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…]
Education
Apple II
Tetris for Applesoft BASIC
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…]
Coding
Department Store BASIC: Learning to code via programmatic vandalism in the 1980s
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…]
Education
Collector’s Corner: Care and Cleaning of CDs and Floppies
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…]
Departments
Miniaturised Radios and Magnetic Tape
Reprinted from Paleotronic issue 1, volume 1 Feb-Mar 2018. Lee De Forest’s 1907 Audion vacuum tube is widely credited with kickstarting the modern electronics industry in general, but it would take the much smaller, lower-power [more…]