Back in the 1950s, when your surgeon wasn’t concentrating on his golf swing, he was probably concentrating on his cardioscope – or at least you hoped he was! The cardioscope was essentially a specialised oscilloscope [more…]
Cathode-ray tubes weren’t just useful for radar – all sorts of aircraft indicators were displayed with them. For example, CRTs were used in the displays of radio detection finders, which used radio “beacons” broadcasting from [more…]
RADAR: RAdio Detection / Direction And Ranging Radar uses radio waves to determine the range, angle or velocity of objects. It can be used to detect almost anything! Airborne surprises can be devastating. As the [more…]
Given the right conditions, amateur radio operators can talk to anyone, anywhere in the world. But what about television? Could that be sent around the world too? Analog television transmitted a lot of information, and [more…]
Yo Ho Ho and a Box of Copied Floppies! Here be a proverbial rogues’ gallery of clippings just in time for Hallowe’en from 1980s computer magazines such as Byte, Analog, Creative Computing, CoCo Mag, Computers [more…]
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…]
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…]
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…]
After Sydney-native Peter Vogel graduated from high school in 1975, his classmate Kim Ryrie approached him with the idea of a creating a computer microprocessor-driven electronic musical synthesiser. Ryrie was frustrated with his attempts at [more…]
In the 1960s, the BBC experimented with the idea of broadcasting a newspaper to hard-copy printers in homes during the early hours of the morning. It worked by rasterising (converting into lines) text, sending it [more…]
©2018 Paleotronic Magazine, a project of Teaching Electronics and Computing History (TECH) Inc., an Australian not-for-profit organisation.
Powered by Wordpress. Hosted by Linode. Made in Australia. Editor: Melody Ayres-Griffiths editor@paleotronic.com