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…]
RPGs, no, it’s probably not what your thinking of – rocket propelled grenades. Although those kind of RPG’s sure are cool and a very useful weapon in today’s current gaming environment. What RPG stands for [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…]
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…]
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…]
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…]
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