Don’t miss bbum’s Magnetic Finger: A Sixth Sense. He describes how to make yourself sensitive to electromagnetic radiation using nothing but an old hard drive, a bit of bamboo and some coconut. (Which might help explain to my wife why I keep so much junk(1) around the house.) You could also follow the links, repeated here, to read more about the surgical inspiration for his adventure.
I’m quite mad at myself for using one of the most annoyingly aped ad campaigns ever, but it’s too late now. Mike’s Electric Stuff is a site chock full of electrical and electronic hackery.
Thanks to Ned, I found Old-computers.com, which has apparently been around longer than when I put up a list of vintage computers that I was playing with circa 1999.
I’ve just finished reading The Autodesk File in original book form (although it is now available online) and this site would have been a great reference to all the early personal computers mentioned therein!
Perhaps my first memory of computers was playing Starblaze on my dad’s Tandy Model 100. I remember him coding Tic-Tac-Toe on an Apple /// that sat in my room for ages, which I eventually “networked” with a long serial cable to a TRS-80 Model III that found its way into another corner. Then came the CoCo2(1) years, where I would turn the living room into a dance hall by looping the screen through colors controlled by a pair of joysticks. Good times! I sometimes miss those days when the guts of the computer were just a PEEK or a POKE away. Instead of surfing through a googol of sites, most of what I learned in those days came from poring through one BASIC Program Conversions book(2).