What happens when a traditional board game company decides to break into electronic gaming? Well, if it were a UK gaming company in 1978, the result would be a Waddingtons 2001 The Game Machine that you can see in the video from [Re:Enthused] below. The “deluxe console model” had four complete games: a shooting gallery, […]
If you follow electronics history, few names were as ubiquitous as RCA, the Radio Corporation of America. Yet in modern times, the company is virtually forgotten for making large computers. [Computer History Archive Project] has a rare film from the 1970s (embedded below) explaining how RCA planned to become the number two supplier of business computers, […]
DDR3 seemed plenty fast when it first showed up 19 years ago. Who could say no to 6400 Mb/s transfer speeds? Of course compared to the modern DDR5 that’s glacially slow, but given that RAM is worth its weight in gold these days– with even DDR4 spiking in price– some people, like [Gheeotine], are asking […]
It is a movie staple to see an overworked air traffic controller sweating over a radar display. Depending on the movie, they might realize they’ve picked the wrong week to stop some bad habit. But how does the system really work? [J. B. Crawford] has a meticulously detailed post about the origins of the computerized […]
We are always amused that we can run emulations or virtual copies of yesterday’s computers on our modern computers. In fact, there is so much power at your command now that you can run, say, a DOS emulator on a Windows virtual machine under Linux, even though the resulting DOS prompt would probably still perform […]
Beauty truly is in the eye of the beholder. (Credit: MattKC, YouTube) What’s it like to use a 2002-era Apple eMac all-in-one in 2025? That’s what [MattKC] asked himself after obtaining one of these systems from a seller who ominously mentioned that it had been ‘left outside for years’. The Apple iMac is a bit […]
A lot of retrocomputer enthusiasts have a favourite system, to the point of keeping up 40 year old flame wars over which system was “best”. In spite of the serious, boring nature of the PC/AT and its descendants, those early IBMs have a certain style that Compaq and the Clones never quite matched. Somehow, we […]
Sony’s original Playstation wasn’t huge, and they did shrink it for re-release later as the PSOne, but even that wasn’t small enough for [Secret Hobbyist]. You may have seen the teaser video a while back where his palm-size Playstation went viral, but now he’s begun a series of videos on how he redesigned the vintage […]
If you search the Internet for “Clone Wars,” you’ll get a lot of Star Wars-related pages. But the original Clone Wars took place a long time ago in a galaxy much nearer to ours, and it has a lot to do with the computer you are probably using right now to read this. (Well, unless […]
[The 8-Bit Guy] tells us how 8-bit Atari computers work. The first Atari came out in 1977, it was originally called the Atari Video Computer System. It was followed two years later, in 1979, by the Atari 400 and Atari 800. The Atari 800 had a music synthesizer, bit-mapped graphics, and sprites which compared favorably […]