This is an amazing promotional film produced by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) documents their attempt to enter the PC market in 1982. DEC owned a major chunk of the mini-computer market and to their credit they got the idea that the PC was the wave of the future and they knew they had to compete. Although in retrospect by 1982 it may have already been too late to get into the game when you think about the fact that the Apple II hit the market in 1977 (not to mention the fact that they were hitting the market after IBM defined it). Here’s the DEC Rainbow Triple Boot Computer which DEC introduced in May of 1982: Read more…
I was lucky that my good friend Christian Liendo got quite a few photos of the Vintage Computer Festival East 6.0 which took place this past weekend. Shown above is a young lady trying out Guitar Hero on a Commodore 64! Below is a collection of just a few of the vintage computers and related paraphernalia that was on display: Read more…
Posted by Michael Pinto on Sep 2, 2009 in Fandom, Tech
If you live in my neck of the woods you may want to think about attending the Vintage Computer Festival East this year: It’s running from September 12th until 13th at the InfoAge Science Center in Wall, New Jersey. Shown above is an amazing video from last year which shows an ancient PDP 8 computer running Space War. This year the fest will feature an 8-bit music concert, a by-the-pound book sale, a build-your-own PockeTerm workshop, and the BASIC Programming Challenge. The keynote speaker is Ted Hurewitz who worked on RCA computers in the 1950s. A single day is $10 and a weekend pass will cost you $15 (hell that’s coat check tip at one of those fancy web 3.0 conferences).
Above: CompuServe hit their high point during the golden age of 300 baud modems. Photo by Guille Avalos.
Founded in 1969 CompuServe was an early powerhouse of connecting people online before the era of the web. And at the end of June AOL killed off CompuServe Classic which was the last surviving bit of that service, the only thing now left is a tombstone “web portal” and a low rent ISP service. It’s a sad ending, but once upon a time in the 80s and early 90s CompuServe was THE online service. Read more…
Posted by Michael Pinto on Jun 22, 2009 in Tech, Videogames
If you’re a retro computing fanboy like me on Saturday you were devastated to learn that Apple denied permission to the developer who created a Commodore 64 emulator for the iPhone. Now normally this news wouldn’t surprise me, but what broke my fanboy heart is that the developer jumped through all the right hoops: Not only did they get a license from the owners of Commodore but they even got positive signals early on from Apple. Read more…
The year is 1982 and Crazy Eddie (with prices so low he’s practically giving everything away) decides to hawk home computers like the Commodore VIC-20 and the Apple ][. Crazy Eddie was a retail chain that was started in Brooklyn in the early 70s and hit a high point in the 80s until the Feds shut them down for fraud charges. By the way the guy in the commercial isn’t the owner of the store who was busted — he’s Jerry Carroll who was an FM radio DJ at the time. Here is an example of his more creative work: Read more…
In my final year of art school (which was 1987) I had a friend from Japan who owned the Sharp X68000 — in fact the computer was only ever sold in Japan. As you can see in the commercial above this machine was very friendly for folks who liked to work with video and graphics, and that wasn’t by accident as the box was powered by a Motorola 68000 CPU which was the same family of chips that powered the other artist friendly machines of that era which were the Macintosh and the Amiga. The first model of this system ran at 10 MHz, had 1 meg of of RAM and no built in hard drive, so it’s sort of amazing just how much this system could do. It’s also interesting to note that many game designers in Japan created arcade games using the X68000 and today you can find emulators for the system. Read more…
The Antikythera mechanism is an ancient calculator that was discovered in Greece over 100 years ago, what makes it amazing is that it’s over 2,000 years old and uses similar technology that wasn’t available until the 18th century. But what’s very cool is that scientists have recently reconstructed a working model of the mechanism which was used to calculate the positions of the sun, moon, and the planets: Read more…
This is an amazing promotional film produced by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) documents their attempt to enter the PC market in 1982. DEC owned a major chunk of the mini-computer market and to their credit they got the idea that the PC was the wave of the future and they knew they had to compete. Although in retrospect by 1982 it may have already been too late to get into the game when you think about the fact that the Apple II hit the market in 1977 (not to mention the fact that they were hitting the market after IBM defined it). Here’s the DEC Rainbow Triple Boot Computer which DEC introduced in May of 1982: Read more… 
