Last issue of Paleotronic, my article on RPG games focused on the birth of RPG games on home computers. It looked at how they were heavily turn based text adventures, inspired by the likes of [more…]
Upon viewing Moonsweeper for the first time the word ‘wow’ just doesn’t seem to do it justice, yet it’s the first word to form in most people’s brains. It just seems to trite, so simple, [more…]
The impact the live broadcast of the Moon walk had on the populace of Western countries cannot be overstated. Witnessing such a momentous event live made people feel they were a part of it, and [more…]
Apollo 11 commander Neil Armstrong’s tense two-word report came over the loudspeakers at NASA’s Mission Control in Houston, more of a question than a statement as he and and fellow astronaut Buzz Aldrin rapidly descended [more…]
In the early 1970s, computers were expensive! Like, really expensive, man! So if you were a young Nolan Bushnell entranced by Spacewar and you wanted to bring it to the masses, how could you do [more…]
Paul Monopoli takes a look back at the very first video game, and its influence on what would become one of the world’s most popular pasttimes. In 1961 the Massachusetts Institute of Technology was to [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…]
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…]
GLANCING AT HIS MORNING PAPER, DAVID SARNOFF QUICKLY REALISED HE HAD A BIG, BIG PROBLEM. Sarnoff, the president of the Radio Corporation of America (RCA) had spent his entire adult life rising up through the [more…]
The soothing sonata of chatter in the convention hall swelled to a crescendo of voices as people piled into the Paleotronic booth ahead of the 1983 Consumer Electronic Show’s umpteenth product announcement of the day [more…]
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