I ve been re-creating Robert Tinney s Byte magazine paintings as photographs. My latest work is Technological Breakthrough . Byte s January 1986 issue had a focus on robotics. Mr. Tinney painted a robot claw hatching out of an egg. As I ve done with several other Byte covers, I re-created Tinney s vision as if it were real, and as if a photographer had been standing next to Tinney as he painted.…
I ve been re-creating Robert Tinney s Byte magazine paintings as photographs. My latest work is Intelligent Reflections . Byte s April, 1985 issue had a focus on artificial intelligence back when we were only a little bit worried it would destroy the world. Mr. Tinney painted a human hand designing a robot claw, while its reflection shows the claw designing a human hand. As I ve done with several…
Adam Rowe has hunted down a lot of Robert Tinney paintings that did not appear on BYTE covers, including the elusive ones that appeared inside issues of BYTE. See his article here. 6/17/2026: Adam has a new article, here, with three more Tinneys I ve never seen before. Scroll halfway down to see them. Elsewhere, there s this.
This is just a quick note that might help someone searching for this information in the future. My Digital Equipment Corporation VT52 worked, but if it were powered on for a few hours, it would fail and start clicking incessantly (that s the sound of the relay it uses for its bell). As the months rolled by, it stopped working entirely it would start its clicking as soon as it was turned on. The…
I built a retro-styled computer with a custom 16 bit CPU that s programmed in a C-Hybrid assembly language. A picture is worth a thousand words, and a demo is worth a thousand pictures.
The November 1966 issue of Electronics Illustrated has a feature article, “Build This Space-Age Decimal Computer. I was inspired to make one of my own. Despite the magazine s hype of it being a computer, it’s really just an adding machine. But I liked its retro look and the way numbers are entered with a telephone dial. My top priority was to make it look like the project in the magazine article.…
I m building a homebrew CPU based on microcode. I made a microcode compiler in Google Sheets. It can easily adapted for other people s microcoding needs. What is microcode? You can find an in-depth explanation of microcode on (of course) Wikipedia. But briefly, a CPU s microcode is implemented in ROM (in my case, EEPROM). It contains the steps required to execute the CPU s instructions. The ROMs…
I made a modern replacement for the Wang 300 series calculator Electronic Package. Not only does it emulate the original Wang calculator s behavior, but it can operate as a nixie clock. The Wang 300 series calculators consisted of an Electronic Package (as Wang called it), where calculations were executed using discrete diode-transistor logic, and up to four keyboard/display consoles. The consoles…
Robert Tinney was in great demand to do covers for companies other than Byte. Here are the ones I have.
I had the famous Utah teapot engraved in crystal. A short video tells the story: