Retro Computers

It’s time to resume our travels into GUI Wonderland, and go back to Apple’s garage to find out what happened to the Lisa’s younger sibling, the Macintosh, and its OS, called System! Is it a Lisa copycat, or are there any intriguing secrets behind it? Let’s find out!

I bought this computer along with some other 'stuff' - old CDs, AOL discs, SoundBlaster box from Circuit City....

The PS/2 is a model 25. The various stickers fell off of the interior while checking the disk connections. Ultimately the 20mb hdd was deemed a goner - I'm sure I could follow a guide to fix it, but instead I went with a CF card ISA adapter (CF uses ATA protocol - I didn't know this before my adventure!).

I ordered the 8087 co-processor along with the ISA adapter for the vast improvement it offered to Pac-Man. I highly recommend Monotech Vintage PC. It's a long shipping distance to the US but totally worth the wait.

I write on it using WordStar, a word processor I began using in 1989 or so when I had to write a state report on Indiana. Back then I was using an XT clone running CPM/80.

Radio Shack kit the wife got me for Christmas. STILL WORKS!

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.bestiver.se/post/157081

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A 1 MHz CPU and 64KB of RAM are enough

If it ain't broke: Many large companies and organizations are often ridiculed for using outdated computers, but not every business requires the latest digital technology. Case in point: a bakery in Indiana has been photographed processing sales using a Commodore 64. This isn't the first time a 21st-century business has been spotted using the top-selling 1982 PC, as the device remains beloved by enthusiasts today.

Photos have recently surfaced showing that Hilligoss Bakery in Brownsburg, Indiana, uses a pair of Commodore 64s as cash registers. While running a business on a 42-year-old PC might seem unusual, the device likely has sufficient processing power to ring up orders of donuts.

The pictures, originally taken in 2010, recently reappeared on social media. The C64s were also visible in another photo from 2021. Hilligoss Bakery appears to have a strong reputation, boasting a 4.7 rating on Google Maps and a 4.4 on Yelp.

GUIs are certainly awesome, and they look like they’ll be the future of IT; but what if you desperately wanted one, yet all you had was a regular IBM PC? Lucky you, as Visi On was just what you needed; let’s explore it in our newest Episode of GUI Wonderland!

Let’s continue our journey in GUI Wonderland by exploring the Apollo/Domain systems! We’ll see how their intriguing opportunities for network computing made them special, in an age when personal systems were on the rise, and we’ll have a look at their multiple available GUIs!

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cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/19281192

A few days ago I posted about my old PC and there was some interest, here's an update.

tldr: the hdd saved everything! It has windows 3.1 and all the games I remember are still there.

Longer story: I bought a few adapters for PATA/IDE to USB and they didn't work. I had this weird issue where when I plugged the usb into my computer, the drive would power off. You can hear it spinning when it's on, plug in USB, drive powers off. Unplug USB, drive powers back on. So after buying 2 different adapters, I gave up on trying to read it that way.

Then, I got a floppy reader and a bunch of floppy disks. The software testdisk has a DOS version, so I copied that to a floppy and ran it on the computer. While it was analyzing the HDD it told me in an error message that the drive appeared smaller than it actually is, and I should update my bios settings.

After struggling to figure out how to get to bios (ctrl alt s, AFTER BOOTING), I googled my drive model and found the cylinders, heads, sectors information and manually typed that into the BIOS as a "user defined" hard drive, and that was all it needed to be able to read the drive.

After that it booted straight into PC DOS + Windows 3.1 and everything is there. I found recipes, games, and other programs.

I was going to try to send files over serial, but it wasn't working for me (i still haven't tried zmodem yet) but I couldn't even receive an echo to the serial port. So I've been backing things up by copying to floppy disk, then reading the disk on my laptop with a reader.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/19133125

I have this vintage pc that I dug up and recently powered on, the hard drive seems to be failing (sector read errors) but I have a bunch of floppy disks i tried running today and it still works as long as it's running from the floppy and doesn't need to be installed first.

If you guys are interested, I'll post it running some things tomorrow. There's a bunch of things I want to do with it like try to replace the hard drive, get it online, and get a compiler so I can port programs or write new ones for it. Maybe install linux if that's a possibility on 6MB of RAM.