I’ve really been enjoying the newly built Altair I described building from scratch in my recent posts. Many technologists can claim to have built their own computer, but for most that involved assembling components. It felt awesome to write and execute software on a computer I soldered together myself. …

One may have seen my earlier article about deciding to build up a 1975-style Altair 8800 from components. I left off saying parts were arriving and I was soldering away. What seems to always happen to me is that I forget something or order the wrong thing, so I end…

Back in 1975, the release of the Altair 8800 in Popular Mechanics heralded the arrival of the personal computer. Built around the Intel 8080 microprocessor, this Altair could be bought as a kit for $439. The kit had the case, power supply, front panel with LEDs for output and switches…

One may have seen my prior post on Cracking a 35 Year-Old Macintosh Game, wherein I describe cracking Star Trek: The Kobayashi Alternative, only to “find out it was absolute garbage” as one friend and colleague put it. …

One may recall my last post on Reviving a Dead Mac Classic, wherein I repair a damaged Mac Classic. After getting it running again, I wanted to find software for it, and soon ran across the fine folks at macintoshgarden.org. This is one of the main abandonware sites on the…

For the past few years, I’ve had an empty Macintosh Classic shell on a table behind me in my home office, the result of a Macquarium project of mine from 2000. And people love it! During video calls it always made for a good topic of conversation. But people were…