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…
Tag: old school
Interesting look at retro (and pre-retro) calculators and calculating machines of yesteryear
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 video arcade game
Galaxian video arcade game
Dig Dug video arcade game
Phoenix video arcade game
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.…