- 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.
- Hi there. I'm Gustavo Pezzi. Most people know me from the website pikuma.com. I am not really good with replies but I check the website at least once a day to keep up with the good content.
PS: Thank you for keeping it active.
- 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!
- Historical context: the “Premier” and “Unified” releases planned here in 1997 got canceled, and all x86 work (Rhapsody for Intel and Yellow Box For Windows) got canceled after Rhapsody Developer Release 2. Rhapsody for PowerPC did see brief public availability as Mac OS X Server 1.{0..2} and shipped both in retail box (like mine!) and bundled with Server configurations of G3 and G4 towers. The “rootless” (only applications visible) Blue Box mentioned here eventually happened when Blue Box became the Classic Environment.
Even though it's actually usable for very little, Rhapsody remains my favorite “weird dead-end Apple thing” just for the novelty of having essentially NEXTSTEP 5.x (Display Postscript and all) with a Mac Platinum UI. Copland would probably hold that title for me if any of its builds actually worked, but Rhapsody has real stability, real application support, and a real POSIX environment via its NeXT heritage: http://rhapsodyos.org/ https://betawiki.net/wiki/Category:Mac_OS_X_Server_1.x_build...
Mac OS X Server v1.2v3 a.k.a. Rhapsody 5.6 is my favorite thing to run on my Blue & White G3 — the OG New World machine `PowerMac1,1`! https://cooltrainer.org/rhapsody-in-blue-and-white/
- Machines and systems are too large to be built alone. But put me down in front of a 6502 Atari. It’s programming a computer with only 56 instructions in a man vs machine death match.
- 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.
- FractInt[1] is still around and most certainly faster with more options. I remember playing with it endlessly in the 90s, alawys looking for new versions on shareware CDs (that was before the Internet). I think I still have a dozen or so floppy disks filled with fractal images somewhere...
- Hello!! I love working on and programming my mac color classic!
- Hello. Also from Canada!
Retro machine of choice. Atari 800. First computer that was mine. Want revive machine to be real….
Day job is working on COBOL and Fortran centric LLM to keep the lights on after I’m gone.
- I mostly lurk but I also created this site and moderate it!
The retro machines I am mostly interested in are BBC Micro, Sharp MZ80K, KIM-1, Research Machines 380Z and 480Z.
- With a current new machine a newbie can not do ANYTHING. With the old machine you could do tons of things. A lot of stuff was in your operating system by default. Programming could be done on ANY new computer as BASIC was a default item in your system. Currently there is no programming language that is as simple as BASIC. Any language has a huge learning curve
- I think retrocomputing also harkens back to a time when you owned a machine, rather than the other way around. No subscriptions, no advertising, no forced obsolescence.
- I would use it. And in fact I do have an XP machine setup for embedded development. It runs great and the tools are stable and robust.
When I need to use those devices, I can just fire it up and go.
Risks are low too. Keep online use by the book, focused and there just us not that much to worry about
- When I used to go to computer auctions in the 80s you could pick up dozens of copies of sealed retail software like this for a quid. I would be the only one buying these things because I was so curious and intrigued, but nobody else gave a damned. Now these things are priceless haha
- 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!
- More