Lunar Lander games abound on every platform. Along with Tetris and Pac-Man, the game–in which your mission is to safely maneuver your lunar module onto the moon’s surface–is one of the most widely cloned computer games of all time. But did you know that game players began touching down on the moon in Lunar Lander just months after Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin did so on July 20th, 1969?
Today’s versions of Lunar Lander are easily taken for granted; they’re generally regarded as dinky games you can get for free–“Who would pay for that?”
But the mother of all realistic space simulations wasn’t always perceived that way. In 1969, it was, in its own way, a sophisticated, ambitious piece of digital entertainment. And during the BASIC era of the 1970s and 80s, many programmers cut their teeth by attempting to program their own version of Lunar Lander. David Ahl, founder of Creative Computing magazine, called it “by far and away the single most popular computer game” in 1978 (and he was only talking about the text version!). Indeed, Lunar Lander was one of the early computer games that helped define computer games.
My pals at Gizmodo are conducting a fun week-long exercise in nostalgia in the form of 
Folks are noticing that CompuServe Classic–the most direct descendant of the online service that debuted in 1979–
There’s no such thing as the perfect computer, and never has been. But in the personal computer’s long and varied history, some computers have been decidedly less perfect than others. Many early PCs shipped with major design flaws that either sunk platforms outright or considerably slowed down their adoption by the public. Decades later, we can still learn from these multi-million dollar mistakes. By no means is the following list exhaustive; one could probably write about the flaws of every PC ever released. But when considering past design mistakes, these examples spring to my mind.
What Were They Thinking?
This week marks the thirtieth anniversary of the public debut of VisiCalc, the first spreadsheet and the personal computer industry’s original killer app. Co-creator Dan Bricklin has 
The personal computer revolution is roughly thirty-five years old, which means that been through seven half-decades so far. To me, the most interesting one is the first half of the 1980s–when PCs were really getting going, and hadn’t yet become commodified through compatibility. Almost every new one was an experiment, whether it was wildly successful or a flop.