In August 2022, I joined up with Ars Technica as their AI and Machine Learning Reporter. Of course, even while documenting one of the wildest cutting-edge stories in tech at the moment, my heart never strays far from the subject of this site: vintage technology and the history behind it.

In between writing about AI at Ars over the past 8+ months, I’ve had the chance to occasionally write a piece about tech history or nostalgia (23 in total so far). To capture them all in one place, I’ve created a tag called “retrotech” for all of those articles at Ars. To check them out, click this link.

Here’s a fun one I did not too long ago: Egad! 7 key British PCs of the 1980s Americans might have missed.

So if you’re interested, keep an eye on the “retrotech” tag and follow along there. In a way, it’s kind of an extension of what I did on Vintage Computing and Gaming back in the day, albeit this time I make a full-time living and get health benefits. That’s quite an upgrade!

As I usually mention in posts on here for the past few years, I’m sorry that I’ve let VC&G wither with neglect. I’m not shutting it down since there is so much historically valuable content here (especially interviews and comments), and our Patreon supporters keep these archives online. Thanks for your continued support over the past 18 years!

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P.S. Did you see this piece that lists out all of the tech history work I did at How-To Geek between 2020 and 2022? Pretty cool.

Atari founders circa 1972-73 (from left to right):
Ted Dabney, Nolan Bushnell, Larry Emmons, and Allan Alcorn

[ Atari Pong turns 50 years old today, and I thought it might be fun to revisit an article I wrote about the game’s creation for Edge Magazine (Issue 248) back in 2012. Since the web version of that piece is no longer online and I retained the rights, I am republishing it here. –Benj ]

Forty years ago this November, Atari introduced the world’s first video game sensation, Pong. The game, while not the first of its kind, would provide the economic catalyst necessary to jump start a completely new industry.

In 1971, Nolan Bushnell and his partner Ted Dabney created the world’s first commercial arcade video game, Computer Space, for California coin-op manufacturer Nutting Associates. It made a minor splash in the arcade market, but it was not wildly successful.

For round two, Bushnell wanted to follow up with a driving game for Nutting, but he quickly found himself at odds with Nutting’s executive staff about the direction of the company’s video game products. He resigned from the company, taking Ted Dabney with him.

Bushnell began to shop his driving game idea around to other American coin-op makers. Bally, then the largest arcade amusement company in the US, showed interest in the idea. The firm awarded Bushnell and Dabney — then doing business under a partnership named “Syzygy” — a contract to develop a video game and a pinball table. Syzygy would create the video game design and license it to Bally, who would produce the hardware and sell it under the Bally name.

Under the new contract, Atari received $4,000 a month to develop the two games, which gave just enough financial room to hire an employee. Recognizing his limitations as an engineer, Bushnell reached out to Allan Alcorn, a former colleague from Ampex, and asked him to join the company.

Alcorn, then 24 years old, accepted the offer to work for Syzygy in June 1972. It was a risky move at the time, but after a few years at Ampex, Alcorn had grown bored with his work. He was ready for a new challenge at a startup company, and both Bushnell and Dabney recognized his considerable talents as an engineer.

That same month, Bushnell and Dabney incorporated their company under a new name, Atari, Inc., and set out to change the world of arcade entertainment forever.

[ Continue reading [ VC&G Anthology ] The Making of Pong (2012) » ]

[ Phillip Heller is a member of the Prodigy Preservation Project. Here, he writes about his progress since Part 1 in January. –Benj ]

Reverse engineering Prodigy is not without challenges. Though the patent describes the communications protocol and the TBOL language well, it lacks detail of the application protocols – that is, the communications between the Reception System and the server-side applications like Logon, Enrollment, Messaging, and so on.

The progress made last time was to implement the communications protocols and to get the reception system to think it was connecting to the server. Now, we need to move beyond that.

After several months on other projects, I’ve freed up some time, made some significant progress, including successful Reception System login, which I’ll detail below.

[ Continue reading Reverse Engineering Prodigy, Part 2 » ]

“Now computing can be fun and easy for the entire family.”

The Tandy Sensation was an early attempt at a specialized Multimedia PC. In this case, Tandy came up with a 25 MHz 486SX computer with a 107 MB hard drive, built-in CD-ROM drive, stereo sound card, a voice/fax modem, SVGA color graphics, and more.

All this for $2,199 US with a SVGA monitor included (that’s about $4,232 today). You could also get the MMS-10 Stereo Speaker/Amplifier for $79.95. It seemed so futuristic at the time.

The Sensation also shipped with the interesting WinMate interface, a successor to DeskMate that ran on top of Windows 3.1.

I miss the ebullient joy of Radio Shack computer bundles aimed at families. They always seemed so fun. I remember seeing the Sensation in a local Raleigh, NC Radio Shack store circa 1993 and wanting one.

By the way — Merry Christmas!

Discussion Topic: Have you ever owned a Tandy IBM compatible PC? Tell us about it.

In Memoriam: Clive Marles Sinclair (1940-2021)
British inventor, Founder of Sinclair Research, Creator of Sinclair computers

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See Also:
RSOTW: Where’s the Bits? (2008)
RSOTW: Memotech ZX81 Modules (2014)

In the mid-1990s, my dad gave me a Hewlett Packard HP 95LX he bought from a friend and never used. The HP 95LX (1991) is a really cool handheld PC that runs DOS from ROM.

