When you mention Teletext or Videotex, you probably think of the 1970s British system, the well-known system in France, or the short-lived US attempt to launch the service. Before the Internet, there were all kinds of crazy ways to deliver customized information into people’s homes. Old-fashioned? Turns out Teletext is alive and well in many […]
If you learned to type anytime in the mid-part of the 20th century, you probably either had or wanted an IBM Selectric. These were workhorses and changed typing by moving from typebars to a replaceable wheel. They were expensive, though worth it since many of them still work (including mine). But few of us could […]
Sometimes, you build a thing because you need a thing. Sometimes, you do it just to see if you can. This project is in category two: [polymatt] didn’t need to create a floppy disk from scratch-– plenty of old disks still exist– but we’re glad he made the attempt because it makes for a fascinating […]
Having owned an Amiga microcomputer is apparently a little bit like having shaken hands with Shoggoth: no one can escape unchanged from the experience. Thirty-two years on, [Neil] at The Retro Collective remains haunted by the memories — specifically, the memory of BlitzBasic 2, an Amiga-specific programming language he never found the time to use. […]
We can’t throw stones. [Leaded Solder] picked up a SparcStation 1+ in 2018 and found it only produced illegal instruction errors. We’re sure he’s like us and meant to get back to it, and, instead, it sat on the bench, taking up space. You eventually have to move it, though, so seven years later, it […]
Like many early microcomputers, the Commodore VIC-20 did not come with an interna real-time clock built into the system. [David Hunter] has seen fit to rectify that with an add-on module as his entry to the 2025 One Hertz Challenge. [David]’s project was inspired by a product that Hayes produced in the 1980s, which provided […]
Although these days we get to tap into many sources of entropy to give a pretty good illusion of randomness, home computers back in the 1980s weren’t so lucky. Despite this, their random number generators were good enough for games and such, as demonstrated by the [CoCo Town] YouTube channel. The CoCo is the nickname […]
The MOS Technology 6502 is a microprocessor which casts a long shadow over the world of computing. Many of you will know it as the beating heart of so many famous 8-bit machines from the likes of Commodore, Apple, Acorn, and more, and it has retained enough success for a version to remain in production […]
The Apple II was made in great numbers, as was the Commodore 64. But the Mimic Spartan? It was a weird Apple II clone that you needed a Commodore 64 to use. [ARC Javmaster] has found one of these obscure machines and has set about bringing it back to life. Check out the video below. […]
Keeping retrocomputers going can be tricky enough, but when you’re talking retro laptops, the battery packs add an extra challenge. While one could simply live without the battery, that’s not going to give you the full retro experience. Replacement batteries are long out of stock, so what can one do? Well, one can check out […]