The other legacy of Dry Bones’ Yaakov Kirschen
I first encountered two of Yaakov Kirschen’s cartoon characters in the late 1980s when I was about 8 or 9 years old.
But I’m not talking about Mr. Shuldig, King Solomon, Doobie the dog or any of the other denizens of his famous “Dry Bones” cartoon. I was a gentile kid living on the other side of the world, and I had never seen nor heard of “Dry Bones” before.
No, the characters I’m talking about were “Mom” and “Uncle Murray” — two colorful, chatty Jewish archetypes who lived on floppy disks and brought my Atari ST computer to life.
Kirschen called them “biotoons.” And, just like his work in “Dry Bones,” Kirschen gave these computer characters unique, humorous personalities. A little off-kilter, they were capable of surprising interactions.
Released in late 1985, Kirschen’s “Murray and Me” and “Mom and Me” were among the very earliest entertainment software titles available for the new Atari ST computer. Newspapers took notice, with profiles appearing in the New York Times, The Times of London and others.
But “Mom” and “Murray” didn’t really catch on; probably fewer than 2,000 copies were sold. I didn’t know that at the time, of course; I was just a kid using a hand-me-down computer, who thought “Murray” and “Mom” were funny.
Decades later, in a fit of nostalgia, I decided I wanted to try those old programs again. But I couldn’t find them anywhere. Nobody had preserved them or even pirated them.
I’m a journalist by trade, and the investigative part of me kicked into gear. I spent years seeking out everything I could find about “Mom” and “Murray,” and the man who made them. I learned that these weren’t one-offs — Kirschen had worked on at least a dozen unique games, software and experiments throughout the 1980s.
Kirschen died on April 14 at the age of 87, and he is (rightly) being celebrated for “Dry Bones,” his great life’s work. But I would like to highlight his lesser-known legacy as a tech innovator who tried to bring humor and humanity to the cold silicon world of computers.
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Kirschen was introduced to computers and programming in the 1960s through his work at a firm in New York called Reinforced Learning, where he helped produce self-instructional training courses for big computer companies, such as IBM and NCR.
He and his family made aliyah to Israel in 1971. He hoped to get into computers but fell into cartoons instead. “Dry Bones” debuted in 1973 in the Jerusalem Post and was an immediate hit.
By the early 1980s, the microcomputer revolution had arrived in Israel. Computers were now small enough to use at home and Kirschen was an early adopter. He bought an imported Apple II clone to play around with, joined a computer club and began doing what most computer enthusiasts did at that time — trading pirated software.
But he had big ideas and big ambitions. He wanted to be the one creating the software.
His break came in late 1982, when Gesher Educational Affiliates hired him to help finish a series of unique Jewish educational games they were developing for the Apple II.
One notable game, “Nosh Kosh,” was like “Pac-Man” with a kosher spin. The main character, Chunky, wears a kippah, and instead of gobbling dots, he eats hamburgers, ice-cream and carrots. The challenge is to wait between eating the meat and the dairy, while also avoiding three non-kosher enemies.
More impressive was a historical simulation called “The Georgia Variations,” an interactive story where you play the role of a boy named Boris Goldberg who lives in Eastern Europe in the 1800s, and is forced to flee pogroms and persecution.
After the Gesher games debuted in late 1983, Kirschen founded his own software firm, LKP Ltd., and hired a small team of student programmers to help him realize his ideas. He wanted to coax life out of those cold silicon chips.
Kirschen liked to say that what people wanted from their computers was not artificial intelligence, but artificial personality and creativity.
In 1985, he succeeded in pitching a big project incorporating these ideas to tech titan Jack Tramiel, the CEO of Atari and a Holocaust survivor. Kirschen proposed to create an easy-to-use computer kiosk that would produce greeting cards on demand, customized “just for you.”
For Kirschen, it was crucial that the kiosk be friendly, so he and his student programmers created a large “artificial personality” named “Murray” to guide users through the process of creating a card. The “Murray” character was closely modeled on “Shuldig” from “Dry Bones.”
Ultimately, the greeting-card kiosk never made it to market. Instead, Kirschen spun off the artificial personalities, selling them as the standalone graphical chatbot programs “Mom and Me” and “Murray and Me” that I would enjoy years later.
I think Kirschen’s most ambitious idea was “artificial creativity.” Beginning in 1986, he and his team developed software for the Commodore Amiga that would generate new music by remixing elements of “musical DNA” from existing pop songs and classical pieces. This innovative music technology was ahead of its time — one academic noted later that it could blend different styles to produce “surprisingly musical results.”
It was rough around the edges, but it worked well enough that a producer friend used it in 1988 to generate background music for a BBC television documentary.
I’m happy to say that while most of Kirschen’s software was lost for many decades, today much of it has been rescued and preserved. You can even play it today in your web browser at the Internet Archive.
Kirschen was an artist of the highest caliber and an amazing thinker. His software may not have sold well, but he imbued each project with a unique sensibility that we can learn from today.
Computers can feel cold and mechanical. Software can seem soulless. But in Kirschen’s hands, they came alive, brimming with creativity, personality and humanity.
Josh Renaud is a developer and data journalist in Ferguson, Missouri, a husband, father of four, teacher and robotics coach.
