50 Years of Text Games: A deep dive into one text game per year each week of 2021, from The Oregon Trail to A.I. Dungeon.

6502.org: 6502.org is a resource for people interested in building hardware or writing software for the 6502 microprocessor and its relatives.

A history of the microcomputer industry in 300 adverts

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace: By John Perry Barlow.

Archives if IT: In-depth experiences of the people who influenced the development of IT in the UK.

Assembly Tutorials: Don't just use that old computer to play the same old games… why not learn to make some new ones, and learn lots of new things about it! Learn about the basics of the processor… and then learn about how to program the hardware of many of the most popular systems that used that processor! All lessons have a text document, a matching Youtube Video, and a discussion forum entry, so you can learn by Reading or Watching and Discussing!

Bit Preserve: Recreating classic computer schematics. Let's convert all those random scanned PDFs into a modern, editiable and re-usable format.

bitsavers.org: As of January, 2019 there are over 98500 files including over 4.7 million text pages in the archive.

Caps Wiki: Welcome to Caps Wiki! This site is dedicated to cataloging and sharing information on repairing devices. It's named “Caps” wiki because in older electronics capacitors are one of the more common causes of problems. But any repair information such as ICs, batteries, belts, 3D printer models, or more for devices of any age is welcome to be put here!

Charles Babbage Institute: The Charles Babbage Institute (CBI) is an archives and research center dedicated to preserving the history of information technology and promoting and conducting research in the field.

chipdb.org: This page compiles and sorts pictures of known CPU:s and is mainly a tool for cpu-collectors to get a view of what there is to collect, but also a great historical document over the development of the CPU. The library is no way near completion and there are many chips still missing, but will be added over time!

Chronology of Personal Computers: This document is an attempt to bring various published sources together to present a timeline about Personal Computers.

Columbia University Computing History: A Chronology of Computing at Columbia University.

Commodore International Historical Society: Documents archive.

Computers in Spaceflight: The NASA Experience: NASA never asked for anything that could not be done with the current technology. But in response, the computer industry sometimes pushed itself just a little in a number of areas. Just a little better software development practices made onboard software safe, just a little better networking made the Launch Processing System more efficient, just a little better operating system made mission control easier, just a little better chip makes image processing faster. NASA did not push the state of the art, but nudged it enough times to make a difference. Mirror: https://history.nasa.gov/computers/contents.html

CPU11: This CPU11 repository contains the results of historical PDP-11 microprocessors reverse engineering.

Data General ECLIPSE S/230 microcode: The Data General ECLIPSE S/230 minicomputer, a competitor to the DEC PDP series, implemented its instruction set in microcode. That is, each assembly-language-level instruction was executed as a sequence of 56-bit microinstructions that were stored permanently in a special memory called the Control Store. The Control Store could accommodate 1024 microinstructions, organized into four pages of 256 microinstructions each.

DEC Microprocessors: Each micprocessor design project is described in greater detail on its own page. Links to chip photographs are provided on the detail pages.

DLH's Commodore Archive: Also Apple, Atari, Digital, IBM, Texas Instrument, etc.

Doug's 1968 Demo - Doug Engelbart Institute: On December 9th, 1968 Doug Engelbart appeared on stage at the Fall Joint Computer Conference in San Francisco's Civic Auditorium to give his slated presentation, titled “A Research Center for Augmenting Human Intellect.” He and his team spent the next 90 minutes not only telling about their work, but demonstrating it live to a spellbound audience that filled the hall. Instead of standing at a podium, Doug was seated at a custom designed console, where he drove the presentation through their NLS computer residing 30 miles away in his research lab at Stanford Research Institute (SRI), onto a large projection screen overhead, flipping seamlessly between his presentation outline and live demo of features, while members of his research lab video teleconferenced in from SRI in shared screen mode to demonstrate more of the system. This seminal demonstration came to be known as “The Mother of All Demos.”

DVG - Il Dizionario dei VideoGiochi (ITA): Il Wiki più Completo della Rete sul Videogaming con 4.000 voci in italiano.