While looking for 95LX software around 1997 (according to the file dates, although it’s very possible I grabbed them earlier), I went on CompuServe and downloaded a passel of shareware games, amusements, and utilities that were designed specifically for the HP 95LX. Many of them were programmed by David K. Goodman, and they mostly date from 1991 and 1992.

[ Continue reading HP 95LX Games From CompuServe in the 1990s » ]

I joined How-To Geek in February 2020, and I’ve been regularly writing tech history-related features in addition to my usual how-to pieces. At the moment, they’re usually published every Monday or on special anniversaries.

Since my first post and second post detailing my history-related How-To Geek articles, I’ve written 46 more pieces that may be of interest to VC&G readers (bringing the total to 66, I think). Man, I’ve been busy! This is the kind of writing I always wanted to do for Vintage Computing and Gaming if my Patreon had ever been fully funded. Luckily, I’ve got a great thing going at How-To Geek.

I realize this list is almost incomprehensibly long, so I’ll try to break it into categories. I also wanted to have a record of all of them in one place, which will help when referring to them in the future.

[ Continue reading Wowzers! 46 More How-To Geek History Articles » ]

Now you’re playing with…glowing robot hands?!

Brother and sister are finally getting along with “Multiple Player Action.”

A friend recently noticed I haven’t posted a new Retro Scan since 2019 (by the way—wasn’t 2020 hell?), so I thought I’d dig through the archives and look for something fun. My scanner isn’t even hooked up at the moment. That’s how long it’s been!

Here’s a nice high-resolution scan of the Nintendo Game Boy box art, front and back, that I scanned a few years ago for an article. One of the most fascinating things about it for me is how the text on the back refers to the Game Boy’s D-pad as a “cross key joystick.” As far as I know, this is the first and only time I’ve seen it described that way. So maybe that’s the official Nintendo term for the D-pad?

I know I’ve let this site wither on the vine for too long, but I’m glad some people are still out there reading it. Hope you enjoy the scan.

Discussion Topic: What’s your favorite Game Boy game?

[ Please welcome Phillip Heller, VC&G’s newest contributor, who is a member of the Prodigy Preservation Project. Phillip will post more updates on his progress here in the future. –Benj ]

Beginning in the mid 1980s, there were a number of online “walled gardens”. Among them were CompuServe, Genie, Delphi, Quantum Link (later PC-Link, AOL, etc), and Prodigy. The latter two were interesting in that they relied on specific client software to access the service.

Quantum Link was certainly novel for the fact that it furnished a graphical online experience for the Commodore 64, and Prodigy was novel for its use of the NAPLPS graphics standard, client-side P-Code virtual-machine, and hierarchical caching. In the early 2000s, some folks nostalgic for Q-Link set out to reverse engineer it, which was a success with Q-Link Reloaded launching sometime in 2005.

It’d be interesting to do a similar thing with Prodigy: To reverse engineer the client and rebuild a mock server with enough functionality to enable those interested to relive another one of the experiences of the early commercial online world. This is the first in a many part series about doing just that.

[ Continue reading Reverse Engineering Prodigy, Part 1 » ]

Greetings, fellow retro tech fans. 15 years ago today, I launched Vintage Computing and Gaming. The origins of the site have been well-covered elsewhere, so I’ll spare you the rehash.

While I haven’t updated the site all that much over the past five years (since our big 10th anniversary celebration back in 2015), I still thought it would be nice to mention this anniversary. As you can see, VC&G is still online, and we still gets lot of legacy traffic from our old posts. In particular, I feel that this site’s archive of comments are a priceless historical record of people’s memories of the past. The server still costs money to keep running, and generous folks on Patreon make that possible without advertisements.

And even though I only post on VC&G a few times a year these days, the site is still not dead. Our patron saint Steve Wozniak recently posted on the site, marking a sort of full-circle fulfillment of how much my career has changed since I started the site 15 years ago. Back then, I had no idea I’d still be talking and writing about vintage computers and retrogaming 15 years later, or that it would became a career path. It’s mind-boggling to think of all the historical tech achievements that have taken place in the past 15 years, and now this site itself is vintage.

So what’s next for VC&G? I’m not quite sure yet. I plan to keep it up as long as I can, and I’ll post on it when I have something to share that I can’t post anywhere else. For example, I’ve recently been experimenting with setting up the TTL RGB input on one of my old monitors. I might put some of that info on here at some point so it doesn’t get lost. And my wife wants me to try doing some YouTube some day. Not sure when I’ll ever do it (and the topic is so well-covered by others), but if I do, you’ll hear about it on this site.

Other than that, it seems retrogaming and vintage computing are both covered very well all over the Internet now (on YouTube, Reddit, Twitter, Facebook, Discord, and more), unlike back in 2005, so I don’t feel like the world needs VC&G as much as it did then. But this site has served its purpose, and the old posts and scans still continue to serve as a valuable historical resource for people. I don’t know why but I almost felt a tear well up inside this old vintage head of mine.

Anyway, if anyone is still out there and still reading this site, thanks for sticking with VC&G for so long. I’m grateful to have had you along on this 15-year journey. If you have the time, I’d love to hear some of your memories about your favorite VC&G posts of the past in the comments. Happy Birthday, Vintage Computing and Gaming!