A Deep Dive Into The Chemistry Of Retrobright: Considerable effort is often required to rejuvenate the yellowed and grungy plastic cases of retrocomputing gear. One generally does well to know their enemy in order to fight it, though, which is where this guide to the chemistry of plastic yellowing and whitening comes in handy.

As We May Think: “Consider a future device … in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility. It is an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory.” – Vannevar Bush

Electronic Computers Within The Ordnance Corps, The Computer Tree: The computer tree shows the evolution of electronic digital computers. The automatic computing and data processing industry is a direct outgrowth of research, sponsored by the U.S. Army Ordnance Corps, which produced the ENIAC, the world's first electronic digital computer. This industry has grown to a multi-billion dollar activity that has penetrated every profession and trade in government, business, industry, and education.

Home Computers Behind The Iron Curtain | Hackaday: I was born in 1973 in Czechoslovakia. It was a small country in the middle of Europe, unfortunately on the dark side of the Iron Curtain. We had never been a part of Soviet Union (as many think), but we were so-called “Soviet Satellite”, side by side with Poland, Hungary, and East Germany.

Preserving Computing’sPast: Restoration andSimulation: Restoration and simulation are two techniquesfor preserving computing systems of historicalinterest. In computer restoration, historical sys-tems are returned to working condition throughrepair of broken electrical and mechanical sub-systems, if necessary substituting current partsfor the original ones. In computer simulation,historical systems are re-created as softwareprograms on current computer systems. (Digital Technical Journal, Volume 8, Number 3, 1996)

Spacewar 1 and the Beginnings of Video Game Aesthetics: Tales of the early days of the first digital video game.

Storing data on a cassette using Arduino and Python (Differential Manchester encoding): I've been building a retro computer, and it's gotten me interested in using cassettes as data storage. This poses an interesting challenge where binary information has to be converted into something that can be written to, and reliably read from, a cassette. We have to worry about immunity to noise (tape hiss), speed fluctuations (wow/flutter), and amplitude fluctuations (dropout). Another limitation is frequency response. Our signal has to stay safely within the range of frequencies a tape can reproduce. This range can be as narrow as 400-4,000Hz for something like a microcassette. We could send a stream of bits at a safe 2kHz, but what if we then have a very long run of all zeros (or ones)? Our signal would dip below 400Hz, and our data would be lost.

The Pac-Man Dossier: What design and AI lessons can we learn from Namco's seminal Pac-Man? From history through behavior, Gamasutra presents a comprehensive Jamey Pittman-authored guide to the classic game.