Atari
Paleotronic’s 12 Years of Retro-Christmas Year Two: 1981
Our second instalment of our 12 Years of Retro-Christmas includes the ZX81, TI99/4A. BBC Micro and more… Click on each image for the full-sized copy or download the PDF Version
Computers
Atari
Paleotronic’s 12 Years of Retro-Christmas Year One: 1980
Over the next 23 days we’re going on a journey through 12 years of Christmas tech-gifts past. Our first year is 1980, when first generation consoles and home computers began to gain serious traction. Click [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…]
Computers
Arrgh Me Hearties: 1980s Pirates’ Letters of Marque
Yo Ho Ho and a Box of Copied Floppies! Here be a proverbial rogues’ gallery of clippings just in time for Hallowe’en from 1980s computer magazines such as Byte, Analog, Creative Computing, CoCo Mag, Computers [more…]
Computers
Point & Click: Welcome to Macintosh
A large, rectangular canvas bag sits in the middle of a huge oaken conference table, a gaggle of journalists assembled around it, while Steve Jobs talks Walkman. “It’s amazing”, Jobs says, “only about that thick.” [more…]
Computers
The Noise Channel: Hearing and Cheering the AY-3-8910
THE ARCADE games of the 1970s used dedicated circuits for sound – even the sound chip in the Atari 2600 only had a set of pre-defined sound effects and an oddly-tuned tone generator. Realising that [more…]
Computers
Colour Clash: The Engineering Miracle of the Sinclair ZX Spectrum
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…]
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…]
Atari
The Jackintosh: A Real GEM – Remembering the Atari ST
After Commodore Founder Jack Tramiel was forced out by his board, he decided, after a brief hiatus, to get revenge. Tramiel knew that a 16-bit computer was next on the horizon for Commodore, and he wanted [more…]
Computers
Back in the Day: 1984 Magazines review the Apple Macintosh
The brainchild of Apple’s Steve Jobs, the Macintosh was the culmination of five years of engineering, and a merging of Apple’s low-cost Macintosh “computer appliance” project, started by Apple engineer Jef Raskin, with Jobs’ Xerox [more…]