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Tech News
A profile outlines the industrial design work of Ira Velinsky, who shaped the look of numerous computing and gaming products from the 1980s through the 1990s, including Commodore's C64 case, the Amiga chassis, Atari's ST-era peripherals and a handheld Sega Genesis. It also covers later projects such as a 1999 'Sozo Ottoman PC' that concealed a Pentium III machine inside a piece of furniture.
GeoWorks began as GEOS, a graphical operating system for the Commodore 64 built by Berkeley Softworks, known for running efficiently on cheap, low-power hardware. In the early 1990s it was ported to PCs under the renamed GeoWorks, and AOL even built a DOS version of its client using the platform before Microsoft Windows became dominant.
Commodore has begun shipping the 64C Ultimate, a new computer built in the wedge-shaped case style of the 1986 Commodore 64C, starting at $299.99 for customers who missed the pre-order campaign. The machine uses an AMD Artix-7 FPGA to replicate the original hardware cycle-for-cycle, claims up to 99% compatibility with vintage software and peripherals, and now supports standard USB mice alongside the bundled GEOS desktop suite.
A new app called Tiny Computers lets iPhone Duo owners transform their device's dual screens into emulations of classic computers. Options include four vintage Macs—the original 1984 Macintosh, iMac G3, iBook G3, and PowerBook G4—alongside non-Apple machines like the Commodore 64, IBM PC, Amiga 500, ThinkPad, and Windows 95/XP laptops. Each emulation includes limited functionality such as clickable keyboards, command lines, paint programs, and simple games, with hidden files and secrets to discover.
Commodore introduced the 1600 VICmodem at the January 1982 Winter Consumer Electronics Show, bringing it to market that March as a low-cost add-on for the VIC-20 computer. Designed by Anchor Automation and built around a Motorola MC14412 chip with just six other components, the modem required users to manually dial a phone and plug its cord into the device rather than using an acoustic coupler or autodial hardware.
A developer has released c64-hw-sim, a program that models the Commodore 64's ASSY 250407 motherboard at the level of individual chip pins and the board's netlist. Users can simulate faults such as lifting a chip leg or shorting it to ground or power, then observe the resulting effect on screen output, keyboard behavior, and board signals. The simulator derives these outcomes from circuit behavior rather than pre-programmed fault scenarios, and runs at 31-48% of real C64 speed depending on the host processor.
A free font called C64 Keyboard recreates the letterforms and symbols from Commodore 64 keycaps, based on photographs of the original keyboard. It includes uppercase letters, numbers, punctuation, function-key labels, and all 63 PETSCII graphic legends, distributed as TTF, OTF, webfont and a complete package with a preview tool.
A volunteer-run project called amigaux.org is bringing Amix — Commodore's System V Release 4 Unix for the Amiga, originally sold in 1990-92 for the A2500UX and A3000UX — back to life on 68040 and 68060 machines and modern accelerator boards. The effort adds a modern toolchain, a package manager (apkg) that pulls prebuilt tools like grep, gzip and less from a repository, and new drivers for hardware the OS never originally supported, including Z3660 and A4091/A4092 accelerators.
Lemmings, created by Scotland's DMA Design and published by Psygnosis, became a massive hit after its 1991 debut on the Commodore Amiga, eventually appearing on more than 20 platforms and outselling every other Psygnosis title by a huge margin. Its puzzle-strategy gameplay and charming creatures made it a mainstream cultural phenomenon, complete with holiday spin-off games and a dedicated hint call center for frustrated players. Despite that early success, the franchise failed to sustain long-term relevance the way contemporaries like Tetris and SimCity did.
A retrospective piece traces how early IBM and other PC-era keyboards, including the Selectric typewriter and IBM 1130 computer, used pictorial symbols for functions like space, backspace, and page navigation. Over time, as computing shifted toward American office use, most of these icons were phased out in favor of plain text labels, leaving only Shift, Enter, and Tab as widely recognized symbolic holdouts on modern PC keyboards.
The Commodore 64, launched in 1982 for $595 with just 64 kilobytes of memory, went on to sell roughly 12.5 million units and become the best-selling desktop computer ever. Its combination of an inexpensive industrial CPU, a music-synthesizer sound chip, and a game-oriented graphics chip made it unusually capable for its price, despite being seen at the time as a mere 'game machine.' That gaming-friendly hardware ended up enabling some of the earliest persistent, open-ended online multiplayer worlds.
Mimic Systems advertised its Spartan peripheral for the Commodore 64 for nearly two years, using recurring magazine ads featuring a mime, before actually releasing the product in 1986. By the time it arrived, reviewers found its specs outdated and users reported persistent bugs and poor support.