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History of Computing

Since the mid-1990s, Brian and his brother Barry have been working to preserve, study and document historic computers. Presented in a visual and intuitive manner for education and inspiration, their work aims to serve as a solid, verifiable reference for classic computer systems.

For example, they created a working version of the classic 1962 game Spacewar! by re-assembling the original source code (40-page, typewritten) to simulate and run it on JavaScript.

Screenshot of the original 1962 Spacewar! source code on PDP-1 emulator

In other instances, they created completely digital models of pre-1980s, manually built chips by treating a series of high resolution photographs to virtually recreate their components.

An example of a vector polygon model of a classic chip’s components. Click on the image for more.

Some of this work is in museums.

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Our Team

Paula Bontá
Read about me here

Brian Silverman
Read about me here

Other Projects

  • Shadow Coding
  • Digital Fabrication
  • Art:bit
  • Tivoli Lights
  • Crickets in Space: T-LogoQube
  • ScratchJr
  • Scratch
  • TurtleArt
  • Logo
  • The PicoCricket Kit
  • Collaboration with LEGO
  • Cellular Automata
  • History of Computing
(C) 2015 Playful Invention Company - Illustration by Caroline Lavergne