35 years ago today, in 1984, Apple held an event, appropriately named “Apple II Forever” where they launched the then new Apple IIc, a portable version of the incredibly successful Apple II computer. The event itself was designed to show Apple’s continued commitment to the Apple II computer line in spite of the Macintosh having […]
This is going to be a quick one, but I wanted to update readers who may be interested (all 3 of them) that I did become aware of a few links in my Bits and Bytes article series becoming broken. I had sourced links from 2 different YouTube accounts and one (Canadian Toast, I believe […]
The computers of the 80’s are somewhat well known for the unique sounds they produced. While CD quality audio and digital sound samples are the order of the day now, and have been for several decades, in the early days of computers sounds, and thus, music, were produced via internal hardware that directly generated tones […]
Ah, now we’re getting into one of the more interesting nuances of the 80’s computer scene – graphics! While today our systems simply use software to create everything we see on screen, with hardware doing the raw math to make it all happen, back in those days, you didn’t have processing power, memory, or, well, […]
Wow, we haven’t taken a look at Bits and Bytes since July! Time to get back to it. Bits and Bytes episode 8 deals with Simulation software and games which have an educational lean to them. While being an episode dealing with games, it does touch into some elements of gaming back in the early […]
One set of early applications that the home computers of the early 80’s were exceptional at (given the primitive graphics available) were those that taught something. Known in this video as “computer aided instruction” this episode of Bits and Bytes focuses on some rather impressive instructional programs intended for children, spanning the various major home […]
Alright, finally we’re getting to something that will feel familiar to everyone: networking! More correctly, the pre-internet computer networking methodology known as BBS’s, via literally dialing a number and putting a phone on the modulator-demodulator – a modem, if you are old enough to remember those kinds of things! This episode shows our friend Billy […]
A decade after it’s release, the Apple II, one of the “holy trinity” of affordable microcomputers released in 1977, was still going strong. Constant updates and improvements kept these machines in use far beyond their original designed life, and beyond the life of 8-bit computers on a whole: I dare say in the early 90’s […]