Engineering and Technology History Wiki - Computing and electronics: The Engineering and Technology History Wiki (ETHW) is a website powered by MediaWiki with thousands of articles, first hand accounts, oral histories, milestones, archival documents and lesson plans pertaining to the history of technology. The ETHW is one of the world’s premier sites for the documentation, analysis, and explanation of the history of technology; the scientists, engineers and business people who made these technologies happen; and on the history of the organizations to which these men and women belonged.

https://fsck.technology/

GUIdebook: Graphical User Interface gallery: This site is meant to be an online museum of graphical interfaces, especially those old, obscure and in desperate need of preservation.

Hackerando la Macchina Ridotta (ITA): HMR è un progetto di ricerca in storia dell’informatica. Studia e racconta le tecnologie degli strumenti per il calcolo: calcolatori e calcolatrici (e altro), italiani in particolare (ma non solo). Come particolarità di metodo, alla ricerca d’archivio, allo studio dei manufatti e alla raccolta di testimonianze, HMR aggiunge l’uso dell’informatica (di oggi) in più declinazioni: dal rigore con cui interpretare i fatti partendo dalla piena comprensione delle tecnologie, alla simulazione software per mostrare in funzione le macchine del passato, alla gestione della conoscenza per la catalogazione delle collezioni museali.

History of Computing Information: Information about the history of computing, assembled by Mike Muuss for your information and edification.

History of Computers: Everywhere you turn, you see and hear about the computer, Internet, information age, etc. During the last several decades, the computer has become undoubtedly the most important invention of humankind. Today, virtually all of the world's knowledge is only a few taps away, which is truly mind-blowing. What is the reason for this explosive development—social needs, economic incentives or the dream of humans to create a thinking machine? Who made it possible? When and where did this most important invention actually happened? Who are the pioneers of the computers, networks, and software?

Homebrew Computer Club Newsletters

IBM Archives: The IBM Archives documents the evolution and accomplishments of one of the world's most influential technology companies.

Information Management: A Proposal: This proposal concerns the management of general information about accelerators and experimentsat CERN. It discusses the problems of loss of information about complex evolving systems andderives a solution based on a distributed hypertext system. – Tim Berners-Lee, CERNMarch 1989, May 1990.

Information Mesh: Information Mesh is a web platform celebrating the 30th anniversary of the World Wide Web that explores social, technical, cultural and legal facts throughout different interactive timelines. The timelines present an overview of Web history, starting with the proposal for hypertext by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN in 1989, initially under the name “Information Mesh.” From this start date, users can then explore 30 years of evolution.

Intel 4004 — 50th Anniversary Project: Happy 50th Anniverary to the Intel 4004 microprocessor!

Internet FAQ Archives: This archive contains Usenet Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) postings in HTML format and in text format.

Mailüfterl - DEZIMALER VOLLTRANSISTOR-RECHENAUTOMAT: The Mailüfterl was a fully transistorized, serial, decimal-and-binary drum computer with 50 words of immediate-access core storage. The 3,000-rpm drum stored 10,000 48-bit words. Instructions were of the one-address type, fully utilizing a whole word, as they included references to the core store, condition on execution, and indication of how the address is to be modified or interpreted, etc. Addition took 0.8 ms. Multiplication and division were effected by subroutines, multiplication taking 26 ms. The machine was built by Dr. Heinz Zemanek and his team in Vienna/Austria from 1956 to 1958. The Team members were Heinz Zemanek, Kurt Bandat, Rudolf Bodo, Viktor Kudielka, Kurt Walk, Peter Lucas, and Eugen Mühldorf.

MobyGames: MobyGames is the working name of an extremely ambitious project: To meticulously catalog all relevant information - credits, screenshots, formats, and release info - about electronic games (computer, console, and arcade) on a game-by-game basis, and then offer up that information through flexible queries and “data mining”. In layman's terms, it's a huge game database.

Multicians: The Multicians web site presents the story of the Multics operating system for people interested in the system's history, especially Multicians. The site's goals are to preserve the technical ideas and advances of Multics so others don't need to reinvent them; record the history of Multics, its builders, and its users before we all forget; give credit where it's due for important innovations; remember some good times and good people.

oldcomputers-ddns.org: oldcomputers-ddns.org is for old computers with Z80 like processor and CP/M like operating system mostly.

