retrocomputing

A lot of retrocomputer enthusiasts have a favourite system, to the point of keeping up 40 year old flame wars over which system was “best”. In spite of the serious, boring nature of the PC/AT and its descendants, those early IBMs have a certain style that Compaq and the Clones never quite matched. Somehow, we live in a world where there are people nostalgic for Big Blue. That’s why [AnneBarela] built a miniature IBM PC using an Adafruit Fruit Jam board.

I'm planning on finally retiring my Logitech T-BB18 trackball. I'm getting a white M585, and putting a T-BB18 ball in it to make it look more like the T-BB13 I had in my teens. I've already tested this, it works. What would really set it off (other than seeing if I can dye the scroll wheel red) would be to get a nice little vinyl sticker of the old Logitech logo. But I can't seem to find anything.

I thought about just getting another T-BB13, since it was actually USB. But, I remember what a pain it was to take out the ball and clean it. I'd rather get a new M575 that is both Bluetooth and dongled USB.

T-BB13

T-BB18

M575S

Old Logitech logo

[Ronan] likes 35mm film photography, but the world, of course, has gone digital. He picked up an Epson FilmScan 200 for about €10. This wonder device from 1997 promised to convert 35mm film to digital at 1200 DPI resolution. But there was a catch: it connects via SCSI. Worse, the drivers were forever locked to Windows 95/98 and Mac System 7/8.

In a surprise twist, though, [Ronan] recently resurrected a Mac SE/30 with the requisite SCSI port and the System 7 OS. Problem solved? Not quite. The official software is a plugin for Photoshop. So the obvious answer is to write new software to interact with the device.

First, of course, you have to figure out how the device works. A service manual provided clues that, as far as the SCSI bus knew, the device wasn’t a scanner at all, but a processor. The processor, though, used SCSI as a simple pipe to handle Epson’s standard “ESC/I” protocol.

cross-posted from: https://libretechni.ca/post/689223

Most DAB radios I find¹ have text-only displays. Some even have no display at all and you must tune in blindly with arrow buttons. Apparently color graphical LCDs increase the cost of the radio enough to omit them from the design.

And yet at the same time people are throwing away quite functional smartphones in mass quantity (thanks to capitalism and designed obsolscence).

Also note that (most?) DAB radios have a USB port for attaching a drive holding music.

Wouldn’t it be sensible to create a DAB radio with no display, but with the possibility to connect a smartphone which runs an app to show station metadata? (Would also be useful if it could connect to the LAN to feed metadata and even accept commands, but that’s another discussion)

I also suspect existing radios could be hacked. That is, radio flashed to decode the signal metadata and (for ease) write it to USB mass storage, which a smartphone can mimick while running an app to display the data that lands on the SD card. The problem would be phones refuse to simultaneously mount external storage that is externally mounted. Could a rooted phone read-only mount an SD partition that is externally mounted? Perhaps the mass storage hack is a broken idea, in which case we would need to invent a protocol for this. Or does a suitable protocol exist?

¹ I say this as a locally buying (usually 2nd-hand) type of consumer. Online consumers might have a different experience.

Last year, researchers at the University of Utah found a copy of Unix lying around on a 9-track magnetic tape. It's special because that version of Unix was lost until it was recovered from that magnetic tape 52 years later. The researchers managed to successfully reconstruct it, and then they made the copy public. Anyone can download it and run it inside a virtual machine. So I did just that, and it made me so giddy to use it.

What is UNIX V4, and why should you care? If you care about computer history at all, Unix lore is utterly fascinating. There was a time when operating systems were tied to their hardware. There was no way to move an operating system to hardware that it wasn't specifically programmed to run. Imagine only being able to install Android on one specific phone model or Windows on just one specific hardware configuration. We take it for granted today, but Unix V4 made 'portable' operating systems possible

How CP/M 2.2’s Success Delayed the 8086 Port — and Whether It Really Mattered

Before DOOM would run on any computing system ever produced, and indeed before it even ran on its first computer, the game that would run on any computer of the pre-DOOM era was Zork. This was a text-based adventure game first published in the late 70s that could run on a number of platforms thanks to a virtual machine that interpreted the game code. This let the programmers write a new VM for each platform rather than porting the game every time. [smbakeryt] wanted to see how far he could push this design and got the classic game running on one of the oldest computers ever produced.

