Digital Retro: The Evolution and Design of the Personal Computer
It's easy these days to take the Internet, ludicrous processing power, massive hard disk capacities, cloud computing and mobile connectivity for granted. Back in 'the day' things were very different. Gordon Laing's well researched and elegantly designed homage to lots of different, lovely but defunct hardware from the era of "Home" as opposed to "Personal" Computers.
The book celebrates the aesthetics of these machines - text information is minimal but pertinent, and anyone with even a passing interest in electronics, design, games platforms or valiant commercial flops would find facinating.
Taking a look at the table of contents should tell you everything you want to know about this book:
A brief history of computers:
MITS Altair 8800
Commodore PET 2001
Apple II
Atari VCS
Tandy Radio Shack TRS–80
NASCOM 1
Sharp MZ–80K
Atari 400/800
Texas Instruments TI–99/4
Mattel IntelliVision
Tangerine Microtan 65
HP–85
Sinclair ZX80
Acom Atom
Commodore VIC–20
Sinclair ZX81
Osborne 1
IBM PC
BBC Micro
Commodore 64
Sinclair ZX Spectrum
Coleco Vision
GCE / MB Vectrex
Grundy NewBrain
Dragon 32
Jupiter ACE
Compaq
Portable
Apple Lisa
Oric–1
Mattel Aquarius
Nintendo Famicom
Sony MSX
Apple Macintosh
Sinclair QL
Amstrad CPC–464
IBM PC AT
Tatung Einstein
Atari ST
Commodore Amiga
Amstrad PCW
Sega Master System
Acorn Archimedes
NeXT Cube
1989 to present day
The design of this coffee-table book means you can read it from cover-to-cover or dip into sections that take your fancy, but expect your coffee to go cold as you recall happy memories of a more innocent era.
Digital Retro: The Evolution and Design of the Personal Computer