It’s been 30 years since Windows 95 launched. [Ms-Dos5] and [Commodore Z] are celebrating with an epic exhibit at VCF East 2025. They had no fewer than nine computers — all period-correct machines running versions of Windows 95. The pictures don’t do it justice, so if you are near Wall, NJ, on Sunday, April 5, […]
[Ben Eater]’s breadboard 6502 computer is no stranger to these parts, so it was a bit of a surprise that when [Mark] wrote in asking us if we’d covered [Ben]’s getting MS BASIC running on the breadboard, that our answer was “no”. Well, that changes today! This is a three-part video series, documenting how [Ben […]
Usually when we talk about retrocomputing, we want to look at — and in — some old hardware. But [Z→Z] has a different approach: dissecting MacPaint, the Apple drawing program from the 1980s. While the program looks antiquated by today’s standards, it was pretty hot stuff back in the day. Things we take for granted […]
We remember when the transputer first appeared. Everyone “knew” that it was going to take over everything. Of course, it didn’t. But [Oscar Toledo G.] gives us a taste of what life could have been like with a JavaScript emulator for the transputer, you can try in your browser. If you don’t recall, the transputer […]
If you’re on the US East Coast, you should head on over to Wall, NJ and check out the Vintage Computer Festival East. After all, [Brian Kernighan] is going to be there. Yes, that [Brian Kernighan]. Events are actually well underway, and you’ve already missed the first few TRS-80 Color Computer programming workshops, but rest […]
The console wars of the early 1990s had several players, but the battle that mattered was between Nintendo’s SNES and Sega’s Genesis, or Megadrive if you are European. They are both famous for their games, but in terms of software they can only run what’s on a cartridge. The Genesis has a Motorola 68000 on […]
We’re used to there being an array of high-end microprocessor architectures, and it’s likely that many of us will have sat in front of machines running x86, ARM, or even PowerPC processors. There are other players past and present you may be familiar with, for example SPARC, RISC-V, or MIPS. Back in the 1990s there […]
When you think about the dawn of modern computers, you often think about the work done in the UK and the US. But Australia had an early computer scene, too, and [State of Electronics] has done a series of videos about the history of computers down under. The latest episode talks about SILLIAC, a computer […]
We are always fascinated by bubble memory. In the late 1970s, this was the “Next Big Thing” that, as you may have guessed, was, in fact, not the next big thing at all. But there were a number of products that used it as non-volatile memory at a time when the alternative was tape or […]
Anyone will tell you that as hard as it is to create a working system, the real trick is making two systems talk to each other, especially if you created only one or none of them. That’s why tools that let you listen in on two systems talking are especially valuable. If you were a […]