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How the Computer Works: selected scans of the 1979 book.

NB: don’t trust everything you read.

In the library of nearly-dead-protocols, we come across the dimly remembered tome of Gopher. Developed at the University of Minneasota in the early 1990s, “Gopher was at its height of popularity during a time when there were still many equally competing computer architectures and operating systems. As such, there are several Gopher Clients available for Acorn RISC OS, AmigaOS, Atari MiNT, CMS, DOS, MacOS 7x, MVS, NeXT, OS/2 Warp, most UNIX-like operating systems, VMS, Windows 3x, and Windows 9x. GopherVR was a client designed for 3D visualization, and there is even a Gopher Client MOO object. [emphasis added]”

Sadly, I don’t see back-ports for the Timex-Sinclair or Commodore Pet in there. However, Hyperlink 2.5e is a gopher-supporting C64 web-browser. But the Atari 2600 implementation misses a few critical features.

The boffins down at Royal Pingdom have done it again: a History of PC Hardware in Pictures.

I’m particularly fond of the bowling-ball trackball, and the first laptop - a GRiD Compass, shown on the Space Shuttle (?).

Nobody delivers documentation like IBM did with the IBM PC in 1984.

And they use JavaScript to re-create the Workbench.

Spotted on HN.

Shorpy is the 100 year-old Photoblog. Well, the blog is not 100 years-old.

Found via Dinosaurs and Robots.

The Escapades of Percival ‘Pac’ Man, Esq.

source-code for classic arcade (and console) games. Along with chit-chat.

The Heathkit Virtual Museum (review’d).

My sister likes to live simply, but sometimes she still msses the forest for the trees. “Although it enters from the workshop, there is no electricity in the workshop itself. IE, it couldn’t actually function as a workshop, despite it’s name.”

Her contrarian Brother would like to point out that there are plenty of non-electrically-powered hand-tools that still work in this day and age. First and foremost is the hand-saw. But a rotary hand-crank drill is not hard to find nor use.

And if you’re really hard-core, you can do it the opposite way — turn your power tools into hand-cranked generators!