Over the past year I took some time to cover every episode of the 1983 Canadian TV series “Bits and Bytes.” This was a television program designed to give its viewers some insight into the then-new home computer scene, covering basic principles of computing, showing some things you can do with various computers of the […]
Ah, now we’re getting into one of the more interesting nuances of the 80’s computer scene – graphics! While today our systems simply use software to create everything we see on screen, with hardware doing the raw math to make it all happen, back in those days, you didn’t have processing power, memory, or, well, […]
Ah, the Commodore 64. The best selling computer of all time, one that most anyone involved in the classic gaming scene is aware of, and those into old computers certainly must have at least tried to experience. What a better way to do this holiday than to go back to 1982/1983 and experience the in-store […]
Computers, explained in their most simplest form, perform tasks they are told to do – namely, calculations. Put enough calculations together, and you can do some interesting things. Telling the machine to do these various tasks one element at a time, though, would be an intense process. Instead, we use various programming languages to write […]
One thing that all computers do in some form is store data, be it programs we install on them, or data we generate ourselves using these programs. This is, of course, by design – computers are tools to help us do work (or at least, that’s why they are made, whether or not we use […]
Returning to Bits and Bytes, we step into the land of ready made programs: that is, software that you just put in and run. You don’t have to write it yourself in basic. Of course, this is how computers are for us today, naturally – we have everything we could ever need, and probably more, […]
It’s time to head back to 1983, to a time when the PC as we know it was in its infancy, and the home computer market was still dominated by the likes of Commodore, Atari, Apple (pre Macintosh, mind you), and Tandy (at least, here in the North American market – it was a slightly […]
Before E3, there was (and still is) a tech industry event known as the Consumer Electronics Show, or CES. This show is exactly what it sounds like, a trade exposition where new consumer technology is shown off, much of the time in some active state, be it simply a demo version, beta software, or just […]
Last week, I finally took the plunge into old-school computer usage by perusing various Bulletin Board Systems (BBSes) via Telnet. Always fascinated by the early days of “modern” computer usage, I wanted to experience the pre-internet digital community as best as I can in 2016, and since then, have been hunting around off and on […]