-based narrative game about Jewish history, identity, and migration, introduced the same year as “Nosh Kosh.”

In this game, the player takes on the role of Boris Goldberg, a Jewish boy in Eastern Europe in the nineteenth century who must make decisions about school, work, marriage, and even what to do in the face of persecution and pogroms. The player’s decisions affect the storyline, but in the end, all the threads eventually lead to the same ending: Goldberg immigrates to Atlanta, Georgia.