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.