Collaborate Disseminate
Whenever there is a large manufacturer of a popular product in the tech space, they always attract tales of near-mythical prototypes which would have changed everything on the spot had …read more Continue reading The Apple They Should Have Made, But Didn’t
These days, there is a plethora of cheap hardware and software which you can use to make digital music. Back in the 1980s, though, this was still a nascent field, …read more Continue reading Building the Cheapest MIDI Home Studio from 1988
At first glance, this gorgeous retro-styled audio player built by [Max Kern] could absolutely pass for the genuine article. But then you take a closer look and realize that the …read more Continue reading Faux-Retro “Tape” Player Runs on ESP32 and 80s Vibes
What happens to old, neglected 1980s toy robots? According to the [Randi Rain], they turn to the dark side! Way back in the ’80s, Tomy had an entire line of …read more Continue reading Verbot Goes to The Dark Side
It was a cold autumn night in 1988. The people of Cambridge, Massachusetts lay asleep in their beds unaware of the future horror about to be unleashed from the labs …read more Continue reading Retrotechtacular: Cheesy 1980s News Report on Early Internet Virus
It’s time once again for another installment in “Milspec Teardown”, where we get to see what Uncle Sam spends all those defense dollars on. Battle hardened pieces of kit are always a fascinating look at what can be accomplished if money is truly no object. When engineers are given a …read more
Continue reading Milspec Teardown: ID-2124 Howitzer Data Display
As you may know, we’re rather big fans of building things here at Hackaday. But we’re also quite partial to repairing things which might otherwise end up in a landfill. Especially when those things happen to be interesting pieces of vintage hardware. So the work [ekriirke] put in to get …read more
In the early 1980s there was growing public awareness that the microcomputer revolution would have a significant effect on everybody’s lives, and there was a brief period in which anything remotely connected with a computer attracted an air of glamour and sophistication. Broadcasters wanted to get in on the act, and produced glowing documentaries on the new technology, enthusiastically crystal-ball-gazing as they did so.
In the UK, the public service BBC broadcaster produced a brace of series’ over the decade probing all corners of the subject as part of the same Computer Literacy Project that gave us Acorn’s BBC Micro, …read more
Continue reading The BBC Computer Literacy Project From The 1980s Is Yours To Browse
It’s easy to dismiss decades old electronics as effectively e-waste. With the rapid advancements and plummeting prices of modern technology, most old hardware is little more than a historical curiosity at this point. For example, why would anyone purchase something as esoteric as 1980-era video production equipment in 2018? A cheap burner phone could take better images, and if you’re looking to get video in your projects you’d be better off getting a webcam or a Raspberry Pi camera module.
But occasionally the old ways of doing things offer possibilities that modern methods don’t. This fascinating white paper from [David …read more
Continue reading Real-Time Polarimetric Imager from 1980s Tech
Over the pond here in the UK we used to have a TV show called Tomorrow’s World, It was on once a week showing all the tech we would have been using in 10 years time (or so they said). In 1982 they ran with a story about a touch screen computer. Perhaps not what you would recognize today as a touchscreen but given the date and limited technology someone had come up with a novel idea for a touchscreen that worked sort of.
It was a normal CRT screen but around the edges where photodiodes pointing inwards as if …read more
Continue reading A Touchscreen From 1982, That Could Kill With A Single Finger Press