Tag: RETROTECH

Okay, this is our last post from that Vintage Computer Festival, we promise, but we thought there was something kind of beautiful about all those retro keyboards we saw, especially after seeing them through the lens of Matthew McMullen Smith's camera. Take a look at the gallery below and let us know if you agree. (We call first dibs on the all-turquoise and PET computer keyboards!) ...

Last week, we showed you the biggest exhibitions we saw at the Vintage Computer Festival East 2009. Still, we also became mildly obsessed with all the logos we saw on those retro PCs. So, we asked our photographer, Matthew McMullen Smith, to shoot some close-ups of as many retro logos (and vintage fonts) as he could find on the various restored computers that were on display. If you're a ...

digg_url ='http://www.switched.com/2009/09/24/vintage-computers-get-the-classic-car-treatment-at-vcf-east-6/'; We trekked down to the New Jersey shore a couple of weeks ago to attend the Vintage Computer Festival East 6.0, an annual gathering of serious computer enthusiasts who prepare and exhibit working, restored computers from '50s, '60s, '70s and very early '80s ("essentially nothing later ...

Young technophiles may believe that catchy abbreviations, acronyms, and emoticons are new developments, arising because of the character limitations of certain modern means of communication like text messaging and tweeting. But the satirical newspaper 'Puck' actually published the first documented emoticons in 1881, and Abraham Lincoln may have even used one when writing a speech. A joint ...

History is littered with the rotting remains of technology -- some brilliant, some not so much. We've spent plenty of time covering classic gadgets that defy logic and have survived well passed their expected shelf life. But what of the products that never really made it? Or the ones that we wish hadn't? Technologizer has compiled a list of gadgets that were doomed from the moment they set ...

Call us old-fashioned, but there's nothing quite like pulling the ol' photo album down from the bookcase and flipping through the past few decades with friends and family. Sure, perusing pics on Facebook is a surefire way to blow a few hours, but, for our money, physical copies still reign. (This probably explains why that digital photo frame we got for Christmas is still gathering dust in ...

Despite the current recession, some companies and industries remain not only unaffected by discerning shoppers, they're actually thriving. One such industry forging through the difficult economic landscape might come as a complete shock to many consumers, though. Cassette tapes, which many people gave up for dead years ago, still appeal to many consumers, and their sales have actually increased ...

Well, it turns out all these fancy social networking tools we've grown to love so much aren't really all that new. Thanks to projects that have been digitizing newspaper archives, researchers have turned up references to "Face Book" and "Twitter" several decades before the Internet was even a glint in a military scientist's eye. An article from the August 24, 1902 edition of the Boston Daily ...

Maybe it just shows what big dorks we are, but we were fascinated the whole way through Edge-Online's 'The Making Of: PlayStation' article. Some of you may be more than happy to accept that PlayStation exists and never give it any more thought. Others, however, might be interested to know some of the quirks and trivia surrounding the creation and launch of what would become one of the most ...

It seems the economic downturn is dragging out the death of the 56k modem -- it's good news if you're in the dial-up Internet business, but bad news for everyone else. Even as broadband Internet makes its painfully slow march across the American heartland, some are holding on to their painfully slow dial-up connections. Why would someone stick with download speeds that make your first gen iPhone ...

Who doesn't love 'Pong?' Nobody, that's who. That's why we just had to tell you about the Pong Museum, a Web site dedicated to all things 'Pong.' The museum opened its virtual doors on January 27 to celebrate the 40th(ish) anniversary of 'Pong' and the Magnavox Odyssey (the first commercially available video game system). Along with a detailed history of the game and all of its various ...

Before they were mortal enemies, Steve Jobs and Bill Gates were just two big dorks who really liked computers, and each other! Of course, the video (check it out after the break) also predates that whole Windows thing by about seven years. This bizarre dating show, taken from an Apple Event in 1983, features a bunch of software guys in '80s-era-preppy khakis and polo shirts answering questions ...

If you're old enough to remember floppy disks, you're old enough to remember the days of installing programs 1.4 megabytes at a time. A blank CD-R can store something like 500 times that amount of information, and a DVD-R many times more than that, so even we nostalgic old-timers aren't quite willing to go back to the ways of exchanging files by floppy. But, if you're dying for a taste of the ...

Unless you have some unexplained obsession with gadgets of yesteryear, you probably haven't been paying close attention to how many brands of portable CD players your local retailers have been stocking. According to Currys over in the UK, however, it's being pressured to order up truckloads of 'em to satisfy the 50 pervent uptick in demand compared to last year. Moreover, John Lewis (a ...

Shake it like a... well, you know. Since switching to digital, we've often missed the look and feel of prints from our old Polaroid cameras. Sure, you can boot up Photoshop and employ a set of filters and level adjustments to achieve the Polaroid look with the washed out colors and white borders, or you can check out the new Poladroid software. Once you open the app, drag your photos onto the ...