REWIND and PLAY
Last November UPS mistakenly charged me a $684 tariff on $355 worth of computer parts shipped from Europe. It was shortly afterwards reduced to $51.30, but I had prepaid the tariff to avoid warehouse fees, so UPS owed me $632.70. They finally issued the refund in July after repeatedly E-mailing their accounting office in India approximately monthly. (Phone number? Ha ha ha.) I don't know if these…
As is typical here in the Floodgap lab, it all started so innocently: rebuilding a flaky Apple Workgroup Server 9150, the odd duck of the Workgroup Server line and older cousin to our beloved Apple Network Server. And then I just had to pimp it out for MkLinux. Before the sui generis IBM AIX-based Apple Network Server , one of our favourite machines here at Floodgap, there were the WGSes, the…
Reports coming in of the death of John C. Dvorak, apparently passed away on Monday (July 20th) from complications of heart bypass surgery . Dvorak started in wine and moved to silicon as an early columnist at InfoWorld, one of the pillar references for this particular blog because of its studious regular reporting, and most notably for PC Magazine where he had no less than two columns since at…
Behold: the Guru of GNU ! (Photo by Habib Mhenni, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0.) True enlightment only comes from a truly free computing experience, probably! And while there is no nerd who lacks an opinion on Richard Stallman personally, likewise let none claim he does not practice what he preaches. Why, the very laptop in front of him was selected deliberately because it can operate with no…
Bobby Prince, '90s FPS game musician extraordinare and longtime id Software associate, has died at 81 . Now, early on, there were things like Commander Keen and Eat Your Vegetables , which were cute and amusing yet almost completely orthogonal to his later output. Correspondingly, his transitional work in Wolfenstein 3D was fine (especially The Ultimate Challenge ) but clearly all of a particular…
Some of our recent (and some upcoming) projects are oriented to systems with serial consoles, but it's been getting pretty old dragging around old CRT terminals or tying up Mac laptops with a serial port. I'd like something that's self-contained, a little more portable and a bit less heavy. I'm sure there's any number of all-in-one setups you can buy to do this, but I'm cheap, so I'm going to DIY…
In 1982, as we mentioned at length with our history of the DEC Professional , Digital Equipment Corporation attempted to keep their PDP-11 minicomputer market-relevant by turning the venerable architecture into a largely incompatible desktop microcomputer. But that wasn't the only PDP-series mini it happened to, and it wasn't even the first: the PDP-8 actually got the shrink-ray treatment several…
The Tomy Tutor was my first computer, in late 1983. I was seven and we got it at Federated . I've acquired several more since then, but this is the actual one I used and it still works perfectly. Using a design modeled on the doomed Texas Instruments 99/8, one of several unreleased successors to the TI 99/4A, the Tomy Tutor and its overseas siblings, the Japanese Pyuuta ( ) series, promised an…
It's time for another save point in the continuing saga of the various ROMs for the Apple Network Server , Apple's first through-and-through Unix server ( previously , previously ). The Apple Network Server was only ever officially able to boot AIX, IBM's proprietary Power ISA-specific Unix, though it was originally intended to run Novell NetWare and was demonstrated booting Mac OS with early…
I almost never buy e-books, but I decided to spring for an electronic copy of David Pogue's Apple: The First 50 Years to see if I even wanted to bother with the hardcover. Previously the essential tome on Apple (and especially Mac) history was Owen Linzmeyer's Apple Confidential , still on my shelf in the well-thumbed 2.0 paperback. I was prepared to find this book lightweight on the technical…
I'm doing periodic updates on some of my long-term projects, one of them being 6o6, a fully virtualized NMOS 6502 CPU core that runs on a 6502 written in 6502 assembly language. 6o6 implements a completely abstracted memory model and a fully controlled execution environment, but by using the host's ALU and providing a primitive means of instruction fusion it can be faster than a naïve…
I've mentioned previously my great affection for Alpha Microsystems hardware, which are rather obscure computers nowadays, but back in the 1980s and 1990s were fairly sophisticated 68000-based multiuser systems that turned up in all kinds of vertical markets. For example, my first Alpha Micro (an Eagle 300) came from a party supplies store, my Eagle 450 was in a 9-1-1 emergency dispatch centre,…
