Archive for the 'Retro Scan of the Week' Category
[ Retro Scan of the Week ] That Sanyo Feeling
Monday, October 8th, 2012The Sanyo MBC-1100 (1982) was a Z80-A-based business machine that ran CP/M as its operating system. It was one of many, many Z80 business machines from that era designed to run CP/M.
Japanese computer manufacturers were just breaking into the U.S. computer market at the time, so the Sanyo MBC-1100 would have likely been a curiosity in an American office setting.
Discussion Topic of the Week: Have you ever used a Japanese-designed vintage computer? Tell us about it.
[ Retro Scan of the Week ] TRS-80 Dino Wars
Monday, October 1st, 2012[ Retro Scan of the Week ] Gun.Smoke
Monday, September 24th, 2012[ Retro Scan of the Week ] AtariWriter
Monday, September 10th, 2012[ Retro Scan of the Week ] Mario Paint Player’s Guide
Monday, September 3rd, 2012[ Retro Scan of the Week ] TRS-80 Color Computer 2
Monday, August 27th, 2012Discussion Topic of the Week: Have you owned a TRS-80 Color Computer (any model)? Tell us about it.
[ Retro Scan of the Week ] This Scrape’s For You
Monday, August 20th, 2012I’ve written about gratuitous and graphic video game advertising of the 1990s more than a few times over the years, but I never get tired of revisiting this wildly bombastic era in consumer marketing.
Here we see a nice ad for World Series Baseball 98 for the Sega Saturn, complete with front-and-center forearm scrape. I don’t know about you, but this makes me want to play baseball. Injury sells.
See Also: Super Mario World 2 (2009)
Discussion Topic of the Week: Would a graphic ad like this make you more or less likely to play a certain video game?
[ Retro Scan of the Week ] The Age of Data Entry
Monday, August 13th, 2012It’s almost amusing to recall the days when secretarial computer work mostly involved data entry and/or printing. (In this case, data entry inspired the neck-cramping computer setup seen here.) Both of those activities were designed to bridge the world of the computer and the world of paper.
By the mid-1990s, the introduction of low-cost scanners paired with optical character recognition (OCR) software helped relieve the tedium of typing in paper-bound data by hand.
Today, such scanning happens far less frequently, as most text-based data originates in the computer space to begin with. And many times it stays there, too: office workers regularly publish data electronically to the Internet or share it over local networks and email, making routine printing (and routine data entry) far more uncommon tasks in the year 2012 than they were in the 1990s.
Discussion Topic of the Week: Was there ever a time when you were forced to do lots of manual data entry? Tell us about it.
[ Retro Scan of the Week ] King Kong’s Super Game Boy
Monday, August 6th, 2012For me personally, the Super Game Boy (1994) was one of the most exciting video game peripherals ever released. It liberated Game Boy games from that unit’s blurry, dark screen, opening up a whole new world of gaming to those who preferred gaming on a TV set.
The fact that it also included a remake / extension of Donkey Kong, one of my favorite games of olde, made it a must-buy. I still remember the day I got it — my family drove to a local shopping mall, and I decided to stay in the car playing Donkey Kong on the Game Boy (even though not in color) instead of going inside. I haven’t been that excited about a new game in a long time.
(By the way, I first talked about the Super Game Boy in an early Retro Scan way back in March 2006.)
Discussion Topic of the Week: When did you first get a Super Game Boy? Did you have any Super Game Boy enhanced games for it?