In this age of smartphone zombification, it's hard to believe that there was once a time when most people had never seen or touched a computer. When I grew up in the 1970s, we didn't have a computer.

Building a paper tape reader by itself isn’t super complicated: you need a source of light, some photoreceptors behind the tape to register the presence of holes and some way to pull the tape through ...

(1) A slow, low-capacity, sequential storage medium used on earlier computing and communications devices. Paper tape holds data as patterns of punched holes. (2) A paper roll printed by a calculator ...

We often think that not enough people are building things with FPGAs. We also love the retrotechtacular posts on old computer hardware. So it was hard to pass up [karlwoodward’s] post about the Chip ...