Collaborate Disseminate
This neat video from the [Computer History Archives Project] documents the development of the Aiken Mark I through Mark IV computers. Partly shrouded in the secrecy of World War II …read more Continue reading Aiken’s Secret Computing Machines
Debugging computers in the 1950s sounds like it wasn’t an easy task. That’s one of the interesting facts from this fascinating talk by [Guy Fedorkow] about the Whirlwind, one of …read more Continue reading Debugging A 1950s Computer Sounds Like A Pain
[RetroBytes] nicely presents the curious history of the SPARC processor architecture. SPARC, short for Scalable Processor Architecture, defined some of the most commercially successful RISC processors during the 1980s and …read more Continue reading History of the SPARC CPU Architecture
[RetroBytes] takes us on a whirlwind tour of the history of the Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), its founder Ken Olsen, and during intermission builds up a working replica of the …read more Continue reading History of Digital Equipment Corp and Bonus PDP-11 Replica Build
Among the many facets of modern technology, few have evolved faster or more radically than the computer. In less than a century its very nature has changed significantly: today’s smartphones …read more Continue reading Classic Chat: Preserving Computer History
Building a complete operating system by compiling its source code is not something for the faint-hearted; a modern Linux or BSD distribution contains thousands of packages with millions of lines …read more Continue reading Building MS-DOS From Scratch Like It’s 1983
Bavarian Alps, Dec. 1945: Since 1935, Berlin engineer Konrad Zuse has spent his entire career developing a series of automatic calculators, the first of their kind in the world: the …read more Continue reading The Other First Computer: Konrad Zuse and the Z3
Over the past few years, I kept bumping into something called Hershey fonts. After digging around, I found a 1967 government report by a fellow named Dr. Allen Vincent Hershey. …read more Continue reading Hershey Fonts: Not Chocolate, the Origin of Vector Lettering
Video blogger and display technology guru [Fran Blanche] has discovered a splendid retro-tech alphanumeric display from 1910. (Video, embedded below.)
We have always enjoyed her forays into old and unusual displays, including her project researching and reverse engineering an Apollo DSKY unit. This time [Fran] has dug up an amazing …read more
Continue reading Fran Finds Four Foot Alphanumeric Displays From 1910
September 30th, 1980 is the day when Ethernet was first commercially introduced, making it exactly forty years ago this year. It was first defined in a patent filed by Xerox as a 10 Mb/s networking protocol in 1975, introduced to the market in 1980 and subsequently standardized in 1983 by …read more
Continue reading Ethernet At 40: From A Napkin Sketch To Multi-Gigabit Links