In the early 1970s, computers were expensive! Like, really expensive, man! So if you were a young Nolan Bushnell entranced by Spacewar and you wanted to bring it to the masses, how could you do [more…]
Call it the ‘butterfly debugger’. People at KansasFest 2018 were excited by the development possibilities of microM8’s ‘rewind’ feature – the one that lets you cheat at games by going back before you made a [more…]
Released in 1977, the Apple II was one of the first personal computers marketed towards households rather than businesses. It was a complete computer – it had a keyboard for data entry and the ability [more…]
Richard Altwasser is a British engineer responsible for the hardware design of the ZX Spectrum. After graduating from Trinity College, Cambridge with an engineering degree in 1978, he was hired by Sinclair Research in 1980. [more…]
April 1982 saw the launch of Sinclair Research’s most successful micro-computer, the ZX Spectrum. The Spectrum was not the first Sinclair computer to make it big, it was however the the first to go massive. In [more…]
You can duke it out with a friend, but be careful not to fall into the star in this exclusive Spacewar clone written in Apple Logo. Seymour Papert’s Logo programming language is perfect for a [more…]
Paul Monopoli takes a look back at the very first video game, and its influence on what would become one of the world’s most popular pasttimes. In 1961 the Massachusetts Institute of Technology was to [more…]
Telephone Television The “Space Phone” built into some Zenith System 3 TVs from the 1970s to the 1990s unfortunately didn’t let you call space, but it did let grandma call her grandkids without having to [more…]
One of the original televisions offered for sale at the start of UK television service in 1936, the Marconi model 702 had such a long cathode-ray tube that it needed to be stood on end, [more…]
Now that the world had a functional all-electronic television system and a way to broadcast a signal to receivers, the question then became: who was going to pay for programming? In the United Kingdom the [more…]
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