It wasn’t so long ago that the computer pictured on this page was considered a cutting edge piece of machinery. The Harwell Dekatron is the oldest original digital computer on the planet. It was given the nickname WITCH and was put together in 1951, making it 61 years old now. It was one of the first dozen of such computers around at that time. For the last 3 years it has been undergoing restoration work but it has now been rebooted back into life again. It was originally designed to crunch numbers instead of using human staff at the...
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What do you get if you cross a camera which can detect movements with another that can tell different kinds of surfaces apart? The answer is that you get a magical little device which lets you make different types of command based upon what part of your body you touch and turns the whole world into your giant touchscreen. So there you have it. A swipe on your shirt means you want to call your Mum while one on your leg could mean that you want to reject a call. People watching on the journey to work could get a while lot more exciting soon. The...
A recent survey of students around their hard drive backup habits has produced some interesting results. It was carried out by Seagate and it revealed that male students are far more likely to backup than their female counterparts are. In fact, the difference is that 57% of male students will do this while only 39% of the ladies will do the same. In all, almost half of all of the students asked said that they think about backing up their work, songs, photos and other documents. This compares sharply to the 12% of them who were more concerned...
It’s being vaunted as the biggest real threat to the iPad’s supremacy in terms of tablet market share, although that’s largely because there’s very little out there that truly competes with the iPad. Everything else is either too budget conscious or too pricey to be considered. While the iPad has its faults, and Yahoo even had to admit to being disappointed by its sales, it is by far the most popular touch screen tablet around. The Samsung Galaxy S hopes to rectify that situation and they’ve put in a very...
Many of the older gadget loving readers of this site will remember the Commodore 64 with great fondness. It will conjure up images of a more innocent time; one filled with the mechanical clunk of the keyboard or, if you were an Amstrad owner, the high pitch whining and shrieking of your tape trying its best to load your favourite game. Thanks to Barry Altman it need not be a bygone era for much longer as he attempts to fully revitalise the Commodore name (which, of course, included Amiga computers too). The brand has already begun its...
Not all of us have been lucky enough to enjoy the benefits of owning an iPad, unless we work for Leicester council of course in which case we’ve been given one to aid us in our daily duties. There’s also a chance that your 5 year old kid who is unlikely to be able to read this article fully has been given one by their school to make life easier for everybody. Cedars School of Excellence (sounds like the school in X-Men) in Greenock, Scotland, has made the unique move to give every one of its 105 pupils an Apple iPad so that...
Europe’s biggest electronics and consumer gadget show starts this week, 3rd September to be exact, and GadgetsAndGizmos will be reporting the latest goings on for all to see (follow us on Facebook to see the latest headlines). There will be over 1,000 stands at this year’s celebration in Berlin, which marks the 50th anniversary, and unline CES this is one is aimed specifically towards the European market making it potentially more relevant to us all (yay). But what exactly are we expecting to see at this year’s event? The...
Google itself aims to release a touch screen tablet PC just in time for Christmas apparently (in the US at least). The tablet, which will be manufactured by HTC and will be released on the 26th November. Obviously it will be using the new Google Chrome operating system and other sketchy/leaked/assumed (delete as you see fit) details include the fact that it will have a multi-touch screen and will use the Tegra 2 chip from Nvidia. Whether it will dethrone the iPad remains to be seen but is unlikely given the incredible popularity of that...
Viewsonic has announced that it will transition from the use of CCFL displays over to the more ecologically progressive and higher quality LED displays. Every new monitor that the company launches will use LED technology and this not only means that they will consume a lot less energy, many featuring quite incredible additional energy saving options, but it also means that the monitors will offer considerably higher resolution and much better picture quality than their predecessors. The flagship monitor, the release of which coincides...
Users of Windows 7 Professional have until 2020 to decide that they want to downgrade to Windows XP. Windows 7 Ultimate users will have until 2015 to make the same decision. In a statement, Microsoft said that the long, long downgrade period was decided upon for “consistency” and to help out companies who do wholesale upgrades to the new platforms. I wonder how many people will take them up on their offer in 10 years time when we all live in transparent bubbles and are transported in floating cars ? (I can’t be the only...