Category: Retrocomputing

When [Kasyan] was six years old, he saw a RADUGA computer, a Russian unit from the 1990s, and it sparked his imagination. He has one now that is a little beat up, but we feel like he sees it through his six-year-old eyes as a shiny new computer. The computer, which you can see in […]
You often hear that Bill Gates once proclaimed, “640 kB is enough for anyone,” but, apparently, that’s a myth — he never said it. On the other hand, early PCs did have that limit, and, at first, that limit was mostly theoretical. After all, earlier computers often topped out at 64 kB or less, or […]
We know [Happy Little Diodes] frequently works with logic analyzer projects. His recent wireless logic analyzer for the ZX Spectrum is one of the oddest ones we’ve seen in a while. The heart of the system is an RP2040, and there are two boards. One board interfaces with the computer, and another hosts the controller. […]
If the Otis King slide rule in [Chris Staecker’s] latest video looks a bit familiar, you might be getting up there in age, or you might remember seeing us talk about one in our collection. Actually, we have two floating around one of the Hackaday bunkers, and they are quite the conversation piece. You can […]
Remember Video Volley? No? We don’t either. It looks like it was a very early video game console that could play tennis, hockey, or handball. In this video, [James] tears one apart. If you are like us, we are guessing there will be little more than one of those General Instrument video game chips inside. […]
The Thinkpad line of laptops, originally from IBM, and then from Lenovo, have long been the choice of many in our community. They offer a level of robustness and reliability missing in many cheaper machines. You may not be surprised to find that this article is being written on one. With such a following, it’s […]
In the world of (expensive) lab test equipment the GPIB (general purpose interface bus) connection is hard to avoid if you want any kind of automation, but nobody likes wrangling with the bulky cables and compatibility issues when they can just use Ethernet instead. Here [Chris]’s Ethernet-GPIB adapter provides an easy solution, with both Power […]
Recently [Colin Leroy-Mira] found himself slipping into a bit of a rabbit hole while investigating why only under Apple II MAME emulation there was a lot of flickering when using the (emulated) Apple II MouseCard. This issue could not be reproduced on real (PAL or NTSC) hardware. The answer all comes down to how the […]
The 1970s saw a veritable goldrush to corner the home computer market, with Tandy’s Z80-powered TRS-80 probably one of the most (in)famous entries. Designed from the ground up to be as cheap as possible, the original (Model I) TRS-80 cut all corners management could get away with. The story of the TRS-80 Model I is […]
The iMac G3 is an absolute icon of industrial design, as (or perhaps more) era-defining than the Mac Classic before it. In the modern day, if your old iMac even boots, well, you can’t do much with it. [Rick Norcross] got a hold of a dead (hopefully irreparable) specimen, and stuffed a modern PC inside […]