- No worries. Really appreciate what you’ve done with the site. I also see that you added mobile styles recently, which is handy.
- Post things you want to see. Upvote and comment on other people's posts that you like, to encourage them to post more. When you come across an interesting comment you like, post that link to your friends.
A site like this can exist on interesting submissions for a little while, but community is what will give it staying power, and help it collect interesting submissions for a long time to come.
- I met John Grant in Cambridge about 10 years ago at some event, he's a really nice guy who can tell very interesting stories about the early microcomputer industry in Cambridge and his later hardware projects.
Another interesting thing – the CPU used in the Spectrum prototype shown in the linked article is a Z80A made by SGS-Ates (a predecessor of SGS-Thompson). I've never seen a Z80 made by them and had to look up the logo, but they started second-sourcing the Z80 in 1979 according to (sorry, page in German) https://www.homecomputermuseum.de/sammlung/detailansicht/com.../
Here's a link to the logo: https://www.elnec.com/en/support/ic-logos/manufacturer-descr...
- Alas. This article is incomplete. I would be loathe to call the original api from 1985 win32. The original api was 16-bit. This was originally the windows api and later called win16. The 32-bit api came later with Windows NT. I’d also think to mention win32s which allowed some 32 but apps to run in 16 bit windows and win64 which is the 64 bit edition if of the api that you can still write applications against with the SDK. I fact you can write assembly code to write a very tiny app against the windows API since the API is what does the heavy lifting. I’d also note that MFC originally shipped as a 16 bit lib.
Also. Notably missing. the windows template lib (WTL) from the COM era.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_API https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Win32s https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Foundation_Class_Lib...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_API https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Win32s https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Template_Library https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_Template_Library
- All article links take you to the blog front page if you use uBlock Origin.
- Thanks! There's still some work to do on mobile but it is useable now. Thanks for being a member!
- The year is 1998. I was tasked with making a movie to communicate some tech at a trade show. Two minutes of video on a loop.
I had setup the animation and kicked off the renderer expecting to come back to work the following day to see all my frames done and ready to be assembled into the movie, which would be written to a few VHS tapes for overnight transport to the show floor.
I go home, life is good, sleep, awake, show up at work, and oh shit!
The renderer script had died a few hundred frames in, meaning I was screwed.
I was doing this work on SGI IRIX, which was a futuristic OS at the time. I was about to experience just what X11 can do!
Some quick math told me the movie could still be done! But, I was going to need to render on damn near every machine in the building.
No problem. One of the managers mooched some temporary render licenses meaning I was set! All I had to do was install the software on the machines, hand each of them a bunch of frames, kick it all off and build the movie as the data gets computed.
I did the whole thing from my desk using X11 to run applications, including the amazing SGI software manager, and setup the renders.
At one point, I had windows open to about 10 machines and each of them was in various stages of software installation too. Some could take the package, others needed space to be free, still others had a dependency, and on it goes.
I pushed all the boxes hard, even rendering on some other users machines without them even knowing!
For 6 hours straight, X11 and I pushed software around, moved render frames to my primary machine, assembled bits into the movie and inch, by inch it got done.
Our sysadmin came by to tell me he had never seen system loads hit these levels. I had many of the machines buried doing frames as fast as they could.
On that day, X11 and a fine UNIX with great tools shined! Got the movie done and written to tape just an hour before the transport person would not make it overseas to the show.
That was multiuser graphical computing in action.
I had been learning UNIX under high pressure to give it up and go all Windows. After that experience, no way. Not gonna happen.
These days I still use Linux everywhere I can. And one last thing:
X11 works great. Being able to remote display is powerful. I was very impressed when I used X to render on a user box, or few.
At any given time, I have forgotten some UNIX, but what I remember always gets me through whatever challenge of the day is.
Go X11! Multi user graphical computing can be amazingly powerful. Would be a shame to lose out on that capability.
- Hi everyone, I designed this a few years ago, and I'm still working on more expansion cards for it. The whole hardware and software is open source. Take a look and let me know what you think. Cheers!
- Jason Scott of the Internet Archive says[1]:
> Nobody should worry about Hobbes, I've got Hobbes handled.
[1]: https://mastodon.archive.org/@textfiles/111728995296654678
- I feel like these sort of articles really undersell the strategic importance of 98sᴇ and 𝓂ℯ as vehicles for distribution of IE 5.0 and IE 5.5 (respectively). More so for OEMs than for retail users IMO. Win𝓂ℯ makes the corporate strategy even more obvious with a few UI elements re-written as HTAs, like the Help & Support Center.
I had a computer with Win98ғᴇ, and getting IE 5.0/5.5 was difficult over 56k dialup when 20-something megabytes was huge and took hours. In fact IE5 was the first time I ever saw an installer exe that was just a downloader (“Active Setup”) to make the download size variable depending on selected components. I 'member exporting the downloaded files and burning a big CD with all of my favorite installers so I wouldn't have to download them all again the next time I did a clean install, which was a thing I did fairly often as a kid.
Compare some historic browser stats:
— March 1999, right at the time of IE 5.0's public release as a download or CD-ROM: https://web.archive.org/web/20070211145820/http://www.websid... (IE4 56.83%, IE5 2.18%)
— April 1999, still one month before the release of Win98sᴇ: https://web.archive.org/web/20070211145751/http://www.websid... (IE4 51.35%, IE5 8.96%)
— August 1999 with three months of Win98sᴇ bringing IE5 to every new PC by default: https://web.archive.org/web/20070211145548/http://www.websid... (IE4 44.73%, IE5 24.86%)
https://www.tech-insider.org/statistics/research/2000/0124.h... sez “Worldwide PC shipments surpassed 113.5 million units in 1999, an increase of 21.7 percent over 1998 shipments.”