Olivetti, storia di un’impresa (ITA): “Olivetti, storia di un’impresa“ è un sito dell’Associazione Archivio Storico Olivetti creato nel 2009 riprendendo con il supporto tecnico della società Localport una precedente iniziativa congiunta con Telecom Italia e Pirelli. Nel corso degli anni sono stati sviluppati oltre un centinaio di percorsi illustrati, dedicati alla straordinaria vicenda industriale olivettiana.

Playlists - CHM: CHM's playlists offer curated multimedia resources designed to inform and inspire. Dive deep into a topic that interests you!

Programmers At Work: I’m Susan Lammers, author of Programmers at Work, a book of interviews I wrote and edited back in 1986 when I worked at Microsoft. That was a long while ago….Now I’m putting up this site in an experiment to make the interviews available for reading and discussion.

ps-2.kev009.com: Welcome to ps-2.kev009.com, an archive of old documentation and sites centric to IBM systems. PS/2 and related. RS/6000, pSeries, System P, POWER and AIX. AS/400, AS/400e, iSeries, System i and OS/400, i5 OS, i OS. S/370, S/390, zSeries, System z, and MVS, VM, VSE, TFP, OS/390, z/OS, z/VM.

Radio Shack Catalogs: Views on TRS-80 & Tandy Computer Catalogs.

Recovering Lost Floppy Discs with an Oscilloscope: Recovering “Lost” Floppy Discs with an Oscilloscope — Chris Evans. A presentation at Vintage Computer Festival West — August 8, 2021 — (VCF WEST 2021).

retrocmp: The main focus of this website are the old floppy drives such as the Shugart 860 und 851, the Misubishi M2896-63 or the NEC 1165 (all 8 inch drives).

S100 Computers: Welcome to the S100Computers.com home page. This web site is setup for people who are interested in vintage S-100 bus based computers. This site describes many of the computer boards made for those systems. It also describes new S-100 boards being made today for people that would like to learn, experiment, and use the bus for various uses. There is a core group of users that purchase these boards as bare boards and build functional circuits with them themselves.

Sci.Electronics.Repair FAQ: This site features Samuel M. Goldwasser's latest and greatest “Notes on the Troubleshooting and Repair of…” series of comprehensive repair guides for consumer electronics equipment and other household devices. There is also a great deal of other information of interest to the electronics hobbyist, experimenter, technician, engineer, and possibly even the dentist and poet. Included are the now quite comprehensive and massive “Sam's Laser FAQ”, many new schematics, and links to over 1,000 technology related sites. In addition, there are a variety of documents from other sources on electronics troubleshooting, repair, and other related topics.

SizeCoding: SizeCoding.org is a wiki dedicated to the art of creating very tiny programs for most popular types of CPUs. By “very tiny programs”, we mean programs that are 256 bytes or less in size, typically created by members of the demoscene as a show of programming skill.

Smalltalk Zoo: Here you will find various Smalltalk stories and artifacts that I have collected from many years of building Smalltalk systems at Xerox, Apple, HP, and Disney. This collection began as background material for a paper that I wrote for the ACM's History of Programming Languages conference in 2020. In addition to various papers to read, there are simulations of several generations of Smalltalk that you can run right here in your browser. This will give you an experience of how the user interface and programming tools evolved along with the progress of the language.

STIM - MouseSite: Welcome to the MouseSite, a resource for exploring the history of human computer interaction beginning with the pioneering work of Douglas Engelbart and his colleagues at Stanford Research Institute in the 1960s.

T E X T F I L E S D O T C O M: On the face of things, we seem to be merely talking about text-based files, containing only the letters of the English Alphabet (and the occasional punctuation mark). On deeper inspection, of course, this isn't quite the case. What this site offers is a glimpse into the history of writers and artists bound by the 128 characters that the American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII) allowed them. The focus is on mid-1980's textfiles and the world as it was then, but even these files are sometime retooled 1960s and 1970s works, and offshoots of this culture exist to this day.

Team 6502: The story of the team ​behind the chip that launched a revolution.

