Benj Edwards    How surveillance capitalism and DRM turned home tech from friend to foe. For a while in the ’ s, ’ s, and early s it felt like nerds were making the world a better place. Now, it feels like the most successful tech companies are making it worse. Internet surveillance, the algorithmic...

Benj Edwards    Clip art collections from the early s are today’s forgotten cultural time capsules, freezing life three decades ago as digital illustrations full of obsolete tech, vintage fashions, and more. Just for fun, let’s explore computer art from a time just before the Internet hit it big. Benj’s note...

Benj Edwards    Platform Studies book from Zagal and Edwards launches May , . Attention video game fans I co wrote an MIT Press Platform Studies book called Seeing Red: Nintendo’s Virtual Boy with Dr. Jose Zagal, and it’s coming out May th of this year. You can pre order it now on Amazon if you’re wild...

Benj Edwards    Benj’s note I originally wrote this in and had it sitting around until now. I still think it might be useful to someone in the future, so I decided to publish it. Many Americans alive today witnessed one of the most dramatic cultural transitions since the invention of the printing press...

Benj Edwards    In August , 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...

Benj Edwards    Atari founders circa from left to right :Ted Dabney, Nolan Bushnell, Larry Emmons, and Allan Alcorn Atari Pong turns 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 back in . Since the web version...

Phillip Heller    Phillip Heller is a member of the Prodigy Preservation Project. Here, he writes about his progress since Part 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...

Benj Edwards    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 MHz SX computer with a MB hard drive, built in CD ROM drive, stereo sound card, a voice fax modem, SVGA color graphics, and...

Benj Edwards    In Memoriam: Clive Marles Sinclair British inventor, Founder of Sinclair Research, Creator of Sinclair computers See Also: RSOTW: Where’s the Bits RSOTW: Memotech ZX Modules

Benj Edwards    In the mid s, my dad gave me a Hewlett Packard HP LX he bought from a friend and never used. The HP LX is a really cool handheld PC that runs DOS from ROM. While looking for LX software around according to the file dates, although it’s very possible I grabbed them earlier , ...