Back in the early 1900s, before calculators lived in our pockets, crunching numbers was painstaking work. Adding machines existed, but they weren’t exactly convenient nor cheap. Enter Vilin Vinson and his Maximal Multi-Divi, a massive multiplication and division table that turned math into an industrialized process. Originally published in Sweden in the 1910’s, and refined […]
The cartridge based game consoles of decades ago had a relatively simple modus operandi — they would run a program stored in a ROM in the cartridge, and on the screen would be the game for the enjoyment of the owner. This made them simple in hardware terms, but for hackers in the 2020s, somewhat […]
The Vectrex console from the early 1980s holds a special place in retrocomputing lore thanks to its vector display — uniquely for a home system, it painted its graphics to the screen by drawing them with an electron beam, instead of scanning across a raster as a TV screen would. It thus came with its […]
[Robert’s Retro] is one of those great YouTube channels that shows us the ins and outs of old and obscure computers. [Robert] likes going a step beyond the traditional teardown though, repairing and upgrading these old machines. His latest project involves giving the ZEOS Pocket PC a fully-functional serial port. If you’re unfamiliar with the […]
[Simon] wrote in to let us know about DingPong, his handheld portable Pong console. There’s a bit more to it than meets the eye, however. Consider for a moment that back in the 1970s playing Pong required a considerable amount of equipment, not least of which was dedicated electronics and a CRT monitor. What was […]
What a long, strange trip it’s been for NASA astronauts Suni Williams and Bruce Wilmore, who finally completed their eight-day jaunt to space after 289 days. The duo returned to Earth from the ISS on Tuesday along with two other returning astronauts in a picture-perfect splashdown, complete with a dolphin-welcoming committee. For the benefit of […]
Sound cards on PC-compatible computer systems have a rather involved and convoluted history, with not only a wide diversity of proprietary standards, but also a collection of sound cards that were never advertised as such. Case in point the 1985 Mindscape Music Board, which was an add-on ISA card that came bundled with [Glen Clancy]’s […]
Ever heard of VENIX? There were lots of variants of Unix back in the day, and VENIX was one for the DEC Professional 380, which was — sort of — a PDP 11. The 1982 machine normally ran the unfortunately (but perhaps aptly) named P/OS, but you could get VENIX, too. [OldVCR] wanted to put […]
After [Andy]’s discovery of an old ISA soundcard at his parents’ place that once was inside the family PC, the onset of a wave of nostalgia for those old-school sounds drove him off the deep end. This is how we get [Andy] building the fastest MS-DOS gaming system ever, with ISA slot and full hardware […]