before these all go to ebay, are there any TRS-80 enthusiasts who want a massive collection of Radio Shack/Tandy Rainbow magazines, from 1984-1990?
will pass them on for a fraction of the ebay price. shipping from canada will be uncheap, but far less than shipping individual issues. would like to see this go to someone in the retrocomputing/archival community!
update: thanks to @shawn6809 the entire collection is now spoken for! :)
Many a computer from the 1980s is today yellowed and brittle. The plastics age considerably over the decades. You can do some mitigation by retrobrighting with hydrogen peroxide. However for some machines you can even get replacement cases, and in some cases even brand new key caps for the keyboard. Today we will transform a beige Commodore A500 into a black beauty!
Today's lunchtime hack was the Hilbert curve on the #penplotter, which was fun to write (I needed an explicit stack because BASIC only has global variables). I really love the flickering lights. #retrocomputing
New blog post! If you're setting up a BlueSCSI image for your classic Mac, there's lots of little tricks and traps for the first-timer. I'm hoping this entry will make things easier, and you'll also learn how to change your hard drive icon... in Japanese. #retrocomputing#mac68k#bluescsi
Data Digger for Windows 95 is a program that can open certain corrupted files, allowing you to dig through them and extract the text you need. You must set the system date to 1996 before using it, or it will refuse to open.
Matthias Wiesmann reflects on how much computing used to be diverse over four decades ago. As an example he explains how weird the Commodore 64 was compared with modern systems.
I cannot date this, but apparently some time in the distant past (possibly 80’s?) the International Harvester tractor company used punch cards for inventory and parts ordering. #retrocomputing#farming
@thelastpsion If you have fun you're doing it right regardless of how interesting or useful what you do is. Even just your passion alone is inspiring. Nothing you post is boring, no matter what you accomplish or share.
@thelastpsion “interesting enough”? Well you’ve got the world’s finest PDA OS running in emulation on Haiku, and a plan to modernise the development tool chain. Could it be more interesting?! :) Glad you had a great weekend.
This mornings seemingly fruitless task is attempting to read 36-32 year old floppy disks in a drive that may be suspect using a greaseweazle fdd controller board.
Let's see what a $25 PC 8801 mkii looks like. It came wrapped in a Japanese newspaper, it has the cardboard drive inserts and most of the plastic port caps. All of which are good signs. 😁 At some point it had an expansion card that is no longer with the system. #retrocomputing#pc88#nec
@ipxfong reminds me of my 1st PC, an old 8088 – a used Goodwill find that I had to slowly upgrade, learning all the while. I miss those days. Good luck! 👍
The elegance of the DG Nova instruction set really becomes apparent when you write emulation code for it. The entire core CPU emulation (no devices) is 250 lines of C, including comments and not even written to be small.
Nova 3 and 4 will probably add another 50-100 lines at most
@loke If you are nesting interrupts you store the contents of 0 somewhere else then either put it back when ready or jump through the saved version.
The other detail is that INTEN takes effect one instruction after not immediately - ie it's the same trick the Z80 later did so you can EI RETI, but in the Nova case you can INTEN JMP @0
In this interview Charles Simonyi told the origin of the acronym WYSIWYG in the context of his work at Xerox PARC on the Bravo word processor, see page 21:
I love treasure hunting. Sometimes Usenet feels like the dusty old thrift store of the Internet. If you have ever found a thrift store with rows of shelves chock full of books, old compact discs, and ancient cassette tapes, then you know what I mean.
