Collaborate Disseminate
It’s weird to think that an abacus would have still been used sixty years ago, or so posits the documentary series The Computer and the Mind of Man. This six …read more Continue reading Retrotechtacular: 1960s Doc Calls Computers The Universal Machine
Weather can have a significant impact on transport and operations of all kinds, especially those at sea or in the air. This makes it a deeply important field of study, …read more Continue reading Weather in Wartime: The Importance of British Meteorology in WWII
Anyone who has ever made a living writing code has probably had some version of the following drilled into their head: “Always write your code so the next person can …read more Continue reading Retrotechtacular: Critical Code Reading, 70s Style
It is a shame that there are fewer and fewer “nerd stores” around. Fry’s is gone. Radio Shack is gone. But the best ones were always the places that had …read more Continue reading Retrotechtacular: Oh Boy! We’re Radio Engineers!
Normally, when we pick out something to carry the “Retrotechtacular” banner, it’s a film from the good old days when technology was young and fresh, and filmmakers were paid by …read more Continue reading Retrotechtacular: The Secret Life of the Electric Light
See if you can talk your local school district into buying a computer that costs about $5,000 and weighs 40 pounds. That was HP’s proposition to schools back in 1968 so really it is more like $35,000 today. The calculator had a CRT display for the RPN stack that you …read more
Continue reading Retrotechtacular: The $5,000 40 Pound HP Classroom Computer
We think of the mobile phone — well, what we would call a cell phone — as something fairly modern. Many of us can still remember when using a ham radio phone patch from your parked car would have people staring and murmuring. But it turns out in the late …read more
Continue reading Retrotechtacular: Mobile Phones 1940s Style
It is easy to find technology success stories: the PC, DVD, and cell phone are all well-documented tales. However, it is a little harder to find the stories behind the things that didn’t quite take off as planned. As the old saying goes, “success has many parents but failure is …read more
It is easy to find technology success stories: the PC, DVD, and cell phone are all well-documented tales. However, it is a little harder to find the stories behind the things that didn’t quite take off as planned. As the old saying goes, “success has many parents but failure is …read more
We take the everyday materials of engineering for granted, as ubiquitous components rather than as complex items in their own right. Sure, we know that an integrated circuit represents the pinnacle of a hundred years’ development in the field of electronics, but to us it’s simply a black box with …read more