Tag: retro

I had the famous Utah teapot engraved in crystal.

I’ve been re-creating Robert Tinney’s Byte magazine paintings as photographs. My latest work is “Software”. There are a few interesting stories to go with this one.

I’ve been re-creating Robert Tinney’s Byte magazine paintings as photographs. My latest work is “CPU Architectures”.

If you’ve used computers from the 70s and early 80s, you’re probably familiar with the classic Star Trek game. What very few people know, is that there was another, very different Star Trek game at the same time. It was script-based, and it gave you a feeling of actually being in an episode of Star Trek. I’ve been looking for this game for over 40 years, and it appeared as if had ceased to exist. Until now. A copy – possibly the only one in the world – has been found. So let’s take a look … at the other…

  I re-created the classic Star Trek game for the VT52. And it demonstrated how much I’ve changed as a programmer in 42 years.

If you have one of the SYM-1 Expansion Boards I’ve made, here’s some useful information I’ve gathered for it.

With tech from the 2020s, I dragged a SYM-1 kicking and screaming into the 1980s so that it could play a game from the 1970s.

There’s a guy on Etsy with a working ASR-33 Teletype, and he’ll make printouts and punched paper tape strips for you. (In Soviet Union, paper tape punches you!)

I’ve been re-creating Robert Tinney’s Byte magazine paintings as photographs. My latest work is “Inside IBM”.

I brought a Wang 360 calculator console back to life with a modern “Electronic Package”. Not only does it emulate the original Wang calculator’s behavior, but it can operate as a nixie clock or as a Reverse Polish Notation calculator.

My daughter and I went to a class in making fused glass art. I made an IMSAI 8080. Everyone else was making landscapes and animals. Are they weird or what?

There are zillions of nixie clocks on the web, so I’ll just discuss the atypical features and problems I encountered.

What if the beautiful, surreal paintings that graced the covers of Byte magazine were not merely figments of Robert Tinney’s imagination, but existed in real life? And what if someone photographed them?

This is not a Hewlett-Packard logic analyzer. It’s a Core i5 Windows PC.

The cover of the July 1977 issue of Byte magazine showed a train chugging around a printed circuit board (PCB). When I started making PCBs as part of my electronics hobby, I got the idea of re-creating this image as a photograph of a real circuit board with a model train on it. This was a challenging project that involved several different photographic techniques, attention to geometry, model-building, wiring, and more.

40 years ago, everyone hated “IBM cards”. I remember folding, spindling, and mutilating them out of spite. Now, they’re an object of nostalgia. When I got my hands on one of the actual printing plates that was used to print the cards, I had to treat it with the respect and dignity it deserved. So I made it into a pencil holder. And I have some extras so I’m selling them.

One of my most precious possessions is a Heathkit GC-1107 clock I assembled as a kid. But it has some shortcomings: it loses the time and alarm setting if the power is interrupted, and adjusting it for Daylight Saving Time is a pain. So I decided to retrofit it with a GPS receiver to get the correct time.

Many people are turning old hard disks into clocks. They disassemble old disk drives and put a clock mechanism behind the mirrored disc platter. They’re using 3½” disks, so they end up with itty bitty little clocks. I wanted something big enough to hang on the wall and retro enough to satisfy my nostalgia for the computers of my youth.

My neighbor put a working Heathkit oscilloscope out in his trash. Naturally, I rescued it. Time to make another clock!

It’s that time of year again: time to make a calender that appeals to geeks as nothing in the stores can!

According to Google, the search term “sexy calendar” frequently resulted in hits for galacticstudios.org. So to satisfy all you vintage computer pr0n fiends out there, here’s 12 more lovelies for 2011. And you can print them out to make your own calendar!

It’s been observed that each generation thinks it invented sex. Likewise, each generation thinks its video games are classics. Sometimes, you just have to smack these kids upside the head.

When I was a teenager, I wanted to get an Altair 8800 computer, but I couldn’t afford it. Now, I can. But I wanted something smaller, quieter, and about a million times faster. So I made it. I consider this the crowning achievement of my mid-life crisis nostalgia kick.

I needed a new calendar for work. The store had calendars with pictures of seascapes and mountain ranges, Elvis and Marilyn, doggies and dragons, airplanes and starships. Isn’t there anything for software engineers?

  Perhaps I’m a luddite, but I just don’t care for the modern video games. Gimme Lunar Lander or Zaxxon and you can keep your fancy graphics. I built an arcade so I can play the classic games anytime I want.