Last year for Hands On, I gutted a defunct TRS-80 Model 100. The goal was to upgrade its 24 kilobytes of RAM and 2.4-megahertz, 8-bit CPU but keep the notebook computer’s lovely keyboard and LCD screen. That article was almost entirely about figuring out how to drive its squirrely 1980s-era LCD screen. I left the […]
Accordions come in many shapes. Some have a little piano keyboard while others have a grid of black and white buttons set roughly in the shape of a parallelogram. I’ve been fascinated by this “chromatic-button” layout for a long time. I realized that the buttons are staggered just like the keys on a typewriter, and […]
This month we’re celebrating the launch of our second PDF collection of Hands On articles, which IEEE members can download from IEEE Spectrum’s website and share with friends. So we thought we’d take a look at the relative popularity of Hands On articles published over the last five years and share the top 15 projects […]
Last year I picked up a Tandy Model 100 at the Vintage Computer Festival East for about US $90. Originally released in 1983, it was the forerunner of today’s notebook computers, featuring a good-quality keyboard and LCD display. It could run for 20 hours on four AA batteries and a month on standby. Thanks to […]
The spacecraft that took men to the surface of the moon and back relied on computers that pushed the state of the art when they were built. Designed by MIT, the Apollo Guidance Computers came with 72 kilobytes of ROM and 4 kilobytes of RAM. This memory used a form of magnetic core memory, where […]
It’s a tough time in electronics manufacturing, especially for small outfits. The Great Semiconductor Shortage is driving up the cost of components—if they can be found at all. But Stefany Allaire has not been deterred, delivering products and developing new ones for her dedicated community of customers. Allaire runs Feonix Retro Systems, which caters to […]
45 years ago, mass produced computers exploded onto the global stage as a harbinger of the digital future. And they’ve never really lost that futuristic shine, with every major announcement in hardware or software touting how the latest product will shape the world of tomorrow, albeit most likely in the form of a new phone […]