retrocomputing

Let's explore the Dolch PAC 62 and upgrade it.

PAC-62: Screen size 266mm

It's a good thing I like the SE/30 as much as I do, considering what this one put me through.

If you’re on the US East Coast, you should head on over to Wall, NJ and check out the Vintage Computer Festival East. After all, [Brian Kernighan] is going to be there. Yes, that [Brian Kernighan].

Events are actually well underway, and you’ve already missed the first few TRS-80 Color Computer programming workshops, but rest assured that they’re going on all weekend. If you’re from the other side of the retrocomputing fence, namely the C64 side, you’ve also got a lot to look forward to, because the theme this year is “The Sounds of Retro” which means that your favorite chiptune chips will be getting a workout.

[Tom Nardi] went to VCF East last year, so if you’re on the fence, just have a look at his writeup and you’ll probably hop in your car, or like us, wish you could. If when you do end up going, let us know how it was in the comments!

Since they are both Kyocera machines, would the Model 100's floppy drive work on the NEC machine? Did it have a floppy of it's own?

The demoscene has become a national UNESCO-heritage in Sweden, thanks to an application that Ziphoid and me did last year. This has already happened in several European countries, as part of the international Art of Coding initiative to make the demoscene a global UNESCO heritage. I think this makes plenty of sense, since the demoscene is arguably the oldest creative digital subculture around. It has largely stuck to its own values and traditions throughout the world’s technological and economical shifts, and that sort of consistency is quite unusual in the digital world.

Most people think of machine instructions as the fundamental steps that a computer performs. However, many processors have another layer of software underneath: microcode. With microcode, instead of building the processor's control circuitry from complex logic gates, the control logic is implemented with code known as microcode, stored in the microcode ROM. To execute a machine instruction, the computer internally executes several simpler micro-instructions, specified by the microcode. In this post, I examine the microcode ROM in the original Pentium, looking at the low-level circuitry.

Archive: https://archive.is/2025.03.30-164547/https://www.seattletimes.com/business/microsoft/microsoft-turns-50-4-employees-recall-their-early-years/

Fifty years ago, two kids from Seattle flipped the tech industry on its head.

While all the big brains in personal computing were focused on machines — “microcomputer” hardware — Bill Gates and Paul Allen were thinking about the technology that made the machines go: software. That idea, planted by Allen at Gates’ Boston-area apartment, became the opening verse of Microsoft’s epic.

Gates and Allen launched “Micro-Soft” on April 4, 1975, out of a small office in a strip mall in Albuquerque, N.M., then decamped for Bellevue before landing in Redmond. Over the decades that followed, amid leadership changes, intense government scrutiny and billions upon billions of dollars in revenue, tens of thousands of employees passed through Microsoft to witness, and add to, the stuff of tech-industry legend.

Cambridge, UK – 28-Mar-2025 – RISC OS Open Limited (ROOL) is calling on the global technology community to support a bold new initiative to secure the long-term future of RISC OS. The company today announced the launch of its Moonshots programme – a strategic shift away from incremental development, towards large-scale engineering efforts aimed at modernising the operating system for next-generation Arm architectures.

I have a laptop that will not allow anything but UEFI and I must run FreeDOS.. (or one of many other OSes that wont boot via UEFI)

Is there a UEFI Bios shim? UEFI thinks it is an OS, but It loads the BIOS boot block and runs it?

Is that even possible?

People make fun of the ZX81/Time Sinclair 1000. It was a super cheap computer which had some questionable corners cut. Let's see if these three machines work, fix them if they don't and then see if these computers are worthy of praise or live up to their bad expectations.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/27380000

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/27362288