The Retrogaming and Retrocomputing Blogazine
Greetings, fellow retro tech fans. 20 years ago today, I launched Vintage Computing and Gaming. The origins of the site have been well-covered elsewhere, so I’ll spare you the rehash. Just kidding, that was a rehash. I copied and pasted that first paragraph from my 15th anniversary post and changed the number. 🙂 But seriously, […]
How surveillance capitalism and DRM turned home tech from friend to foe. For a while—in the ’80s, ’90s, and early 2000s—it felt like nerds were making the world a better place. Now, it feels like the most successful tech companies are making it worse. Internet surveillance, the algorithmic polarization of social media,
Clip art collections from the early 1990s are today’s forgotten cultural time capsules, freezing life three decades ago as digital illustrations full of obsolete tech, vintage fashions, and more. Just for fun, let’s explore computer art from a time just before the Internet hit it big. [Benj’s note—I wrote this piece years ago, and it […]
Platform Studies book from Zagal and Edwards launches May 14, 2024. Attention video game fans! I co-wrote an MIT Press Platform Studies book called Seeing Red: Nintendo’s Virtual Boy with Dr. Jose Zagal, and it’s coming out May 14th of this year. You can pre-order it now on Amazon if you’re wild about stereoscopic red […]
[Benj’s note — I originally wrote this in 2020 and had it sitting around until now. I still think it might be useful to someone in the future, so I decided to publish it.] Many Americans alive today witnessed one of the most dramatic cultural transitions since the invention of the printing press: The rise […]
In August 2022, I joined up with Ars Technica as their AI and Machine Learning Reporter. Of course, even while documenting one of the wildest cutting-edge stories in tech at the moment, my heart never strays far from the subject of this site: vintage technology and the history behind it. In between writing about AI […]
Atari founders circa 1972-73 (from left to right):Ted Dabney, Nolan Bushnell, Larry Emmons, and Allan Alcorn [ Atari Pong turns 50 years old today, and I thought it might be fun to revisit an article I wrote about the game’s creation for Edge Magazine (Issue 248) back in 2012. Since the web version of that […]
[ Phillip Heller is a member of the Prodigy Preservation Project. Here, he writes about his progress since Part 1 in January. –Benj ] Reverse engineering Prodigy is not without challenges. Though the patent describes the communications protocol and the TBOL language well, it lacks detail of the application protocols – that is, the communications […]
“Now computing can be fun and easy for the entire family.” The Tandy Sensation was an early attempt at a specialized Multimedia PC. In this case, Tandy came up with a 25 MHz 486SX computer with a 107 MB hard drive, built-in CD-ROM drive, stereo sound card, a voice/fax modem, SVGA color graphics, and more. […]
In Memoriam: Clive Marles Sinclair (1940-2021) British inventor, Founder of Sinclair Research, Creator of Sinclair computers — See Also: RSOTW: Where’s the Bits? (2008) RSOTW: Memotech ZX81 Modules (2014)