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
Consumer Electronics
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…]
Consumer Electronics
CRT Trouble? Danger Will Robinson!
Danger Will Robinson! High Voltage! In order to work, a TV or monitor uses high-voltage currents which can electrocute you! For electrons to be attracted enough to the anode to leave the cathode in a [more…]
Consumer Electronics
Doctor Where? The Missing Episodes of Early Television Programs
While the age of television meant you could electronically capture a moving image and broadcast it to receivers “live”, there quickly became an obvious need to store that moving image either for posterity or use [more…]
Consumer Electronics
The Adventures of Captain Midnight: An Early History of Pay TV Scrambling
While the advertising model adopted by free-to-air television more than covered station-owners costs, media companies have always searched for solutions aimed at getting viewers to pay for programming directly. Telemeter was one such solution. An [more…]
Consumer Electronics
Women in Tech: Rosie the Riveter becomes Tracy the TV Assembler
During the Second World War, American women were recruited to fill factory roles previously occupied by men who had gone off to fight in Europe and in the Pacific. While many of these roles involved [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…]
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…]