COBOL turned 66 this year and is still in use today. Major retail and commercial banks continue to run core account processing, ATM networks, credit card clearing, and batch end-of-day settlement. On top of that, many payment networks, stock exchanges, and clearinghouses rely on COBOL for high‑volume, high‑reliability batch and online transaction processing on mainframes.

Which reminds me, mainframes are still alive and well too. Banking, insurance, governments, inventory management – all the same places you'll find COBOL, you'll find mainframes as well.

None of that is as sexy as the latest AI program or the newest cloud-native computing release, but old dogs with their old tricks still have useful work to perform.

A retro hardware modder has recreated the classic Commodore 1084 monitor in miniature form using 3D printing, pairing an 8-inch LCD with a custom-designed shell to match the Amiga A500 Mini and C64 Mini. The project, documented in detail on YouTube, combines modern display tech with faithfully styled housing, offering a sharp, compact alternative to original CRTs for today’s mini retro systems.

Amiga computers may have been popular in the late 1980s and early 1990s, especially in media production, but their filesystems are not directly compatible with modern computers. The new 'amifuse' project aims to fix that with a new filesystem driver built around an invisible m68k CPU emulator.

Amifuse is a FUSE driver for macOS and Linux, allowing you to natively mount disk images using the Amiga's Professional File System 3 (PFS3). The project's documentation says other Amiga filesystems might work, "but have not been tested." Disks are read-only by default, but you can enable the experimental read-write support through a command-line argument.

Computer History Museum software curator Al Kossow has successfully retrieved the contents of the over-half-a-century old tape found at the University of Utah last month.

UNIX V4, the first ever version of the UNIX operating system in which the kernel was written in the then-new C programming language, has been successfully recovered from a 1970s nine-track tape drive. You can download it from the Internet Archive, and run it in SimH. On Mastodon, "Flexion" posted a screenshot of it running under SGI IRIX.

Last month, we wrote about the remarkable discovery of a forgotten tape with a lost early version of Unix, found by Professor Robert Ricci at the Kahlert School of Computing at the University of Utah. At the time, we quoted the redoubtable Kossow, who also runs Bitsavers, as saying that it "has a pretty good chance of being recoverable." Well, he was right, and at the end of last week, he did it. Ricci also shared a video clip on Mastodon.

Hello. I've been doing some digging on how tripcodes worked on old BBS and imageboards and tried to write a small article about it. I'm not a seasoned expert by any means so all criticism is welcome.

Once get FPS: FBP ‘98 working on my brandnew & gifted Framework 12 LT, preferably without Windows OS, but with Linux OS.

Need help in managing/running a huge amount of FBP ‘98 leagues, in same playoff system.

&

Once get FPS: FBP ‘93 working on my brandnew & gifted Framework 12 LT, preferably without Windows OS, but with Linux OS.

Need help in managing/running a huge amount of FBP ‘93 leagues, in same playoff system.

I have experience in participating in such tiny & dumbed down/uncreative league, but the commissioner (which the refusal to allow creativity of plays & Etc. had us falling-out, will not even reply to my let get back to friendship E-Mail) got my copy of the game to work on my Windows 11 LT, by taking over the LT & cut & pasting things. That old (by LTs standards) LT is dead & I was now gifted a Frame Work LT. & gifted pre-bought Windows, on the LT, so forced to install. I am looking in to if best Alternative to Windows would have local Computer Repairperson, willing, to work on non-Windows OSs LT; if not sticking with Windows.
I want to get back to F.ront P.age S.ports: F.ootB.all P.ro ‘93 & ‘98 playing, on this type of LT. Can anyone help me?

The Amiga 600 was in its day the machine nobody really wanted — a final attempt to flog the almost original spec 68000 platform from 1985, in 1992. Sure it had a PCMCIA slot nobody used, and an IDE interface for a laptop hard drive, but it served only to really annoy anyone who’d bought one when a few months later the higher-spec 1200 appeared. It’s had a rehabilitation in recent years though as a retrocomputer, and [LinuxJedi] has a 600 motherboard in need of some attention.

As expected for a machine of its age it can use replacement electrolytic capacitors, and its reset capacitor had bitten the dust. But there’s more to that with one of these machines, as capacitor leakage can damage the filter circuitry surrounding its video encoder chip. Since both video and audio flow through this circuit, there was no composite video to be seen.

Maurice Ravel's Boléro performed on homemade 8-bit instruments. Official music video.

9 hours and 42 minutes of footage
52 mixer channels
13 neck- and bowties
9 different instruments
1 crazy automaton
0 regrets