Commodore
Retro Reviews: Commodore 64 accessories!
uCassette + tapDancer Loading tape games on a C64 can be a hassle. Assuming you can find a working datasette for the system, the chances are that a lot of tapes have degraded to the [more…]
Month: November 2018
Fiction
Android Dreams: The Sliced Salami Society Investigates the Murderer on Channel 4
Vera did as he had done for so many Tuesday nights before: she made her cup of tea, got her little biscuits from the tin above the sink, and headed for her living room, sitting [more…]
Education
Pong: or, how I learned to love getting paddled
In the 1960s, television was something that was a passive occupation, you turn it on an it entertained you. The possibility that you might be able to create or manage what you saw on the [more…]
History
The Pro Shop: CRTs in Medicine
Back in the 1950s, when your surgeon wasn’t concentrating on his golf swing, he was probably concentrating on his cardioscope – or at least you hoped he was! The cardioscope was essentially a specialised oscilloscope [more…]
Television
The Business of Television
The ability to broadcast moving images over-the-air was a miracle, but the question then became: “Who was going to pay for it?” In the United Kingdom, the answer was the television set owners. Since 1904 [more…]
History
Electrons in Motion: CRTs in Aircraft
Cathode-ray tubes weren’t just useful for radar – all sorts of aircraft indicators were displayed with them. For example, CRTs were used in the displays of radio detection finders, which used radio “beacons” broadcasting from [more…]
History
RADAR: Electronics at War
RADAR: RAdio Detection / Direction And Ranging Radar uses radio waves to determine the range, angle or velocity of objects. It can be used to detect almost anything! Airborne surprises can be devastating. As the [more…]
History
Hamateur Hour: Slow Scan Television
Given the right conditions, amateur radio operators can talk to anyone, anywhere in the world. But what about television? Could that be sent around the world too? Analog television transmitted a lot of information, and [more…]
Apple II
Logo Adventure for Apple Logo
Don Hopkins recently posted his clever Logo Adventure for C64 Terrapin Logo, a skeleton of an adventure game that uses Logo’s own parser as the parser for the game, by defining commands as procedures and using [more…]
Computers
Emulating the Tube: Completing the Retro Experience
For some nostalgics it’s not merely enough to emulate the console or computer – they want to emulate the CRT they used it on too! The nature of cathode-ray tube displays distinctly affected how images [more…]