If you are into vintage computing here’s a podcast for you. Earl Evans of Retrobits has returned from a one-year hiatus to bring us more episodes of The Retrobits Podcast. This podcast is about all aspects of retrocomputing. Like he … Read more
Ante Vukorepa draws our attention to this video of Claude Paillard, a French radio amateur (F2FO), making his own tubes (also known as thermionic valves) from scratch. “The video depicts the whole process, from winding the filament through making the … Read more
tubebooks.org Vintage info from the days of vacuum tubes Kelvin informs us of an online stash of vintage engineering docs at tubebooks.org. He especially recommends you check out the technical books section/link. Tubebooks is “a collection of vintage engineering texts, … Read more
Here’s something for retro video game enthusiasts. This talk by Sven Oliver (‘SvOlli’) Moll from the recent 28C3 conference in Berlin covers the history, the hardware and how to write programs for the Atari 2600 gaming console. The Atari 2600 … Read more
Dennis Ferron developed this Parallax Propeller Laptop with a 6502 co-processor and 64K of static RAM as his entry to a Parallax Propeller design contest. He observed that hardware prototyping has evolved from building-block hardware (TTL) to programmable hardware (PLA’s … Read more
Steve at Big Mess o’ Wires has resumed work on his Macintosh floppy drive emulator project. Previously he had developed the project on a breadboard using an Altera EPM7128S CPLD and an Atmel ATMEGA32u4 microcontroller. Now he has assembled it … Read more
“THE 6502″ is a documentary series by Jason Scott about the MOS Technology 6502 chip, the circumstances that lead to it and the experiences of assembly language programming. Funded in 2011, the project is expected to go for several years … Read more
Fans of tech history may want to read Dot-dash-diss: The gentleman hacker’s 1903 lulz. This article appears on the NewScientist website and reveals that wireless hacking dates back to the time of Marconi! Any you thought you were onto something … Read more
Digi-Comp was a fully functional binary digital mechanical computer, which sparked many future engineers’ imagination in the early 1960′s. The crew at Evil Mad Science recently revived the game with a larger than life version displayed at several Maker Faires. … Read more
Joe Grand, developer of the Parallax Laser Range Finder (LRF) presents this hack interfacing the LRF with a vintage Game Boy printer. The project uses the LRF’s onboard camera, along with a few circuit and firmware mods, to allow the … Read more
UP Digital Bureau and Unteleported tech agency present the Tweephone, an analog Twitter client. In the world of short messaging this is about as retro as you can get. Remove the phone from the switchhook, use the rotary dial to … Read more
Our friends over at 2600 have the official 2012 Hacker Calendar in stock! Filled with hacker trivia for every day of the year, the 2012 calendar’s theme is the science of telephony with a different related photo accompanying each month. … Read more
Steve Chamberlin over at Big Mess o’Wires presents the Plus Too, a working hardware replica of the Macintosh Plus and Macintosh 512Ke computers. The original Macs contained a Motorola 68000 CPU and about half a dozen major support chips, with … Read more
Bre and Astera over at Hackerspace blog have assembled a detailed history of the hackerspace movement. Covering from their inception in 2008 to date, what they initially believed would be a 25 page booklet has turned into a 182 MB … Read more
If you’re interested in reading about state of the art radio engineering data from way back in the day, then this may be for you.Tubebooks.org has a free download of Federal Telephone and Radio Corporation’s 1946 “Radio Data for Engineers, … Read more
If you are into retrocomputing with the Commodore C64 or clone then you will be interested in reading CommodoreFree. This is a free online magazine which has been published since 2007 and is now in its 53 issue. You can … Read more
Daniel Brake writes: I don’t know if you guys have seen this yet, but TI has their 1988 TTL Logic Data Book for only $0.10. I have received 3 copies and the total cost, including shipping (US), was only $0.30! … Read more
What do you call a typewriter modded to communicate digital messages over Skype? A Stype, of course! Daniel Huhndt describes it: With the help of “some solenoids, relays, pushbuttons, some parts of a cheap keyboard, an arduino mega and a … Read more
The eccentric thinkers at asciimation have developed a phonograph using the Arduino. In the steampunk tradition, the turntable is steam powered and made from scrap parts. The speed is controlled by the Arduino using six magnets and a coil as … Read more
András Veres-Szentkirályi found an old CGA monitor and wondered whether it could be repurposed for use with an Arduino. He noted that CGA monitors use inexpensive DB-9 connectors, the signals are TTL (0-5V digital), the clocks are in the range … Read more
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