Category: computer history

Al and I were talking about the IBM 9020 FAA Air Traffic Control computer system on the podcast. It’s a strange machine, made up of a bunch of IBM System 360 mainframes connected together to a common memory unit, with all sorts of custom peripherals to support keeping track of airplanes in the sky. Absolutely […]
We noted that Excel turned 40 this year. That makes it seem old, and today, if you say “spreadsheet,” there’s a good chance you are talking about an Excel spreadsheet, and if not, at least a program that can read and produce Excel-compatible sheets. But we remember a time when there was no Excel. But […]
We’re always a wee bit suspicious about articles that announce some sort of “World’s first” accomplishment. With a couple of hundred thousand years of history, most of which wasn’t recorded, over which something like 117 billion humans have lived, any claims of primacy have to be taken with a grain of salt. So when the […]
We loved keygens back in the day. Our lawyers advise us to clarify that it’s because of the demo-scene style music embedded in them, not because we used them for piracy. [Patch] must feel the same way, as he has a lovely historical retrospective out on “The Internet’s Most Illegal Music” (embedded below). After defining […]
If you’re into Macs, you’ll always remember your first. Maybe it was the revolutionary classic of 1984 fame, perhaps it was the adorable G3 iMac in 1998, or even a shiny OS X machine in the 21st century. Whichever it is, you’ll find it emulated in [Marcin Wichary]’s essay “Frame of preference: A history of […]
This week marks the twenty-five year anniversary of the demise of Commodore International. This weekend, pour one out for our lost homies. Commodore began life as a corporate entity in 1954 headed by Jack Tramiel. Tramiel, a Holocaust survivor, moved to New York after the war where he became a taxi driver. This job led […]