i wrote a 120,000 word book on my experience growing up in the BBS and dial-up internet era, from ~1985-1997

it's chock full of stories about ibm pc and macintosh hardware and gaming

it's going to be published this autumn as an ebook and might get a print edition

but i have a far more stupid idea for it: how about a floppy disk edition with a custom dos/windows 3.1 & macintosh system 6 ebook version

has anyone written a Voyager Expanded Book using the VEB Toolkit in 30 years?

(if you haven't heard of Expanded Books, michael crichton and voyager's team wrote an *excellent* version of Jurassic Park)

is there an ms-dos or windows 3.1 equivalent to VEBs? I swear that back in the 90s someone made ebooks using "Asymetrix Multimedia Toolbook", but i can't seem to find any examples of it

#macintosh #dosgaming #books #retroComputing #vintageApple

We’re adding more remote systems accessible from anywhere via ssh / browser at icm.museum

Come experience historic operating systems, programming languages and ASCII games 24/7

#retrocomputing #gaming #retrogaming #ascii #ansi #vintagecomputing

Rate my battlestation!

This is a Sony Anycast Station AWS-G500HD from 2007. It's essentially a Sony luggable PIII 933Mhz PC that runs Linux 2.4.20 with a ton of FPGAs to do the heavy lifting of a video switcher. Plus glorious physical buttons, faders, dials, and removable keyboard. Oh, and a jog wheel.

#RetroComputing

TIL the Kensington Turbo Mouse can use a billiard ball.

#RetroComputing #VintageMac #VintageAP

Anybody else out there fondly remember Geoworks?

It had a really killer office suite for low-end computers. I did all of my homework assignments in GeoWrite up until high school.

#retrocomputing

The NC10 was dead. BIOS beeps, no POST, nothing.
I tried Debian. I tried 7. I gave up.

Then I didn’t.
I stuck the motherboard in the oven.

And somehow, it booted.

What followed was two full days of ISO failures, update errors, driver hell, and one buried ISO that saved everything.

XP is back. On the original hardware.
New post is up:
fireborn.mataroa.blog/blog/dea…
#DeadOSWalking #windowsxp #retrocomputing

Long before the internet, some phone networks were hackable by playing a single tone at 2600Hz.

Whistled into a phone, it could grant you unrestricted access. Do you have the vocal chops to be an old-school phone phreak?

I built a web app to test your ability to produce the legendary frequency. You won't get free long distance calls but you will get some honor in the knowledge that you could have been a cool hacker. 😎

I am sad to say that I can only whistle up to 1100Hz... But my wife (a long time woodwind player) is able to consistently get it.

Give it a try: phreak.kmcd.dev/

#phreaking #2600Hz #bluebox #RetroComputing #hacker #infosec #Tech

Phone Phreak Emulator

Test your phreaking skills by hacking this phone line.

^{phreak.kmcd.dev}

My latest project is code-named "Total Reprint." I ported The Print Shop (1986) to ProDOS and made it hard-drive-installable. Then I made some other improvements, like live previews of third-party graphics and borders. It's bundled with every graphic, border, and font that Broderbund ever released, plus hundreds of other openly licensed graphics that I back-ported from modern artists.

Come to INIT HELLO in July for the product launch. <init-hello.org/>

#AppleII #retrocomputing

It's June, so I've got my Javastation off the shelf for the first time in a couple of decades. This is a Javastation Krups, with 100MHz sparc, sold as a diskless workstation. I never realised it had a PPP ROM boot in! Anyway, I should get on and set up networking and a boot server.
(Note: the plastic on the clips on the doors is fragile, 2 just pinged off on me)

#retrocomputing

💡 Why we need lisp machines

｢ They were programmed in lisp the whole way down and could be run code interpreted for convenience or compiled to microcode for efficiency. You could open up system functions in the editor, modify and compile them while the machine was running. Everything worked in a single address space, programs could talk to each other in ways operating systems of today couldn’t dream of ｣

fultonsramblings.substack.com/…

#unix #lisp #retrocomputing

I added to my reading queue this four-part aricle series on the history of the personal computer "to trace where the personal computer came from and where it went". The title of one of the parts seems intriguing: "Interactive Computing: A Counterculture".

technicshistory.com/a-bicycle-…

#PersonalComputer #retrocomputing

A Bicycle For the Mind

This series consists of the following posts: A Bicycle for the Mind – Prologue A Craving for Calculation Interactive Computing: A Counterculture From ACS to Altair: The Rise of the Hobby Computer…

^{Creatures of Thought}

Had fun at the Retro Computer Museum today in Leicester UK. Plenty of hands-on retro computers and consoles as well as an arcade area too.

Friendly volunteers who obviously were passionate about the collection and helping out there.

Really worth a visit!

retrocomputermuseum.co.uk/

#retrocomputing #retrogaming #leicester #uk

Researching the best instruction set architectures for learning to program in Assembly for retro and modern CPUs. More than the final pick or the shortlist, what's interesting is the assessment the author does of each architecture.

thechipletter.substack.com/p/l…

#assembly #retrocomputing

Learning Assembly for Fun and Profit

Why take an interest in assembly language and which to learn?

