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…]
History
Consumer Electronics
Gadget Graveyard: Baird’s Mechanical Television
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…]
Consumer Electronics
Sarnoff vs Farnsworth: The Battle for the Tube.
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…]
Atari
The Jackintosh: A Real GEM – Remembering the Atari ST
After Commodore Founder Jack Tramiel was forced out by his board, he decided, after a brief hiatus, to get revenge. Tramiel knew that a 16-bit computer was next on the horizon for Commodore, and he wanted [more…]
Computers
Back in the Day: 1984 Magazines review the Apple Macintosh
The brainchild of Apple’s Steve Jobs, the Macintosh was the culmination of five years of engineering, and a merging of Apple’s low-cost Macintosh “computer appliance” project, started by Apple engineer Jef Raskin, with Jobs’ Xerox [more…]
Consumer Electronics
Dial-Up Chat: Stewart Cheifet Looks Back At CES
Stewart Cheifet is an American television presenter best known for his work producing and hosting the 1983-2002 PBS series Computer Chronicles, which covered the Consumer Electronics Show on multiple occasions. Paleotronic reached out to Stewart [more…]
Computers
Open Mailbox: An Introduction to the World of Text Adventures and Interactive Fiction
WELCOME TO ADVENTURE!! WOULD YOU LIKE INSTRUCTIONS? Y SOMEWHERE NEARBY IS A COLOSSAL CAVE, WHERE OTHERS HAVE FOUND FORTUNES IN TREASURE AND GOLD, THOUGH IT IS RUMOURED THAT SOME WHO ENTER ARE NEVER SEEN AGAIN. [more…]
Consumer Electronics
The Apple Newton: A Fruit that Ripened Too Soon
Apple’s CEO, John Sculley, called it a “Personal Digital Assistant”, and the journalists present seem to have been in awe of the potential the Newton represented. A digital tablet that recognised handwriting? That could wirelessly [more…]
Consumer Electronics
The Future That Wasn’t: 1980s Home Robots
1983 was the year robots invaded the Consumer Electronics Show, soon after to storm homes across the world, and provide us with robotic domestic bliss ever since! Er… uh… well, maybe not. Truth is, they [more…]
Commodore
A 1980s Quantum Link to a modern-day Mutiny
Visitors to the Commodore booth at the 1986 Consumer Electronics Show were not only introduced to the newly restyled Commodore 64C and GEOS, but also a colourful new information service called Quantum Link. Typical 1980s [more…]