Sierra On-Line spent most of the 1990s shipping adventure games with names like King’s Quest and Space Quest, then spent one Christmas trying to sell the board those games would run on. Screamin’ 3D reached stores in November 1996 at a suggested price of $199, the only graphics card the Oakhurst studio ever put its name on, and it vanished so completely that plenty of people who owned a Sierra box never knew the company had tried hardware at all.
Sally Gray flew to San Diego in December 1996 for a children’s science show with a name that already sounded like a dare. It’ll Never Work had sent her to the visual arts department at the University of California, and the brief was odd even by the standards of that series. She was supposed to meet one of the most important young painters alive. His name was AARON. He was 23. His work had already hung in serious galleries. He was also a computer program, and Gray introduced him that way on purpose, as if the hardware were a student who had grown up in the department.
Back in the middle of 2006, a small company called Chip PC Technologies started shipping a computer that vanished into the wall. Jack PC occupied the same opening as a standard network jack, behind a faceplate barely larger than a light-switch cover, and every port a desk worker needed sat on that plate. Offices were paying for floor space by the square foot, and a tower under every desk ate room, power, and repair hours. Chip PC, founded in 2000 and based in Ness Ziona, built thin clients for companies that already ran Citrix or Microsoft terminal servers.
Mitsubishi spent the late 1980s and early 1990s stretching the limits of glass and electron guns until a 40-inch direct-view tube became something you could actually buy. The CS4307 belongs to that short, expensive run of sets that sat at the top of the company’s American lineup in the mid-1990s. Few other makers even tried a tube this large for living-room use. Projection sets offered more inches for less money, yet they never matched the punch of a real cathode-ray picture. Owners who wanted the biggest possible image without a projector chose this family of Mitsubishi consoles and paid accordingly.
Japanese company Tamura Electric sold the Lumitime as a stylish desk or wall clock throughout the mid to late 1970s, giving buyers the futuristic look of digital numerals when affordable LED and LCD panels were still dim, tiny, or simply not ready for living rooms. Mark Furneaux opened one of these machines and found no counters, no decoder chips, and no real-time clock module. A synchronous motor tied directly to the 60 hertz household line supplies both power and timing, spinning at a fixed rate so the clock stays accurate as long as the grid stays stable.
Opening a BBC ‘Towards Tomorrow’ special first shown on December 28, 1967 is a warning that mankind may already be obsolete. Population growth, pollution and a planet slipping out of human control could finish the job even without nuclear war. Intelligent machines might have to take Earth off our hands, the narration says, if only to keep life going after we have made a mess of it.
Photo credit: ETZone
Sony shipped the SMC-70 in September 1982 as its first real microcomputer, first in the United States for office work and then in Japan on December 1. Most people walking past a gray-and-silver slab that year would have assumed it belonged to NEC or Sharp. Few realized the company that made Trinitron sets and Walkmans had just entered the personal-computer business with a Z80A running at 4.028 MHz, 64 KB of user RAM, and Sony BASIC already sitting in ROM.
James Channel spent a recent video staring down a piece of Nintendo hardware that was never meant to last. His question is simple and a little unsettling: does the object in his hands still hold a game the rest of the world no longer has? That question only makes sense if you rewind past Satellaview itself and look at how Nintendo spent the late 1980s turning a living-room toy into a communications box.
Radio Shack asked $3,495 in 1983 for a 12-megabyte external Winchester meant to sit beside a TRS-80 Model II, Model 12, or Model 16. That price lands near $11,754 in 2026 money. Clint Basinger of LGR pulled one of those units from long-term storage, cracked the case, and gave it a brief power-on test before packing the vintage hard drive off to a museum.
Forum regulars who had sold and played the GP32 and GP2X decided those machines left too much on the table, so Craig Rothwell, Fatih Kilic, Michael Mrozek (known as EvilDragon), and Michael Weston started sketching a successor, called Pandora, that mixed a proper Linux desktop with real game controls. Dave Cancilier shaped the clamshell case and keymat.