I thought I would share this awesome little project for any tech enthusiasts who might be interested in tinkering with this sort of thing: The Commander X16 has finally arrived! It is sold as a micro ATX form-factor motherboard, meaning it can be installed in most standard PC cases, new and old (starting from the very late 90s or early 00s) and has a nice set of features for an 8-bit micro. It is not fully compatible with Commodore or other commercial 8-bit systems, but there is a large community of people writing software for it, and the hardware design itself is open, so people can make, and indeed have made their own boards based on it. 8-bit computers aren't really my thing personally, but as a computer enthusiast and hobbyist I still think it is neat and figured some folks here might appreciate it.
In the 1970's a lot of people were building their own computers and IO boards. Radio Shack was the place. And later Computer Shopper, I still have a couple Shoppers around to show people what computers were like at the start and how far they have come. When the Commodore 64 came out it had games on a cassette tape drive. Everyone sat around watching people play the Star Trek game, very crude, the ships fired asterisk photon torpedoes. When the real speech synthesizer chips came out in the early 1980's and showed up at Radio Shack, people at work went out and bought one and of course built a board and immediately programmed it to insult and cuss at people.
It looks like there are a lot of Computer Shopper scans and ISO images of bundled CD-ROMs available on archive.org: https://archive.org/search.php?query=computer+shopper&sin= I'll have to take a look at those! I'd never heard of it before. Looks like the publication lasted until 2009.
