Al Williams

Some brand names become the de facto name for the generic product. Xerox, for example. Or Velcro. Teletype was a trademark, but it has come to mean just about any teleprinter communicating with another teleprinter or a computer. The actual […]

You don’t have to know how a car engine works to drive a car — but you can bet all the drivers in the Indy 500 have a better than average understanding of what’s going on under the hood. All

If you ask someone who grew up in the late 1970s or early 1980s what taught them a lot about programming, they’d probably tell you that typing in programs from magazines was very instructive. However, it was also very boring

We have often wondered if people dreamed in black and white before the advent of photography. While color pictures eventually became the norm, black and white TV was common for many years. After all, a TV set was a big

According to [MTSI], if you used a Z80 chip back in the 1980s, it almost certainly passed through the sole Fairchild Sentry 610 system that gave it the seal of approval. The Sentry was big iron for its day. The

If you want to add humidity and temperature sensors to your home automation sensor, you can — like [Maker’s Fun Duck] did — buy some generic ones for about a buck. For a dollar, you get a little square LCD

In the modern age, when you hear “component tester” you probably think of one of those cheap microcontroller-based devices that can identify components and provide basic measurements on an LCD screen. However, in the past, these were usually simple circuits

Before flat screen technologies took over, we associate TV with the CRT. But there were other display technologies that worked, they just weren’t as practical. One scheme was the Nipkow disk, and [Bitluni] decided to build a working demonstration of

If you ever played an arcade game and wondered what was inside that joystick you were gripping, [Big Clive] can save you some trouble. He picked up a cheap replacement joystick, which, as you might expect, has a bunch of

[Classic Microcomputers] read in a book that there was a computer-generated film made in the late 1960s, and he knew he had to watch it. He found it and shared it along with some technical information in the video below.