This is my latest vintage camera – the Kodak Duex. The Kodak Duex is a very unusal 620-format camera with a helical telescoping lens cylinder made from bakelite, creating photos with a negative size of 6×4.5cm. It was only made for a very short time from 1940-42 at a cost of $6, approximately $167 in [...]
Thirty years ago today, the ZX81 home computer was launched in the UK. Nobody could have even guessed what an avalanche this little machine would produce – within a few years, every teenager in Europe would be playing computer games… The ZX81 can easily be credited as the milestone that launched the computer revolution in [...]
In November 1979 – 30 years ago – the Atari 400 and 800 computers went on sale to the public. The Atari 400 and 800 were both based on the 6502 CPU and had a number of custom chips that definitely pushed the envelope in the late 70s and meant that close descendants of these [...]
Over at DadHacker, Landon is celebrating his 30th year of programming in C. It’s a great reminiscence across several decades of coding, ending in three golden rules that should be repeated in the first chapter of every future programming manual: Leave the existing brace style in the code alone or change all of it Keep [...]
Here’s an interesting new clone of 80s home computers: The FPGA Arcade (not sure if that’s the final name) is based on a Xilinx FPGA and will be a multi-machine clone for the Atari ST, Amiga and older 8-bit systems all on one main board. From the blog it looks like they will be very [...]
I’ve written before about the roots of my programming life – while I first had a ZX81, I really consider the Sinclair ZX Sepctrum as the machine where I developed a taste for programming and thinking in algorithms. Most actual Spectrums are now rather long in the tooth, and many have probably near irreparable damage [...]
I’ve been gone for quite a while from this blog… it’s been a busy few months! To restart the blog, here first something geeky: 25 Microchips that Shook the World. A great article with short histories of 25 chips that had wide-ranging influence on… really, everything. Between them, there is no part of modern human [...]
While googling up another arcane feature of the Atari ST system hardware I stumbled over this: The Flight Simulator History page. It offers a very comprehensive history of all versions of FS and background about its creators, and then in addition pre-built emulator packages so you can go and check out what Flight Simulator looked [...]
If you’ve used an original Atari Joystick back in the 80s, you know that there was something very special about that joystick. I could never figure out what it was, and undoubtedly the ergonomics of every other later joypad/analog stick thingy was far superior. But still… there was something to that old square box, all [...]
I’ve always been fascinated by software emulators. The earliest example I’ve used that I can think of was a ZX Spectrum emulator on an Atari ST around 1987. I had a real Spectrum for some time at that point and had just bought a ST the year before, when I found this program on a [...]