Sinco's retro tech stuff

I post retro adverts and snippets from magazines cause why not?

[sinclair-speccy]

An introduction to my account?

Hey there! If you’re into old-school tech, you’ve come to the right place. I post vintage ads found in magazines online and etc 80s, 90s, 2000s and sometimes 2010s that made tech history look way cooler.

Drop by, reblog or whatever. I’m also active and do the same stuff on Mastodon. I try to post every day but I gotta fill my queue up at times

[bak3lite]

[thevaultoftheatomicspaceage]

[sinclair-speccy]

Genuine question I keep coming back to: if your favourite old OS had never been discontinued and just kept getting developed normally with proper modern hardware support, security patches and so on, which one would you actually want to daily drive today?

For me it's a tossup between Windows XP and Windows 7. I used both of them a lot when I was younger and honestly they felt basically the same to me at the time, but Windows 7 always seemed a bit easier to navigate.

[sinclair-speccy]

Genuine question I keep coming back to: if your favourite old OS had never been discontinued and just kept getting developed normally with proper modern hardware support, security patches and so on, which one would you actually want to daily drive today?

For me it's a tossup between Windows XP and Windows 7. I used both of them a lot when I was younger and honestly they felt basically the same to me at the time, but Windows 7 always seemed a bit easier to navigate.

[never-obsolete]

Canon ELURA Wired - May 1999

[yoan-le-grall]

[stone-cold-groove]

Mattel Electronics product catalog - 1982.

[yodaprod]

Trying to look natural while carrying your 33lbs laptop

[retrocgads]

Joan Of Arc / Hollywood Poker Pro / Journey To The Centre Of The Earth / Bad Cat (aka Street Cat)

Rainbow Arts Ltd. (reLINE Software / Chip) UK 1990

[krjpalmer]

A+ January 1986

Linking your Apple computer (II or Mac) to an "IBM in business" world provided the feature stories for this issue. After articles on networking and file exchange, the Macintosh section compared the $1795 MacCharlie, a "headless PC" sized to fit alongside a Mac, with the $695 Abaton Drive 5.25, which could read from and write to IBM PC disks and which did contain a Z80 microprocessor which you could communicate with using your own terminal program to run CP/M software.

[sinclair-speccy]

[retrocgads]

Risc User magazine

Beebug Ltd UK 1990

[retrocgads]

Midnight Resistance

Ocean Software Ltd (Data East Corporation) UK 1990

[retrocgads]

Adidas Championship Football / Tie Break

Ocean Software Limited (Starbyte Software) UK 1990

[krjpalmer]

Portable 100/200/600 March 1986

The "Inside the Model 100" article illustrated on the cover of this issue was less general than you might think from the picture: excerpted from a book, it specifically described how the 80C85 CPU "communicated with the rest of the world" through input/output ports. There was an article that involved opening up the computer, though: the purpose of that was to modify the hardware so that nickel-cadmium batteries would recharge when the power adapter was also plugged in. (My family made that modification to our Model 100. While I did dismantle it myself not that long ago to extract the circuit board and mail it off for capacitor replacement, I have to admit that since switching to nickel-metal hydride batteries, I've been swapping in batteries recharged in a modern device instead of seeing what happens when the modification passes current through them...)

[thevaultoftheatomicspaceage]

Bell Telephone Labs “Music From Mathematics” (1960) This is a piece of computer music history, with early examples of music generated by and performed on computers 50 years ago