Texas Instruments (TI) had been a pioneer in transistor, integrated circuit, and semiconductor design, and it was a major player in the calculator market. However, it took its time entering the home and business computer markets and fared poorly in both areas.
Category Archives: Low End Mac
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Pebble finally brings its new look watch OS to the original Pebble and Pebble Steel.
Juice Packs are popular with many iPhone users, but is your Mophie genuine or a fake?
In 1977, Radio Shack became one of the first companies to sell personal computers, but it didn’t have a model with color graphics until 1980. This is the story of the Radio Shack Color Computer.
The Atari 2600 was once the king of gaming consoles, but Atari was a late entrant to the personal computing field.
After using a Juice Pack Helium and Air for my iPhone 5, I decided to check out the heavyweight Mophie in the iPhone 5/5s range.
In 1977, there were three home computers: The Apple II, the Commodore PET, and the TRS-80, which was sold at 3,500 Radio Shack stores across the United States. Apple and Commodore used the MOS Tech 6502 CPU in their computers, but Radio Shack chose the Zilog Z-80.
Best known for the Commodore 64, the best selling single model in the history of computing, Commodore International was one of the first companies to enter the personal computing market and the first with a million-selling computer. Its first model was the Commodore PET.
Do you like having a beer? Now you can use your smartphone to log your drinks and share them with other like-minded drinkers.
1995 saw release of the ill-fated (but fantastic) Sega Saturn. I am still a big fan of the 32-bit console.
Gaming is a great pass time. I take a look at the top 50 titles that have shaped my gaming history.
Prior to the September 1986 introduction of the Apple IIGS, every Apple II computer ran an 8-bit 1 MHz 6502 processor, used 5-1/4″ floppy disks, had a very limited color palette, and sound was nothing to write home about. The Apple IIGS changed all of that.
The Apple II family was known for its expansion options – eight slots for adding capabilities. Inevitably one held a floppy controller, typically one held a parallel printer card, and another might have a serial card for a modem or printer. Some bought Microsoft’s Z-80 SoftCard to run CP/M. But for most users, most slots remained empty.
The Apple II and II Plus had been a runaway success for Apple, establishing it in the home, the school, and, thanks to VisiCalc, the workplace. Even though that was true, these models had some shortcomings that were addressed when the Apple IIe was introduced in January 1983.
Although the Apple 1, introduced in April 1976, had been a big success among the hobbyist crowd, people who didn’t mind assembling their own computer and designing a case for it, it was not part of the ready-to-go personal computer revolution of the late 1970s. That’s where the Apple II comes in.
I take a look at the very popular cross platform messaging service, WhatsApp.
Apple has a very impressive track record. It is the only personal computer company to have survived from the early days of 8-bit computing while once mighty Commodore, Radio Shack, and Atari no longer exist or long ago stopped making personal computers.
The first computer worthy of the name “computer” was produced more than 60 years ago. It was a monstrous machine, covering more than 136 square meters and used 18,000 vacuum tubes (the predecessors to the transistor). It was capable of computing the sum of 5,000 numbers ten digits in length per second. It’s name was ENIAC, […]
What’s chunky, cream coloured, and has a screen capable of displaying four shades? It’s the legendary Nintendo Game Boy.
With Apple on an annual development cycle for Mac OS X, it’s interesting to see what patterns develop between the official launch of one version and the launch of the next version. Today we look at Yosemite’s first year.
One of the things that we computer nerds have always loved is tinkering with our machines. We have always enjoyed opening up our computers and expanding their capabilities. Unfortunately for us, the expandability of modern Macs ranges from limited to nonexistent.
In June 2007, we got the first iPhone. Three months later, we got the first iPod touch, which was essentially an iPhone with the phone, camera, Bluetooth, and wireless data capabilities removed. We’ve come a long way since then.
When you buy an iPhone or iPad, Apple makes it pretty clear which operating systems support it, whether Mac OS X or Windows. They also tell you which version of iTunes is required. What they don’t tell you is that this can change with iOS updates, leaving you unable to sync your iPhone, iPad, or […]
Playing your old games on your new console is a great thing. I take a look at which consoles offer backward compatibility.
There are now a great variety of wireless hard drives available, but so far only one is available at a true low-end price, offering an unprecedented overall value to the consumer, while being compatible with a wide variety of Macs, PCs, iOS devices, and Android devices. Behold the EMTEC P600 Wi-Fi Hard Drive.
Perhaps we might see a return to smaller iPhones after all. But will we see colourful handsets in the future?
The G5 is a 64-bit member of the PowerPC processor family that is fully compatible with 32-bit code. It was first used when the Power Mac G5 was introduced in June 2003. Only three different versions of the chip were produced before Apple made the move to Intel CPUs in 2006. IBM was the only manufacturer […]
From the first iPhone launched in 2007 with its 480 x 320 3.5″ display, ARM processor running at 412 MHz, and EDGE networking through today’s iPhone 6S and 6S Plus with their 750 x 1334 4.7″ and 1080 x 1920 5.5″ displays, dual-core 1.85 GHz A9 CPUs, and 4G LTE networking, we’ve seen a lot of […]
Prior to the September 2012 introduction of the iPhone 5, every iPhone had used a 3.5″ display. Since the iPhone 5, all screens have been larger than that. At the same time, Apple abandoned the 30-pin dock connector it had inherited from iPods and adopted the new Lightning connector. This also marked the debut of […]
High Dynamic Range (HDR) photography is a system for recording more detail in shadows and highlights than standard 24-bit photography is designed to handle. The greater the range between the brightest and darkest points in a photo, the more it can benefit from HDR.