- Get better Woz :(
- wasn't an issue, still had half a dozen tabs open with articles i hadn't read yet till it came back. :-)
great site. thank you for the retro tech news.
- I’ve long wanted a site like this and so I’m really happy so many others have signed up and are contributing. I wanted something that was not technology specific and that mixed retro gaming and computing as these are worlds that overlap and feed each other.
Thank you to everyone who has participated so far and helped build the site. I’m really grateful to all of you.
Let’s build a fun, supportive and retro community together.
- 450 pounds, or about 200 kg
- These machines didn’t ask to be built this way. It’s their greedy ink overlords that did this. Mechano rights now! :-)
As I said elsewhere the shenanigans with ink didn’t start until recently. That era of printer is probably ok. It’s all in the choice you make. I just bought a brother Lp for my mother in law. Printer and 1 toner was c$370/U$. Will last rest of her life. With about 3500 pages of capacity. However the software world will surely change but when I take possession of it again I hope this solution still works so I can make use of it …
- Some games indeed. But I've also done art (graphics and music) and programming on Win 3.x with some of it being in proprietary file formats that can't be loaded by modern software. I could export music to MIDI and load that in modern software like Sibelius or Musescore, but I'd lose much of the notation. So instead I use the old software to have it on-screen or print it, then transcribe it.
- Sierra's AGI and SCI and Lucasfilm/LucasArts' SCUMM were strokes of genius and have been a major factor in these companies' success. It allowed them to not just churn out games at a far greater pace than if every game's tech had to be built from the ground up, but also made porting to other platforms much easier. In that sense they are the predecessors of Unity and Godot and all the other game engines we have today.
- I remember back in 1995 when the German magazine c't published an in-depth analysis showing that SoftRAM did not work at all.
That was way before Mark did the analysis for DrDobbs. However I guess since it was in German, the rest of the world didn't really notice...
- Ha! Love that the website swaps out the mouse cursor with that little dinosaur dude. It's been so long since I've seen that cursor!
- A production of nearly 50 years is honestly astounding. I assume this is for the full line of Z80 cpus
- There was a clone by Timex, the T/S 1500, which was a ZX81 (with 16 kB RAM!) in a Spectrum-like case with rubber/chicklet keys: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timex_Sinclair
You can build your own ZX81 replica, there are several projects available and all components are still available since the replicas replace the Sinclair ULA with a bunch of regular 74-series TTL ICs. We used the ZX81plus38 for a soldering course with our students, this works very well:
https://github.com/mahjongg2/ZX81plus38
There's also a Sinclair Spectrum clone, the Harlequin, which is also quite simple to build.
- Works like a charm – also with a Spectrum clone, but you have to invert the order of the cables at one of the connectors IIRC. I had a number of the PCBs manufactured (but I used different keycaps) and use them with inexpensive keychron switches.
- This game became Zarch and when converted to other platforms was named Virus.
- Wild!
- I have one of these. Great little computers!
Back in the 80's, I wanted one of these computers to write and carry around manufacturing related programs. Was too much money, so I settled on the PC-6. Pocket computer with 2K RAM, just enough!
I would have done more with the Model 100!
There is a 64 character driver floating around that I have lost track of. If you find it, it makes the display more dense, better.
- They aren't putting him back on the current leaderboard they're just putting him back where he was on legacy boards.
- windows me has a bad rep from a lot of people. i only had it on 1 computer but it never gave me trouble. it was in a rural location and the 56k modem struggled to get past 26k on bad phone lines.
when it got infected win9x and it's ilk could be beaten into removing all the virus whereas when it was replaced with win2000 and xp it required a full reinstall.
had to bring all the updates out on cd-rs but it worked great with that limitation. was so good to get that location onto broadband a few years later.
- Happy holidays! Thanks for this terrific site, I read it daily. Can't get enough of this retro goodness!
- Thenks to you for such a great resource, which was missing in this space.
- From the excellent Commodore books by Brian Bagnall:
While the engineers were showing off the new PET models, John Feagans noticed Bill Gates step up to one of the demo computers. “He was looking over his shoulder,” recalls Seiler.
“Gates walked up to our machine and played around with it.” What Feagans saw amazed him. Gates typed a simple command and the screen displayed the word MICROSOFT.
“If you put WAIT 6502 and then a number, it would print MICROSOFT that many times,” says Seiler. Gates cleared the screen and walked away, unaware Feagans had observed his deed.
Feagans soon realized Gates had snuck an Easter egg into Commodore BASIC. “There was another guy who did the first work on BASIC but Gates was working on it near the end. That’s how small the company was,” says Seiler.
Gates used the hidden code to fingerprint this particular version of BASIC. “He put in something in the PET because he was real suspicious of people like me stealing his BASIC on paper tape,” says Seiler. If someone attempted to incorporate BASIC into a machine using Gates’ code, it would be easy to check if the code originated with Micro-Soft.
Feagans felt perturbed because he had previously scanned through the code searching for hidden messages and found no discernable words. “It wasn’t in ASCII where you could see it. Gates had fiddled with a couple of bits with the ASCII character set, so it didn’t show up when you just looked at a raw binary dump,” says Seiler.
Feagans vowed to hunt down the hidden message and remove it from Commodore’s code. “He was just so perturbed that he had put that in there,” says Seiler. “Feagans is kind of a perfectionist like that.”
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