Marc Verdiell is obsessed with clunky, vintage computers. He has over a hundred pieces in his collection, mostly early HP and IBM computers and test equipment, which he cleans, repairs, and displays in his extremely tidy basement. The standout, of course, is the Xerox Alto from the 1970s.
Have you ever had that nagging sensation that your computer was slower than it used to be? Or that your brand new laptop seemed much more sluggish than an old tower PC you once had? Dan Luu, a computer engineer who has previously worked at Google and Microsoft, had the same sensation, so he did what the rest of us…
Everybody knows that computers were huge and unwieldy in the middle of the 20th century. But a lot of the tech terminology that we take for granted today had to be invented at some point. Such is the case with the term “desktop computer,” which emerged long before “personal computers” became commonplace in American…
Peeking inside a book bin at a Seattle Goodwill, Redditor vadermeer caught an interesting, unexpected glimpse into the early days of Apple: a cache of internal memos, progress reports, and legal pad scribbles from 1979 and 1980, just three years into the tech monolith’s company history.
Today Cory Doctorow tweeted out a fascinating image showing an RCA computer room in 1959. I can’t stop staring at it.
One woman’s trash is literally everyone else’s super-expensive, rare $200,000 piece of computer history. Most of the time, recycled electronics are too crappy to sell on Craigslist. But one California e-recycling center recently received one of the most coveted gadgets ever: A genuine Apple-1 computer.
The second season of AMC’s Halt and Catch Fire returns to AMC tonight with a whole new focus: internet gaming.
Now that the collective eye roll around Apple's $10,000 watch has turned into a blank stare, it's time for a little bit of nostalgia. Apple is not new to this game of selling seemingly everyday gadgets for ridiculous dollar amounts. The Twentieth Anniversary Macintosh (TAM) wrote the rules nearly 20 years ago.
There was something undeniably awesome about Disney in the early 1980s. The company was expanding its theme parks in Flordia with EPCOT, a shrine to technological innovation. Meanwhile, a bunch of young kids sort of got left unattended at the studio. The result? Movies like Tron.
Ross Perot is a collector. He once bought a copy of the Magna Carta in 1984. But more intriguingly, he also bought and resurrected ENIAC, the world's first electronic computer.
In the early days of personal computing—think UNIX early—text was often white or green on a black screen. That didn't last long, of course, but there's a little-known reason that those shadowy screens weren't ideal for users. And it has to do with your poor eyesight.
It's hard to say if the Macintosh would've been so successful if it hadn't had such a revolutionary interface—namely, the mouse. While Apple didn't invent the mouse, it did commission the now legendary engineer Jim Yurchenco to make it viable. And he looked to Steve Jobs' former employer for inspiration.
Some day a President of the United States may be elected “electronically.” This sentence wouldn’t look out of place in any news story from the 21st century, despite quotes around the word “electronically.” But believe it or not, that prediction comes from a magazine article in 1945.
It’s human nature to hate things that remind us of how dumb we used to be; Like teenagers who can’t stand their baby pictures, we prefer to ignore the proof of our humble beginnings. The same goes for artifacts of computing history—for proof, just look at the rage directed at relics of those early days, like Comic…
“The ubiquity and power of the computer blur the distinction between public and private information. Our revolution will not be in gathering data — don’t look for TV cameras in your bedroom — but in analyzing information that is already willingly shared.”
During World War II, the best mathematical minds in Britain gathered at a place called Bletchley Park to decipher the secret codes used by the Axis. To aid the process, they developed the Colossus Mk 1 and Mk 2, some of the first machines recognizable as programmable computers. And now UK computer scientists are up in…