Collaborate Disseminate
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. …read more Continue reading The Lancaster ASCII Keyboard Recreated
[Kevin] doesn’t stock zener diodes anymore. Why? Because for everything he used to use zeners, he now uses bandgap voltage references. These look like zener diodes but have an extra …read more Continue reading Programmable Zener is Really an IC
Last time we checked in on [Inkbox], he had made a 16-bit CPU in Excel. Impressive, but not really practical. Presumably, his latest project isn’t any more practical, but we …read more Continue reading RISC CPU Lives in Excel
[My Ham Radio Journey] wanted to see if a “common person” (in his words) could build an effective vertical ham radio antenna. If you look at the video below, the …read more Continue reading $40 Ham Antenna Works Six Bands
[Japhy Riddle] was tired of creating pixel art. He went to subpixel art. The idea is that since each color pixel is composed of three subpixels, your display is actually …read more Continue reading Forget Pixel Art: Try Subpixels
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 …read more Continue reading A Teletype by Any Other Name: The Early E-mail and Wordprocessor
You don’t have to know how a car engine works to drive a car — but you can bet all the drivers in the Indy 500 have a better than …read more Continue reading Intuition about Maxwell’s Equations
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 …read more Continue reading Teaching Computers to Read — Sort Of
We have often wondered if people dreamed in black and white before the advent of photography. While color pictures eventually became the norm, black and white TV was common for …read more Continue reading Retrotechtacular: Color TV
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 …read more Continue reading Z80 Testing the 80s Way