retrocomputing

This poor broken mess of an 80s laptop has been rebuilt and it's better than ever! The rare Chaplet Halikan LA-30A is an interesting machine on its own, but this one's story of breaking into a thousand pieces and being restored by the talented PolyMatt takes it to another level. His video went into the rebuild process, but this one dives into using the PC itself, its odd quirks, the company behind it, and its small but fascinating place in computer history.

If you have been warming up to the idea of owning physical media or preserving your existing collection before it fades away, then PicoIDE should interest you.

The work of Polpotronics, this is an open source IDE/ATAPI emulator meant to replace aging tech like CD-ROM drives and hard disks. If you don't know what those are, you probably weren't around back then. ☠️

The job of the PicoIDE is quite simple; it can take in disk images (e.g., ISO, .bin/.cue, .vhd) from microSD cards and present them to your vintage computer as real IDE hard drives or ATAPI CD-ROM drives.

https://picoide.com/

The current CPUs use 3 or 5 nm transistors and run at MHzs and I was thinking how small and fast would be a 6502 or a Z80 with current tech?

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/33498885

I'm quite late to finding out about this, but it's quite awful to learn. I was hoping he'd be able to complete his documentary of Gary Kildall, but that may never happen now.

He died on December 28th of last year from the flu.

Rest in peace, Stewart.

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.