(Please note all images can be clicked to enlarge) Like many who ventured into the newly emerging field of Computer Art in the 1970s, Marcus West did not come with a formal background in the Arts. Instead, a strong curiosity to test the boundaries of his mathematical and programming knowledge meant his art ultimately found...Read More

The other day I happened across a great piece of forgotten communication technology from the 1980s called the ‘Interlaser’ by a small UK company named Modular Technology Ltd. This had been an optical communication system which could send either data or multiple phone lines back and forth via a beam of light up to 1km...Read More

This piece is the culmination of many hours of research so far. Feel free to share but please be kind and attribute HistoricTech.com In 1949 a 24-year-old Welsh computer scientist named Donald Watts Davies created an electro-mechanical version of the classic game of Noughts and Crosses (Tic-Tac-Toe). A colleague of Alan Turing, Davies’ simple intention...Read More

(written for West Country Life Magazine) The years between the 1960s to late 1970s saw a revolution in computers, not just in their size and ability to conduct ever more complicated tasks, but in our whole perception of what a computer was really for. The noted technology commentator Howard Rheingold has called machines from this...Read More

Think of Artificial Intelligence and the 1950s and visions of Robbie the Robot or apocalyptical futurescapes are immediately brought to mind. Indeed, if we believe the Sci-fi movies and books of the time then this was an era standing on the precipice grappling with the very fundamentals of humanity and automation. In truth, if we...Read More

Up until the invention of electronic valve computers after WW2, the world was largely run by analogue computers. These machines worked off the time-honoured tradition of carefully engineered interlocking moving parts that were manually triggered to give a certain intended result. Some, like the aircraft and missile trajectory machines used by ground and air defence...Read More

Ken Sadler was a young Industrial Design Graduate from the Royal College of Art in late 1960 when he was asked to join the small but influential design consultancy firm of Wilkes & Ashmore in Horsham, West Sussex. Headed up by Ted Wilkes and Peter Ashmore, the firm had been making a name for itself...Read More

It is fair to say that peripherals rarely get as much adoration as the computers they support, but back in late 1963 when English Electric LEO Computers (EELC) released their Lector they were more than happy to announce it as “…the computer users dream come true”.  Lector was an early Optical Mark Recognition (OMR) machine...Read More

Back in the 1960s and 70s there were two types of electronic gadget you could buy- the slick and finished product and the do-it-yourself kit. While the finished item would naturally cost more and appeal to a lazy public who didn’t care what was inside the shiny plastic case (just so long as it worked),...Read More

If I asked you to think of a valuable magazine you would probably think of a 1960s copy of Melody Maker hand-signed by the Fab Four, or even a mint copy of the first edition of Superman. These are of course highly valuable and coveted items, but I bet very few people would ever go...Read More