The Bendix G-15 Runs 75,000 Lines Of Code

There’s a Blue Bendix in Texas, and thanks to [Usagi Electric] it’s the oldest operating computer in North America.  The Bendix G-15, a vacuum tube computer originally released in 1956,…

Fixing 1986 Sinclair Spectrum+2 With A High-Score Of Issues

The Sinclair ZX Spectrum+2 was the first home computer released by Amstrad after buying up Sinclair. It’s basically a Sinclair ZX Spectrum 128, but with a proper keyboard and a built-in tape …

Altair 8800 kits went on sale December 19, 1974

Even Bill Gates and Paul Allen couldn't get one

Back To The Future Of Texting: SMS On A Panasonic Typewriter

Among us Hackaday writers, there are quite a few enthusiasts for retro artifacts – and it gets even better when they’re combined in an unusual way. So, when we get a tip about a build l…

The Last Acorn BBC Computer Wasn’t A BBC Micro

For home computer users, the end of the 1980s was the era of 16-bit computers. The challenge facing manufacturers of 8-bit machines through the middle of the decade was to transfer their range and …

Documented Source Code For Elite On The C64, BBC Micro And Others

If you ever wanted to dive into the source code for the 1980s space game Elite, but didn’t want to invest many hours reverse-engineering the 6502 assembly code, then [Mark Moxon]’s anno…

Micral - Wikipedia

Apple Newton Gets Rebuilt Battery Pack

We all carry touch screen computers around in our pockets these days, but before the smartphone revolution, there was the personal digital assistant (PDA). While it wasn’t a commercial succes…

Debugging The UE1 Paper Tape Reader And Amplification Circuit

After recently putting together the paper tape reader for his custom tube-based UE1 computer, [David Lovett] did get squiggles on the outputs, but not quite the right ones. In the most recent video…

Microchess Remembered

Playing chess has always been a bellwether for computers. The game isn’t trivial, but the rules are managably simple. However, the game is too complex to be easily solved entirely, so you hav…

Ampere WS-1: The Other APL Portable Computer

When thinking of home computers and their portable kin it’s easy to assume that all of them provided BASIC as their interpreter, but for a while APL also played a role. The most quaint APL po…

The 6809 8-Bit Microcomputer: A Father-Son Odyssey

If you’re nostalgic for the golden age of microprocessors and dream of building your own computer, this story might spark your imagination. [Eric Lind], passionate retro enthusiast and his 14…

How Corroded Can A Motherboard Be?

We will admit it. If we found a 386 motherboard as badly corroded as the one [Bits und Bolts] did, we would trash it—not him, though. In fact, we were surprised when he showed it and said he had al…

A Brief History Of Calculator Watches

When humans counted on their fingers, everyone had a state-of-the-art (at the time) calculator at all times. But as we got smarter about calculation, we missed that convenience. When slide rules we…

8-Bit Computers Crunch Advanced Scientific Computations

Although largely relegated to retrocomputing enthusiasts and embedded systems or microcontrollers now, there was a time when there were no other computers available other than those with 8-bit proc…

8-Bit Computers Crunch Advanced Scientific Computations

Although largely relegated to retrocomputing enthusiasts and embedded systems or microcontrollers now, there was a time when there were no other computers available other than those with 8-bit proc…

The Lancaster ASCII Keyboard Recreated

It is hard to imagine that there was a time when having a keyboard and screen readily available was a real problem for people who wanted to experiment with computers. In the 1970s, if you wanted a …