Terminals Wiki: Welcome to the terminals wiki! This wiki contains information about the computer peripheral devices referred to as terminals. Terminals have a long history in computing, beginning with modified teletype machines that were used as the operator consoles of early computers. Terminals evolved from the electromechanical teletype to printing terminals with no local processing to CRT video terminals with on screen editing to graphics terminals with a local graphical user interface. What they all share in common is that they interact with a remote computer where the actual work takes place.

The Analytical Engine: These pages are an on-line museum celebrating Babbage's Analytical Engine. Here you will find a collection of original historical documents tracing the evolution of the Engine from the original concept through concrete design, ending in disappointment when it became clear it would never be built. You'll see concepts used every day in the design and programming of modern computers described for the very first time, often in a manner more lucid than contemporary expositions. You'll get a sense of how mathematics, science, and technology felt in the nineteenth century, and for the elegant language used in discussing those disciplines, and thereby peek into the personalities of the first computer engineer and programmer our species managed to produce. If you are their intellectual heir, perhaps you'll see yourself and your own work through their Victorian eyes.

The Art of Unix Programming: This book has a lot of knowledge in it, but it is mainly about expertise. It is going to try to teach you the things about Unix development that Unix experts know, but aren't aware that they know. It is therefore less about technicalia and more about shared culture than most Unix books — both explicit and implicit culture, both conscious and unconscious traditions. It is not a ‘how-to’ book, it is a ‘why-to’ book.

The Autodesk File: Bits of History, Words of Experience.

The BBS Corner: Welcome to The BBS Corner - the only website that offers information on Bulletin Board Systems (BBS) for both the BBS System Operator (SysOp) and the BBS User . We have been offering information, news and files since April 1996.

The birth of the Web: Tim Berners-Lee, a British scientist, invented the World Wide Web (WWW) in 1989, while working at CERN. The web was originally conceived and developed to meet the demand for automated information-sharing between scientists in universities and institutes around the world.

The CP/M 86 and CP/M 80 Museum: This website is a Work In Progress dedicated to CP/M (Control Program for Microcomputers) which was (and is) an operating system similar to MS-DOS but which predated MS-DOS, and which is in fact the operating system that MS-DOS descended from. But CP/M is much more than simply an early version of MS-DOS and CP/M is very much alive in online communities of Enthusiasts and Others who still use CP/M in Old (and sometimes newer) Computers and Emulators.

The Cutting Room Floor: The Cutting Room Floor is a site dedicated to unearthing and researching unused and cut content from video games. From debug menus, to unused music, graphics, enemies, or levels, many games have content never meant to be seen by anybody but the developers — or even meant for everybody, but cut due to time/budget constraints.

The Design of a Relay-Based Computer: This paper describes the design of a computer that I built out of relays. The computer, which was completed in 2005, is documented at http://www.cecs.pdx.edu/~harry/Relay which contains a number of photos and videos.

The Dot Eaters: From what started as a personal passion, The Dot Eaters has become today a trusted source of information about the history of video games. Many books on that topic have referenced The Dot Eaters in their research. Moreover, College and University faculty regularly check the website to look for relevant content. The Dot Eaters has an extensive section about the history of video games, called Bitstory, which is illustrated with many videos and images. It also has a blog called Updates, in which I write about how retro video games continue to resonate in the industry and with players today.

The Evolution of the Unix Time-sharing System: This paper presents a brief history of the early development of the Unix operating system. It concentrates on the evolution of the file system, the process-control mechanism, and the idea of pipelined commands. Some attention is paid to social conditions during the development of the system.

The Giant List of Classic Game Programmers: This is a Who's Who of classic game designers and programmers, where classic refers to pre-NES 8-bit systems: home computers (like the Atari 800 and Apple II), consoles (like the Atari 2600 and Intellivision), and arcade coin-ops. Games for later platforms are included to show the history of designers that started with 8-bit systems.

The Intel 4004 Home: The Intel 4004 Microprocessor and the Silicon Gate Technology. A testimonial from Federico Faggin, designer of the 4004 and developer of its enabling technology.

The Unix Heritage Society: The Unix Heritage Society's aims include: The preservation and maintenance of historical and non-mainstream UNIX systems; The further development of existing UNIX systems; and The continual fostering of the Unix community spirit.

