If you use this image on your site, please support “Retro Scan of the Week” by giving us obvious credit for the original scan and entry. Thanks.

“We were quite impressed with the speed of the Tandy 2000’s 80186 processor.”

In honor of this week’s Consumer Electronics Show (CES 2008), I’ve prepared a special RSoTW that highlights the little-known side career of its keynote speaker, Bill Gates.

Product endorsement ads like this one for the Tandy 2000 computer weren’t unusual for the Gatesmeister back in the early 1980s. Of course, those were the days before Microsoft was insanely huge, rich, and unstoppable. I wonder how much he got paid for the gig?

(P.S. Take a look at the early version of Windows featured in the ad!)

If you use this image on your site, please support “Retro Scan of the Week” by giving us obvious credit for the original scan and entry. Thanks.

[Edit – 04/15/2008: I just received an email from Dorian saying that StarTTY is staying up for the foreseeable future. Thanks for your support. ]

I recently received sad news from the creator of StarTTY, an innovative telnet service that VC&G covered back in January 2007. Dorian Garson is shutting down the service on January 30th, 2008 unless he can find financial support to keep it going.

I’m not a regular user of the service myself, but I tried it and it was really neat. If any of you out there want to see this unique information service for old computers/terminals continue, then you should get in touch with Garson soon. I’ve reproduced Garson’s original email below.

Hi Guys,

It’s been real fun, but I’m going to have to shut down StarTTY. January 30 will be the last day.

I’ve got other bills to pay. Spending the dough to keep the site running for just a few users doesn’t make much sense.

UNLESS…

If some of you want to chip in to keep it going, I’m willing to give it a shot.

Reply to this email and let me know what you think you’d pay per month to keep StarTTY running. If I get enough responses I’ll set up a PayPal link and let you guys take over the funding.

Hoping for the best but preparing for the worst,

-Dorian

As if you hadn’t had enough Christmas already. Well, here comes yet another Christmas-related piece: my latest article on PCWorld.com. It’s titled “A Very Vintage Tech Christmas” and it’s a slideshow of vintage home computer ads. A few of the ads are decidedly Christmas-themed, and the others focus either on families or pitching PCs to home buyers.

Unfortunately, PC World’s slideshow setup makes the text in the ads too small to read. But at least you can look at the pictures. I hope you enjoy it.

How does Santa keep track of who’s been naughty and who’s been nice? A computer database, of course. And it runs on an Apple II.

Looks like Woz saved Christmas!

If you use this image on your site, please support “Retro Scan of the Week” by giving us obvious credit for the original scan and entry. Thanks.

[ Editor’s Note: I asked Eric Lambert, a VC&G contributor, to write something entertaining for Christmas in the vein of his Halloween Spam poem. Just yesterday he delivered, sending me an MP3 of modified holiday jingles with a computer twist. It’s a tad cheesy, yes, but it’s full of fun and spirit. Thanks, Eric! ]

Download the MP3 file here or read a full transcript after the break.

[ Continue reading Eric’s VC&G Christmas Medley » ]

As a sequel to last year’s “Very TRS-80 Christmas,” we have this ad for the TRS-80 Color Computer 2. I’m not sure what makes this model “better” than the first Color Computer (CoCo), aside from obvious: different keyboard, ugly case-retooling, and perhaps more RAM.

Unfortunately, this unit ages to a nasty brown and its rubber-dome keyboard isn’t much of an improvement (I still like the CoCo 1’s keyboard better). But at least Tandy saw it fit to advertise the unit with a Christmas theme, which is quite relevant to the season at hand.

If you use this image on your site, please support “Retro Scan of the Week” by giving us obvious credit for the original scan and entry. Thanks.

Earlier this year, I had the chance to interview Nolan Bushnell, career entrepreneur and nigh-but-legendary founder of Atari. For the last seven years, Bushnell has been pouring most of his energy into his latest venture, uWink — a sort of Chuck E. Cheese restaurant for adults.

Of course, being the history buff I am, I wanted Bushnell to clear up some things regarding articles I was working on at the time. Accordingly, we touched on a variety of topics, such as the origin of the term “video game,” Steve Jobs at Atari, his “feud” with Ralph Baer, the Atari 800, and his wife’s love of the Wii, among other things. Despite being such a grab bag of topics, I figured the interview was worth publishing in its entirety while it still feels relevant. Bushnell’s thoughts deserve to be heard, especially since he took time out of his busy schedule to share them.

This interview took place on March 30th, 2007 over the telephone.

[ Continue reading VC&G Interview: Nolan Bushnell, Founder of Atari » ]

Chestnuts roasting on an open fire, jackboots kicking at your nose…

If you use this image on your site, please support “Retro Scan of the Week” by giving us obvious credit for the original scan and entry. Thanks.