^{Babbage (The Chip Letter)}

In case you missed it, there are Mastodon apps for retro computers from the 1980s & 90s

Apple II
colino.net/wordpress/en/mastod…

Apple Macintosh (pre-OS X)
github.com/smallsco/macstodon

Commodore 64
github.com/Havoc6502/MOStodon

Commodore Amiga
github.com/BlitterStudio/amido…

MS-DOS
github.com/SuperIlu/DOStodon

MVS
github.com/mainframed/BREXXTOD…

Palm OS
github.com/knickish/heffalump

Windows 95
github.com/meyskens/mastodon-f…

#Mastodon #RetroComputing

GitHub - BlitterStudio/amidon: A Mastodon client for Amiga computers

A Mastodon client for Amiga computers. Contribute to BlitterStudio/amidon development by creating an account on GitHub.

^GitHub

If Commodore hadn't gone bankrupt in 1994, we might have had an AmigaPhone in our pockets. 🥲

#RetroGaming #RetroComputing #RetroGames #VintageComputing #retro #commodore #amiga #1980s #1990s #tech #technology #vintage #old #nostalgia #graphics #mobile #design #artwork #digital #DigitalArt #art #artist #arte #arts #GraphicDesign #image #MastoArt #FediArt #CreativeToots #ArtistsOnMastodon

For all you retro text to speech nerds out there, here's a recording of Superior Software's "Speech" for the Amstrad CPC computer (1986). This was a small piece of Z80 machine code that played phonemes through the computer's AY-3-8912 sound chip

It sounds pretty harsh, and there are a number of hard clicks in the output I couldn't easily fix.

I've included what I think is the spoken script as alt text

#RetroComputing #TTS #Spech #SuperiorSoftware #AmstradCPC

Remember the pretty-looking Windows 3.1 "high resolution" mode possible with Viaduct now? Well, as it turns out, the boot logo is displayed by a different piece of code, so despite the new driver it was still in 640x200, and thus, very ugly. 🤮

This isn't part of the DDK at all, so I had to disassemble the CGA and Hercules editions of the logo display code from Windows 3.1 binaries, then bodge one together, that can display the EGA monochrome logo in 640x400. 🤪 👍

#msdos #retrocomputing #amiga

Findings at my parents' house, part 2: A Commodore 1084S monitor, from the early 1990s. It was connected to my Amiga 500

#BlastFromPast #BlastFromThePast #RetroComputing #Commodore #Amiga

@troed Writing demos teaches some skills that are hard to acquire otherwise... while also creating some bad habits.

Oh, and I'm writing that literally as I'm starting work on a new ST demo, I just did the first git commit of a trivial program that'll grow into some demo over the next few weeks.

--Djaybee from the MegaBuSTers

#AtariST #DemoScene #RetroComputing

Don't forget to play Dark Castle today to see the tree in the foyer 🎄

#RetroComputing #RetroGaming #VintageMac #MacPortable

Logging on for the holidays.

#RetroComputing #VintageApple #VintageMac

There is something oddly satisfying and dare I say therapeutic defragmenting a mechanical hard drive on Windows 98.

How many of you have carefully watched the progress as the churn and crunch of the drive is heard?

#retrocomputing #defrag #windows98

My bad bro

#RetroComputing

The first virtual meeting occurred in…1916?

"The telephone connections involved traversed about 6,500 kilometers (about 4,000 miles) across 20 states, held up by more than 150,000 poles running through 5,000 switches. … more than 5,100 members attended."

They even had break-out sessions and a musical interlude.

spectrum.ieee.org/virtual-meet…

#Retrocomputing #Zoom #IEEE

The First Virtual Meeting Was in 1916

The amazing feat linked up 5,100 engineers from Atlanta to San Francisco

^{Allison Marsh (IEEE Spectrum)}

🟪🟩 Silicon Graphics - SGI once reigned supreme in the realm of the most powerful graphics workstations and servers.

💸 In the museum, we preserve many of these systems, which when new could cost more than $10,000 and even $100,000, along with some of their high-end monitors and peripherals:

5x Indigo2
2x Iris Indigo
2x Indy
1x Personal Iris
1x Octane2
1x Octane
3x 19" + 1x 17" CRT

#computermuseum #computerhistory #slovenia #ljubljana #sgi #retrocomputing #vintagecomputer #vintagecomputing

IT WORKS! AppleTalk over barbed wire fence is a go! :D
#LiveLaughLocalTalk
#GlobalTalk
#RetroComputing

#FieldTalk

I really, truly can not express how mind-blowing this Windwalker title anthem is. This is a stock Apple ][ running at 1 MHz. No third-party sound card. Just the built-in $C030 speaker that blips.

#AppleII #retrocomputing

I finally got around to implementing the MacPaint file format, so now you can not only convert all your old MacPaint files to PNG, but also the reverse.

If you rescue any old MacPaint files please send them to me for archiving on macpaint.org!

github.com/thejoelpatrol/macpa…

#retrocomputing #vintagemac