The PiStorm is nothing new; if you’re familiar with the retrocomputer scene, you’ve probably heard of it. By replacing the 68k processor in an old Amiga (or some models of Atari) the PiStorm accelerator gives a multiple order of magnitude speedup. It’s even a reversable mod, plugging in where the original CPU was. What’s not […]
If your travels take you near Mountain View, California, you can have the pleasure of visiting the Computer History Museum. You can see everything from a PDP-1 to an Altair 8800 to a modern PC there. If you aren’t travelling, the museum has launched a digital portal that expands your ability to enjoy its collection […]
If you are interested in historical big computers, you probably think of IBM, with maybe a little thought of Sperry Rand or, if you go smaller, HP, DEC, and companies like Data General. But you may not have heard of Tandem Computers unless you have dealt with systems where downtime was unacceptable. Printing bills or […]
Before the modern Internet existed, there were still plenty of ways of connecting with other computer users “online”, although many of them might seem completely foreign to those of us in the modern era. One of those systems was the Bulletin Board System, or BBS, which would have been a single computer, often in someone’s […]
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 […]