when i was a kid, buying a new game was serious business. it meant saving up my weekly farm-chore allowances of $2.50 for six to eight months, before I could afford a brand new computer game. this usually meant about one new PC game a year, along with whatever I got for christmas.
among the lost pieces of canadian computing history are the retail prices for computer hardware and software we swallowed in the 1990s
buried in the archives was this Softwarehouse catalogue from 1994 - an Edmonton-based computer retailer from the 80s and 90s.
enjoy skimming through the eyeball-gouging prices we paid back then, like an $80 copy of Isaac Asimov's Science Adventure for DOS. this was mostly due to a crushing US-CAN exchange rate at the time.
ps: anyone else remember visiting Softwarehouse in YEG? it was at 102 ave and 108 st :D
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!
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!
on that note: i just booted up an A500 that I bought 20 years ago for the first time
i never had bothered with the machine because I preferred its older brother A1000 for the case design and overall style
as it turns out, the previous owner installed a 2MB RAM + clock upgrade, as well as an internal HDD in this A500! i had no idea they were capable of having internal HDDs D:
i soldered a new clock battery in, and it's running like new. pretty amazing machine for its footprint.
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
As a youngster, I made my first Deluxe Paint pixel art on an Amiga 1000 in 1986. Coming from a Commodore 64 with a fixed palette of 16 colors, the Amiga was revolutionary at the time.
I went on to use "DPaint" professionally on a daily basis for around 10 years, creating pixel graphics for games, advertising agencies and television shows.
I am astounded at how advanced a game Elite was on the BBC Micro. This video does a great exploration of the mechanics of it, how it was written, the history around it, and its influences to this day. He also gave a big shout out to others who have thoroughly documented the game as well. #RetroComputing#RetroGaming#ComputerHistory Elite: "The game that couldn't be written"
Hate those fake updates from USPS where their computer sees that nothing has happened for a couple of days and inserts some generic "oh, we've totally put it on a truck and it's heading to you!” It has been sitting there for 3 days! Definitely not arriving today. 😔
Remembered I had a big variac. I was able to get the power supply to start by slowly bringing up the AC voltage. It’s hard to repeat, but I was able to do it more than once.
Sometimes those impulse purchases turn out to be pretty handy. Bought this endoscope several months ago and it has just been sitting around. Can see the labels without having to tear all the components off. #electronics#electronicsrepair#RetroComputing#VintageComputing