Posted 07/22/09 at 03:30:00 PM by Norman Chan

As the setup for tonight's Comic-Con 2009 opening continues, we've managed to sneak inside yet again to see how the show floor looks one day later. Vendors and studios are putting the final touches to their booths, some even shielding big props with curtains to hide big reveals from curious eyes. This afternoon's gallery has highlights from Sideshow Collectible's famous booth, Hasbro's GI Joe presence, and Warner Bros.'s giant tumble weed. We're just as confused as you. Confirmed, though, is the presence of the Black Hornet's car and an Iron Man 2 armory with at least 4 full-size suits on display. Check back tonight as we'll post coverage from tonight's Preview Night events. 

Read on to see all the new pics!

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Posted 06/03/09 at 12:30:00 PM by Erik Klein

Imagine a world in which all cars are like the Toyota Prius: four-door midsize hybrids. Sure, they aren’t bad cars, you can paint them any way you want and even modify some parts, but in the end you still just have a generic Toyota with a funky paint job.

That’s the world of personal computing today. It doesn’t matter if you’re running Windows, Mac OS, or Linux. Your machine is almost certainly using Intel chips at its core and almost everything else is fairly generic—even the world’s greatest case mod with water-cooled dual-Xeons and quad-SLI graphics is just a really fast PC.

This was definitely not the case 35 years ago. A quick tour of the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA, reveals machines that were as varied and unique as the companies that made them.

The microprocessors, if there even was one, were supplied by Intel, MOS, Zilog, RCA, or any number of other companies. Memory was static, dynamic, and shift-register. And without the Internet, programs were loaded from paper tape, punched cards, cassette tape, floppy disks, cartridge, or even manually switched in by hand.

In the following pages, we take a close look at some of the most influential personal computers of the past 40 years. From pre-microprocessor machines to the venerated IBM PC, each of these systems contributed in some way to the modern personal computing era.

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