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…]
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…]
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…]
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…]
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…]
WELCOME TO ADVENTURE!! WOULD YOU LIKE INSTRUCTIONS? Y SOMEWHERE NEARBY IS A COLOSSAL CAVE, WHERE OTHERS HAVE FOUND FORTUNES IN TREASURE AND GOLD, THOUGH IT IS RUMOURED THAT SOME WHO ENTER ARE NEVER SEEN AGAIN. [more…]
Visitors to the Commodore booth at the 1986 Consumer Electronics Show were not only introduced to the newly restyled Commodore 64C and GEOS, but also a colourful new information service called Quantum Link. Typical 1980s [more…]
The Commodore 64, introduced at the 1982 Winter Consumer Electronics Show, was a significant improvement on the VIC-20, and would become the best-selling computer model of all time. In early 1981, Commodore-subsidiary MOS Technology began [more…]
Released in 1980, the VIC-20 was the world’s first low-cost computer, at a list price of under US$300. Compared to other computers of the time, the VIC-20 had a tiny memory (5 kilobytes) and an [more…]
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