New AMC drama, Halt and Catch Fire, will follow 1980’s personal computer boom

AMC has announced that they ordered up a pilot for a new drama, “Halt & Catch Fire”, that will follow the personal computing boom in its early days. Set in the early 1980’s, Halt & Catch Fire dramatizes the personal computing boom through the eyes of a visionary, an engineer and a prodigy whose innovations…

The first known aid to calculations was the Abacus, used by Sumerians and Egyptians earlier than 2,000 BC (with the possible exception of the Antikythera mechanism). By 1642, the mechanical calculator was invented by Blaise Pascal. By 1902, we had a pushbutton calculator in the form of the Dalton Adding Machine. Here is a pictorial…

Donkey Kong was released by Nintendo in 1981. In the game, Jumpman (renamed Mario soon later) must rescue a damsel in distress, Lady (now named Pauline) from a giant ape named Donkey Kong. The hero and ape later became two of Nintendo’s most popular characters.

Galaxian was developed by Namco in 1979 and was released in the United States in 1980. It was designed to be an improved version of the popular Space Invaders game and went on to become one of the most popular games during the golden age of arcade video games.

Dig Dug was a arcade video game produced by Namco in 1982. The objective of Dig Dug is to eliminate underground-dwelling monsters by inflating them until they pop, or by dropping rocks on them.

Phoenix was a arcade video game developed by Amstar Electronics in 1980. It featured the typical (for the day) top-down fixed shooter similar to Space Invaders. It, along with Galaxian, was one of the first color games and was noted as being the first video game to feature a “boss” character presented in a separate game challenge.…

Williams Defender came out in 1980 with over 60,000 game cabinets made When it came out people thought that it was no possible to pass 70k, later folks would be turning the game over and experiencing the “no die” mode.