Ted Kingston Inc.

10/14/2026

10/13/2026

Building your own PC can save money and give you way more flexibility, but in 2026, there are some real tradeoffs to consider. If you were buying a new desktop today,. would you build it yourself or go with a prebuilt?

10/13/2026

Ever work with magnetic tape like this? These reels were used to store data for mainframes and other large computer systems. If you used them, what do you remember most—the tape drives, the computer room, or the job you were doing?

10/13/2026

10/07/2026

The Ultimate Guide to 15 Legendary Vacuum Tubes for Audio Amplifiers.

AI-generated image. Some information may be inaccurate. Please check the official datasheet for each vacuum tube before use.

09/10/2026

We fix it. Or we complain. Probably both. Serving MA & CT from Webster, MA.

09/10/2026

Before SSDs… before even the little 3.5-inch hard drives most people remember. This cutaway old server drive holds a whopping 200 MB—and you can see every platter, head, and mechanism that made it work.

Who remembers working with drives like this?

09/07/2026

From the TRS-80 days

07/29/2026

Hams around the world are confirming the ARISS cross-band voice repeater is back up following yesterday's Soyuz departure.

There was not an ETA for return of the Service Module Packet (APRS) radio, so let us know if you hear it. Also, no confirmation yet of HamTV status.

07/29/2026

MAINFRAME HISTORY
If you worked in a mainframe data center in the 1960s, 1970s, or 1980s, you probably remember the sound — the 1403 high-speed line printer hammered away hour after hour, producing payroll reports, invoices, inventory listings, financial statements, utility bills, and mountains of green-bar paper.

It rarely stopped.

Operators constantly changed paper, replaced ribbons or print bands, tore apart reports, and stacked thousands of pages for distribution the next morning.

To many mainframers, that rhythmic sound wasn’t noise — it was the sound of business getting done.