School kids today may all have tablets, but in the early 1980s you were lucky if your classroom had its own computer! More likely, there was only one (or maybe two) for the entire school. [more…]
One of the hottest Christmas toys of 1979 was a lunar-inspired tank that taught rudimentary computer programming! The Milton Bradley Big Trak (also stylised as bigtrak) is a programmable toy resembling a futuristic utility vehicle [more…]
In the 1960s, television was something that was a passive occupation, you turn it on an it entertained you. The possibility that you might be able to create or manage what you saw on the [more…]
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…]
Recently we experienced some negative feedback on a public forum from an individual who took issue with our exuberance in announcing new features in microM8, calling them unimportant or defective, accusing us of stealing some [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…]
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…]
What do Steve Wozniak and George H.W. Bush have in common? They’ve both been seriously into Tetris! But who can blame them? The object of the game (as if you didn’t know) is to complete [more…]
Before MS-DOS, Microsoft’s biggest product was arguably BASIC. Variants of Microsoft BASIC shipped in most 1980s home computers, including the Commodore 64, Tandy Color Computer and the Apple II (as Applesoft BASIC). Standing for “Beginners [more…]
First demonstrated at the Consumer Electronics Show in 1982, the Compact Disc was an evolution of the optical LaserDisc format created by Philips and MCA. Philips partnered with Sony to develop the new disc, initially [more…]
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