Apple II
Ancient Tongues: Logo Spacewar!
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…]
Articles by paleotronic
Features
From the Computer Lab to the Arcade: The Journey of Space War
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…]
Consumer Electronics
The Crystal Ball: CRT ‘Innovation’ Flops
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…]
Consumer Electronics
The Entertainment Centre: CRT Television Through the Years
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…]
Consumer Electronics
Popped Culture: Television’s Journey to Strange New Worlds
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…]
Announcements
Issue #3 has been released: To the Moon!
The digital copy of issue 3 has been released, and the files are at the printer awaiting publishing of the hard-copy version. Our third issue looks at the Apollo lunar landings, and all other things [more…]
Education
Radio Waves: How the Wireless Made Television
So you’ve invented a video camera (or a scanner) and you’ve got something to reproduce the picture on, but how do you get the signal from one to the other? Well, you could do it [more…]
Consumer Electronics
Gadget Graveyard: Baird’s Mechanical Television
Going a different way: long before Philo T. Farnsworth and David Sarnoff duked it out in the United States, a Scotsman had already been driving his idea of the future of television far away in [more…]
Consumer Electronics
Sarnoff vs Farnsworth: The Battle for the Tube.
GLANCING AT HIS MORNING PAPER, DAVID SARNOFF QUICKLY REALISED HE HAD A BIG, BIG PROBLEM. Sarnoff, the president of the Radio Corporation of America (RCA) had spent his entire adult life rising up through the [more…]
Consumer Electronics
Paleotronic Issue 2 Web-Release: Celebrating the CRT
I GREW UP WITH THE TUBE FOR A NANNY. My day would start with Sesame Street, The Great Space Coaster, Reading Rainbow, Mister Rogers… and then later in the afternoon, trashy cartoons such as The [more…]