💾 Coding, Machines and Silicon Dreams

How Turkish Magazines Brought the Microcomputing Revolution to Life

Ever wondered how computers entered everyday life in Türkiye — long before the internet, app stores, and YouTube tutorials?

My upcoming book, Coding, Machines and Silicon Dreams, dives into a forgotten world of floppy disks, dot matrix fonts, and homemade code.

It tells the story of how Turkish computing magazines in the 1980s and 90s helped everyday people make sense of the microcomputing revolution.

Think: pirate software reviews, BASIC programming walkthroughs, modem jokes, and letters from teenage coders writing from Ankara to Adana.

These magazines weren’t just tech guides—they were blueprints for an emerging digital culture, shaped by a shock liberalization program, military repression, and boundless DIY spirit.

Using digital humanities tools and oral histories, this book explores how printed and digital zines (or diskmags, if you’re cool) helped build computing communities from scratch.

📚 Coming soon in 2027.
🔍 Keywords: computer magazines, Science and Technology Studies (STS), Türkiye.

👉 If you’re into media history, creative tech cultures, or vintage computing—this one’s for you.

🕹️ “Attention Users, Please Refrain from Modifying Your Ataris”

How Turkish Gamers Outsmarted One of the World’s First Region Locks

Before digital rights management, app store firewalls, and locked-down consoles — there was the META Atari.

This chapter dives into a strange and fascinating episode from 1980s Türkiye, where a local electronics company began assembling Atari 2600 consoles under license – only to sneak in one of the earliest known hardware-based region locks in gaming history. Turkish users were restricted to just 13 “approved” games. But, as it turns out, users had other plans.

Drawing from vintage ads, technical schematics, and oral histories, Arda Erdikmen and I explore how Türkiye’s post-coup economy and liberalization reforms collided with global tech flows – and how that friction sparked a flurry of hardware hacks and DIY modifications. What was meant to control content instead gave birth to one of the first creative computing stories in the region.

This is a tale of locked consoles, unauthorized cartridges, and the ingenuity of everyday users pushing back—screwdriver in hand.

📖 Featured in an upcoming edited volume “Silicon Dawn: Creative Computing in Europe: 1970-2000” published by Amsterdam University Press.
🔍 Keywords: Video Game Consoles, Atari 2600, Region-Locking, Türkiye, Hardware Modification