While most hams and hackers have at least heard of Heathkit, most people don’t know the strange origin story of...
History
The Vectrex console from the early 1980s holds a special place in retrocomputing lore thanks to its vector display —...
Over the decades there have been many denominations coined to classify computer systems, usually when they got used in different...
There’s something magical about the clunk of a heavy 1950s portable radio – the solid thunk of Bakelite, the warm...
S/Sgt Betty Vine-Stevens, Washington DC, May 1945. On 31 March of this year we had to bid farewell to Charlotte...
Somewhere between the period of 1999 and 2007 a plague swept through the world, devastating lives and businesses. Identified by...
When the AMSAT-OSCAR 7 (AO-7) amateur radio satellite was launched in 1974, its expected lifespan was about five years. The...
We used to say that fixing something was easier than bringing up a design for the first time. After all,...
If you’re familiar with Java here in 2025, the programming language you know is a world away from what Sun...
Shortwave radio has a charm all its own: part history, part mystery, and a whole lot of tech nostalgia. The...
By the beginning of the 20th century scientists were only just beginning to probe the mysteries of the atomic world,...
We hear a lot about how ham radio isn’t what it used to be. But what was it like? Well,...
Portability has been a goal of a sizable section of the computing world for many decades now. While the obvious...
With so many cheap oscilloscopes out there, the market for old units isn’t what it used to be. But if...
At the height of the Cold War, those of us on the western side of the wall had plenty of...
In ham radio, we often use Handie-Talkie or HT to describe a compact, handheld transceiver. My first exposure to the term Handie-Talkie was when...
Brian Justin, Jr., WA1ZMS, of Forest, Virginia, will operate experimental station WI2XLQ on 486-kHz AM for the Reginald Fessenden commemorative...
For home computer users, the end of the 1980s was the era of 16-bit computers. The challenge facing manufacturers of...
We usually think of a hydraulic system as fully self-contained, with a hydraulic pump, tubing, and actuators filled with a...
Opinion The oldest functional off-Earth space hardware? Well, that is a great question for those into pub quizzes, aka bar trivia....
These days, not only are oscilloscopes very common, but even a cheap instrument today would have been the envy of...
To commemorate the centenary of this historic contact made by Goyder and Bell, Mill Hill School will be hosting working...
For some time now, Apple has developed a reputation for manufacturing computers and phones that are not particularly repairable or...
The Geochron World Time Indicator is a clock that doubles as a live map of where the sun is shining...
Despite the rise of ARM processors in more and more computers from embedded systems to daily driver PCs, the x86...