TheRef (tm) Drive and Controller Guide: The purpose of this site is to provide you with the specifications and setup information you'll need to install storage peripherals, such as Hard Drives, Optical Drives, Floppy Drives, and Controllers/Host Adapters.

Thomas Scherrer Z80-Family Official Support Page: The purpose of this page and its sub pages about members of Z80 family (and close relatives) is to collect and share information and good ideas. I know there are lots of people out there, who have developed some good utilities and hardware solutions. Now we all can share this infomation. This page contain docs, FAQs, source code, (cross-)assemblers, (cross-)compilers, utilities, etc. as well as links to other Z80 relevant stuff.

TULARC - Hard Drive Specs: Alps Electric, Ampex, Atasi, Aura, Avastor, Basf Magnetics, Brand, Bull Ag, Calluna, Cdc, Cmi, Cms, Compaq, Comput Network, Conner, Daeyoung, Dec, Epson, Ezi, Fujitsu, Hewlett Packard, Hitachi, Ibm, Imprimis, Integral, Itochu, Jts Corp., Kalok, Kyocera, Lapine, Maxtor, Micropolis, Microscience, Miniscribe, Ministor, MISC, Mitsubishi, Ncl, Nec, Newbury Data, Okidata, Olivetti, Optima, Orca, Plus Develop., Prairietek, Priam, Pti, Quantum, Rodime, Samsung, Seagate, Sequel, Siemens Nixdorf, Singapore, Syquest, Tandon, Tandy, Teac, Toshiba, Vertex, Western Digital, Ye Data, Zsi.

Unix 50 - Nokia Bell Labs: It all started in 1969 when two Bell Labs computer scientists were looking for a new research project. Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie had spent the last half of the decade working on an experimental time-sharing operating system for mainframes called Multics as part of joint research group with General Electric and MIT. The Multics project was high on ambition but fraught with problems leading AT&T to withdraw from the effort. That left Thompson, Ritchie and several other Bell Labs researchers in search of a new problem to solve. They decided to take the best ideas from Multics and implement them on a smaller scale – specifically on a little-used PDP-7 minicomputer at Bell Labs. That summer Unix was born.

Usenet Archives: We are one of the most extensive archives of Usenet newsgroups on the Internet, currently archiving 359 million posts in 11 thousand unique Usenet newsgroups. The free of charge access is possible via the web interface, without a requirement for a third party Newsreader.

Using 8-inch diskette drives with a PC: I have once stumbled upon an interesting article from 2018 published on retrocmp.de, discussing about provisions on connecting an 8″ floppy disk drive to a PC. You know, those huge “boat anchors” that accept flexible disks just four inches shy of an LP record, in exchange of a couple of hundred kilobytes data storage. That sort of type. The experiment there was to connect that big ol’ mainframe-era drive to a normal PC, as to be used under DOS as an archival tool. In 2019, the author got mixed results from his experiments: he was able to fool the system BIOS, tricking the 8″ drive to work with a geometry that of a 5 1/4″ 1,2MB DS HD drive. For the rest, he’d use a proprietary controller card paired with some paid software. As a follow-up to his article, I’ve decided to tinker around on how to have fun with these clunkin’ beasts using a classic PC equipped with a vanilla floppy-disk controller (FDC); without any commercial hardware, software, or some USB controlled thing-a-magic with Windows 10 support. Besides, 8 inch drives predate PCs as we know them, and classic floppy drives with PCs were mostly used during the DOS/Win9x decades. Behold!

Video Game History Foundation: We’re bringing video game history back to life. The Video Game History Foundation is a 501©3 non-profit organization dedicated to preserving, celebrating, and teaching the history of video games. Our archives provide rare material for study, and our advocacy and educational outreach bring everyone together to do their part in celebrating and discovering video game history.

VintADS (ITA): Collezione di brochure e pubblicità d'epoca di strumenti di calcolo.

Vogons Wiki: Welcome to VOGONS Wiki, a reference site covering vintage computer hardware used for playing games that don't run correctly on modern computers. Current goals: Write about the details, advantages, disadvantages and quirks of useful old gaming hardware. Write guides to help get old games running their best. Populate the Device Library with as many devices as possible!

Vintage Computing Map