Like old Zip disks. What the fuck do I do with these? Still have the old G3 tower but it doesn’t boot up. I have a vague memory of you dealing with this kinda stuff, @jessamyn ?
In the "filesystems and I/O" portion of my Operating Systems course in college today. Brought some floppy disks in to help understanding storage system history and the archaic methods for data organization: tracks, sectors, partitions, etc.
I was surprised at how much the disks were investigated and examined by the students and how much curiosity was expressed. We almost had to suppress questions to get to the course material.
I think this is instructive. I'll try and incorporate some kind of tactile thing this spring when I'm teaching.
Reminder that #USB is, and always was, a bad design; as usual for Intel. We had #Firewire, a true bus, and not the worst option of many, polling, like USB. We could have had everything USB-C offers now -- reversible plugs, power-negotiation, multi-protocol -- with Firewire decades ago if USB hadn't taken over. Firewire even had Ethernet-over-Firewire, at 400MBps, fifteen years before Thunderbolt would do the same.
Firewire didn't need a different plug for the computer-side and for the device-side (USB-A & USB-B) because it was a true bus. You could hook any two devices together via a normal Firewire cable and you'd get instant two-way communication. This is how the PS2 did link-play. USB pushed the workload on to the computer. USB-C solves the "who is the host and who is the client?" problem by putting a tiny *computer* into the cable, that's how insane USB has become.
Firewire has been gone so long now that most #Apple #Mac users probably don't even know that you could plug a Mac into another computer via Firewire, power it on holding T and the internal disk drive would appear *as an external HDD* to the other computer.
I'm sure you'll be pleased to know that the News tab in Nautilus from GNOME 1.4 (released in 2001) still shows current @lwn headlines/lwn.net still support whatever API/feed it's using.
Somebody built a searchable and browsable BYTE magazine archive with all single pages on one single web page. I think, this is a very nice way of visualising a magazine archive. Enjoy: byte.tsundoku.io #vintagecomputing #retrocomputing #bytemagazine #byte
This is notable but I haven't seen it reported elsewhere: the pioneering blogging platform Typepad is shutting down in a month. Another piece of the early web is vanishing.
Blog publishing platform TypePad closing 30 September 2025. Publishers have until the end of September to download their data. And then find a new online home
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
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.
It's world emoji day. Did you know we had emojis in the 1980s and 1990s? We did. They were invented in 1982. In this blog post, we look at how emojis worked without graphics, where we used them before the Internet, and how they proliferated. #retrocomputingdfarq.homeip.net/emoticons-in-…
Day 3 of running Windows XP in 2025 is up. I opened Enafore to check my Mastodon replies. It worked—for a few seconds. Then the notifications started. And they didn’t stop. Ping. Ping. Ping. I couldn’t reply. I could barely move the cursor. I watched the system buckle in real time. So I tore XP apart. I disabled over thirty services, deleted Windows File Protection, nuked the prefetch cache, rewrote shutdown behavior, and killed every background process that wasn’t strictly mine. If it touched the network, tried to log something, or ran without permission, it’s dead. And you know what? Enafore runs fine now. JAWS doesn’t read new posts live, but I don’t care. I can read. I can reply. XP obeys. Discord, though? Wouldn’t even load in the browser. Just a blank page. So tomorrow, I’m pulling in what channels I can through IRC. It’s not over. Read the full post: fireborn.mataroa.blog/blog/dea… #WindowsXP #Retrocomputing #BlindComputing #Accessibility #IRC #Mastodon #DeadOSWalking
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.
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/>
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)
｢ 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 ｣
I just discovered the amazing Evertop project by @cobble2stone @ericjenott! Evertop is a portable PC that emulates an IBM XT with an 80186 processor and 1MB RAM, running DOS, Minix, and other old 1980s operating systems, including Windows up to version 3.0. Powered by a low-power microcontroller and an e-ink display, it can run for hundreds or even thousands of hours on a single charge, thanks to its built-in solar panel and extreme power-saving measures. It's loaded with built-in peripherals like a keyboard, PS/2 ports, graphics support, audio output, serial ports, USB, Ethernet, WiFi, and LoRA radio. Charging options include a solar panel, DC input, and micro USB. It features a detachable keyboard, optional hibernate, and power shutoff. Storage is via SD card, and it's powered by an Espressif ESP32 microcontroller. Compatibility includes almost all IBM PC/XT compatible DOS software from the 1980s and early 90s. There's also a minimal version, "Evertop Min," which reduces weight and cost by removing some features. I'd love to see a model with a Raspberry Pi Zero for more productivity-focused tasks. Let's see if someone is already working on something similar! #Evertop #RetroComputing #PortablePC #OpenSource #DIY #TechInnovation #Emulation #OffGridComputing #ESP32 #RaspberryPi #Minimalism #Productivity #EInk #solar #solarpanel #Typewriter
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".
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…
Book your tickets now to come and play on our retro gaming and computing systems, view our rare and unique items, browse our extensive software and publication libraries or simply chat to our passionate and knowledgeable volunteers.
What do you do when your lucrative patent expires? In the case of MP3s, the patent owner tried to migrate everyone to another tech that was still under patent. At least that scam didn't work. #RetroComputingdfarq.homeip.net/mp3-is-dead-l…
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.
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
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. 🤪 👍
@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.
![A screenshot of the LWN.net home page taken 02 Sep 2025. The headlines are:
- GNOME loses another executive director
- [$] The future of 32-bit support in the kernel
- Kernel prepatch 6.17-rc4
- Bcachefs goes to "externally maintained"
- [$] The challenge of maintaining curl
These match those shown in the GNOME 1.4 virtual machine.](https://fedi.ml/photo/preview/640/700001 "A screenshot of the LWN.net home page taken 02 Sep 2025. The headlines are:
- GNOME loses another executive director
- [$] The future of 32-bit support in the kernel
- Kernel prepatch 6.17-rc4
- Bcachefs goes to \"externally maintained\"
- [$] The challenge of maintaining curl
These match those shown in the GNOME 1.4 virtual machine.")
![A screenshot of the GNOME 1.4 desktop running in QEMU. There is a 'Start Here' Nautilus (the file manager) window open. The window has a side bar with several tabs to choose from. News is selected and shows:
LWN.net
- GNOME loses another executive director
- [$] The future of 32-bit support in the kernel
- Kernel prepatch 6.17-rc4
- Bcachefs goes to "externally maintained"
- [$] The challenge of maintaining curl](https://fedi.ml/photo/preview/640/699999 "A screenshot of the GNOME 1.4 desktop running in QEMU. There is a 'Start Here' Nautilus (the file manager) window open. The window has a side bar with several tabs to choose from. News is selected and shows:
LWN.net
- GNOME loses another executive director
- [$] The future of 32-bit support in the kernel
- Kernel prepatch 6.17-rc4
- Bcachefs goes to \"externally maintained\"
- [$] The challenge of maintaining curl")
Apple II
Commodore 64
Commodore Amiga
MS-DOS
MVS
Palm OS
Windows 95
