Companies have been trying to smarten up watches for more than 40 years now. It started with a move to digital numeric displays, then was followed by an avalanche of questionable features, unorthodox designs, and functionality that was passed off… Read More ›
Retro
90s Websites That Still Exist
The idea that once something hits the internet, itâs there forever, isnât true. Things disappear from the internet all the time, from once-thriving online communities being killed when their hosting company goes under, to publications that have their archives wiped,… Read More ›
Springboard: the secret history of the first real smartphone
A decade before Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone, a tiny team of renegades imagined and tried to build the modern smartphone. Nearly forgotten by history, a little startup called Handspring tried to make the future before it was ready. This… Read More ›
The Wild West Days of Phone Design
I do miss the Wild West days of cell phones, before we’d all settled on glass rectangles. It’s always fun to watch competing manufacturers trying to figure out the ideal form for a new thing, and it’s not the home… Read More ›
BBC Micro Elite source code
It covers the original BBC Micro cassette version, the enhanced BBC Micro disc version, the super-fast 6502 Second Processor version, the flicker-free BBC Master version and the cut-down Acorn Electron version, all of which were written by Ian Bell and… Read More ›
20 years of the iPod (a prototype)
Now, there are a lot of mysteries in the Panic Archives (itâs a closet) but by far one of the most mysterious is what youâre seeing for the first time today: an original early iPod prototype… More here. Some excellent… Read More ›
Making the Laptop Commonplace
“People don’t want to lug a computer with them to the beach or on a train to while away hours they would rather spend reading the sports or business section of the newspaper.” Full tweet is here. Kind of funny,… Read More ›
Do They Know It’s Christmas Yet?: They took a trip back to 1984 and broke it.
Thirty-somethings Tash and her brother Jamie didnât mean to time travel back to October 1984, but bizarrely they did on the very day that Bob Geldof watched the BBC news report which moved him to form Band Aid and record… Read More ›
Apple’s biggest disaster
As disastrous as the Newton was from a business perspective I still look at it with some fondness. It feels ahead of its time in terms of how personal it was to use, but strangely for Apple it was much… Read More ›
McGST 