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 …

Exploring The Gakken FX Micro-Computer

Early computer kits aimed at learning took all sorts of forms, from full-fledged computer kits like the Altair 8800 to the ready-made MicroBee Computer-In-A-Book. For those just wanting to dip thei…

Ruined 1993 ThinkPad Tablet Brought Back From The Brink

Collecting retrocomputers is fun, especially when you find fully-functional examples that you can plug in, switch on, and start playing with. Meanwhile, others prefer to find the damaged examples a…

Completing The UE1’s Paper Tape Reader And First Squiggles

On today’s installment of UE1 vacuum tube computer construction, we join [David Lovett] once more on the Usagi Electric farm, as he determines just how much work remains before the project ca…

Retro Calculator Build Proves The Space Age Isn’t What It Used To Be

The common wisdom these days is that even if we wanted to get back to the Moon the way we did in the 1960s, we’d never be able to do it. Most of the blame for that usually falls on the loss o…

Building A Reproduction Apple I

If you think of Apple today, you probably think of an iPhone or a Mac. But the original Apple I was a simple PC board and required a little effort to start up a working system. [Artem] has an Apple…

A Teletype By Any Other Name: The Early E-mail And Wordprocessor

Some brand names become the de facto name for the generic product. Xerox, for example. Or Velcro. Teletype was a trademark, but it has come to mean just about any teleprinter communicating with ano…

Remember The Tri-Format Floppy Disk?

These days, the vast majority of portable media users are storing their files on some kind of Microsoft-developed file system. Back in the 1980s and 1990s, though, things were different. You absolu…

Teaching Computers To Read — Sort Of

If you ask someone who grew up in the late 1970s or early 1980s what taught them a lot about programming, they’d probably tell you that typing in programs from magazines was very instructive.…

A Brief History Of Cyrix, Or How To Get Sued By Intel A Lot

In a new installment on computer history, [Bradford Morgan White] takes us through the sordid history of Cyrix, as this plucky little company created the best math co-processors (FasMath) and then …

Z80 Testing The 80s Way

According to [MTSI], if you used a Z80 chip back in the 1980s, it almost certainly passed through the sole Fairchild Sentry 610 system that gave it the seal of approval. The Sentry was big iron for…

Videonics: The Dawn Of Home Video Editing, Revisited

Here’s a slice of history that will make any retro-tech fan grin: before TikTok and iMovie, there was a beast called the Videonics DirectED Plus. This early attempt at democratizing video editing s…

Building A Motor Feed For The UE1 Vacuum Tube Computer’s Paper Tape Reader

Building a paper tape reader by itself isn’t super complicated: you need a source of light, some photoreceptors behind the tape to register the presence of holes and some way to pull the tape…

HIDman Brings Modern Input To Vintage PCs

Retro computing enthusiasts, rejoice! HIDman, [rasteri]’s latest open source creation, bridges the gap between modern USB input devices and vintage PCs, from the IBM 5150 to machines with PS/…

Retrotechtacular: Computer-Generate Video 1968 Style!

[Classic Microcomputers] read in a book that there was a computer-generated film made in the late 1960s, and he knew he had to watch it. He found it and shared it along with some technical informat…

Hear A Vintage Sound Chip Mimic The Real World

Sound chips from back in the day were capable of much more than a few beeps and boops, and [InazumaDenki] proves it in a video recreating recognizable real-world sounds with the AY-3-8910, a chip t…

The Most Inexpensive Apple Computer Possible

If Apple has a reputation for anything other than decent hardware and excellent industrial design, it’s for selling its products at extremely inflated prices. But there are some alternatives …