Vintage Technology Collector

A collection of pictures of water in computer games over the last 25 years. You can see how video games went from unrealistic to photo realistic.

Steve Russell, one of the creators of Space War, demonstrates the game at the Computer History Museum. This video was taken during the Vintage Computer Festival 2006. Russell and some friends at MIT wrote Space War between 1960 and 1962. While others had created Pong-like games in the 50's, Space War was the first non-pong video game ever designed. The computer here is a restored DEC PDP-1, which is the original hardware for which the game was designed.

Dr Ashen reviews the Barcode Battler. This device was released in 1991, and competed against other popular hand-held gaming devices such as Sega's Game Gear and the Nintendo Game Boy. The Battler was a rudimentary fighting game that displayed fights as numbers on the screen. To fight you have to swipe special barcode-equipped cards through the console's card reader.

CNET News.com hosts images documents and other things from computing's history being auctioned off.

TechRepublic reports: "The Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif., celebrates a nondescript converted bread truck for its instrumental role in developing the first mobile and wireless Internet connection. News.com's Kara Tsuboi introduces the engineers behind a feat that happened three decades ago this month." I never even heard of the Internet van until I saw this video. Its very interesting if you know nothing about this van.

Inside CRM reports: "Some things were just never meant to be, but that doesn't mean that investors won't pile millions of dollars upon a bad idea — or even a good idea gone bad. Whether they crashed and burned or sucked investors dry, these ventures just didn't work out. Check out our graveyard of dreams and money to get a look at VC (venture-capital) investments that just weren't wise."

PC World reports: "These former technology luminaries have all taken different paths. How different? One's a country doctor, one's a budding movie mogul, and one teaches toddlers--and he's not even alive."