A more obscure Commodore employee (where he apparently met his wife), but still quite influential during the Amiga era. Along with more pedestrian units such as the Amiga 3000 and the monochrome Amiga 2024 monitor, my favourite device he worked on was the 1987 prototype SX-500 . That's exactly what it sounds like: an Amiga 500 crammed into a portable SX-64 case, even keeping the same 5" colour…
Remember when Sega made consoles? Hideki Sato remembered, because he was involved in or designed all of them — from the 1982 SG-1000 under Sega Enterprises Ltd. president Hayao Nakayama, later reworked as the SC-3000 home computer , to of course the extremely popular Mega Drive/Genesis and the technologically overwrought Saturn, to the flawed but ahead-of-its-time 1999 Dreamcast , the very…
Canadians, rejoice! Not only do you have curling, the Big Turk and Tim Hortons (and, when I was in BC last, Dr Pepper made with real cane sugar), you also have a number of interesting indigenous computers like the underappreciated Micro Computer Machines MCM/70 portable, the Tarot Electronics MIMIC (not to be confused with the more notorious Spartan Mimic), the Dynalogic Hyperion and of course the…
Grateful acknowledgement made to the several former Apple employees who materially contributed to this entry. This article wouldn't have been possible without you! Here's why I need to do inventory more often. This is an Apple prototype ROM I am ashamed to admit I found in my own box of junk from various Apple Network Server parts someone at Apple Austin sent me in 2003. The 1996 Apple Network…
Very sorry to hear about the death of Stewart Cheifet at 87, long-time host of Computer Chronicles, which for a long time was the undisputed best show on computers on American public broadcasting. I watched it on PBS TV as a kid, and candidly I didn't understand much of what was going on at the time, but I learned a lot and rewatching the episodes now really demonstrates what a treasure trove of…
A very happy holiday season and Merry Christmas to those of you who celebrate it (timezone may vary). Also, I don't think I nearly say thanks enough to my regular patrons through Ko-fi, and I want to also thank them on behalf of the geriatric systems their generosity — and all of you who have chipped in at one time or another — helps keep running. I've got more projects to finish in…
I've mentioned on the blog several times the continuum that exists between handheld computers and pocket computers , battery powered devices in rather small form factors that are nevertheless fully-fledged general purpose computers — arguably more so than the modern locked-down smartphone has become. Some of these diminutive systems are best considered "handhelds," with larger size, larger…
Way back (well, six months ago, anyway), when I was wiring up a Gremlin Blasto arcade board , we talked at length about this 1978 arcade game's history and its sole official home computer port by Milton Bradley to the Texas Instruments 99/4A. In the single player mode you run around in a maze and try to blow up all the mines, which can set off sometimes impressive chain reactions, all the while…
"Burger Becky" did a lot of great games, first at Interplay (Bard's Tale, Wasteland), then later at Logicware, where she and others did some great Mac ports including Jazz Jackrabbit and their Half-Life MacOS port which never actually saw the light of day, the infamous 3DO port of Doom , and of course the initial work on the IIgs version of Wolfenstein 3D . Naturally these are just the highlights…
I try not to write anything even vaguely political on this blog because we have a variety of views on a variety of subjects and no one is here for that. We can all enjoy our geriatric little silicon artifacts together regardless of your electoral persuasion. But I was hopping mad this week, and the reason is actually on-topic, because I got hit with US Customs tariffs close to double the cost of…
As Pibb is the official beverage of Old Vintage Computing Research, no doubt to the profound chagrin of the Coca-Cola Company, I feel compelled to offer a public service announcement. Old and busted: New hotness: Yes, Mr Pibb (technically mr P!BB, though Coca-Cola is inconsistent on their own brand name ) is back and Pibb Xtra, the face of Pibb since 2001, is relegated to the dust heap with Peppo.…
The 1996 Apple Network Server was Apple's first true Unix-through-and-through server (the Apple Workgroup Server 95, actually a Quadra 950 with a special PDS card limited to A/UX, doesn't really count) and through a complex history came to run IBM's AIX as its native operating system. I actually had an ANS 500 when it was almost new, in 1998, and it ran Floodgap until 2012. It is still in my…
Pretty sure this will end up as one of my longest-term restoration projects, but I'm back in the Southern Hemisphere for a little while to visit my wife's side of the family and giving me another opportunity to see if we can make progress on our defective PAL 128DCR , my favourite Commodore 8-bit. When we left it last Christmas, it had an obviously defective U19 colour RAM and the serial bus…
