- For those who accessed the internet with dial-up in the early ’90s before broadband, this looks at the underground behind the curtain of AOL, the scene of punters, crackz, and warez. The podcast interviews the hackers and AOL staffers from that time and covers the progs, tricks, and exploits used to mess with the service. With AOL dial-up gone, it’s a chance to capture a bit of history that’s gone forever.
- The 68k was a dream to program thanks to its spacious, linear address space with no segments and offsets to juggle like on the 8086. It had its own quirks, but dealing with memory in awkward 64 KB chunks wasn’t one of them.
- > except for my new SHARP PC-G850V![0] I am jelly. I have never seen anything like that in pictures or in the flesh as they say. Closest I had to that was an HP15C as nerds of my era did.
Havent done much retro beyond a restoration of an Outrun coin op. Alas it’s a project for a friend and once done it will be going to a new home.
- Hey, been a while! How are things? I have been a busy bunny doing almost no retro, except for my new SHARP PC-G850V![0]
Same. It is a delightful cpu. Was thankfully simple enough for kids to understand without too much trouble. I got most of mine through magazines and a rough copy of the 6502 dtatsheet.
Prior to the 68K, I got to enjoy the 6809. Actually enjoy that one a bit more than the 68K as long as the project or data fits the overall capability. (It is no fun on any CPU when that becomes true)
I only did some small projects on the 68K. Still, more than enough to appreciate how Moto did things.
- I was flabbergasted at the time that AOL was valued more than Time Warner. By that point any savvy analysis should have pointed out AOL was very far down the road of being just another ISP rather than a destination in itself, while the Time Warner media assets were much more valuable and relevant then than they are today (and there’s still some value there today).
Total failure of due diligence — on the scale of the Studebaker-Packard merger, or bigger — and every consultant on Time Warner’s side who didn’t advise against it should have been put on a list, never to be trusted again.
- This was an amazing piece of debugging and interesting to find that the official copy protection patches, and the ones from GOG, are both faulty and ruin the game.
- I’ve been enjoying the latest business wars, “The AOL Time Warner Disaster” which I suppose many of us thought it was pretty messed up at the time. Spoiler alert: it was even more messed up that you imagined!
- Just a data point to magnify how out of reach a computer was in this era. $18000 in 1975 would be $107,000 in 2025.
- 56 instructions. 3 GP registers. What’s not to like. Didn’t hit my stride till i got on 68k
- Although I'd argue that's an odd, almost vestigial use. The RP2040 on that board is performing most of the show and the 6502 becomes more of a front end. But it's a fun idea, at any rate.
- Still being used for new computers: https://www.olimex.com/Products/Retro-Computers/Neo6502/open...
- Looks to be from 1987 (most likely); certainly not 1984.
- An article on networking was definitely not a place I was expecting to see my old high school mentioned.
- Yes of course, it's a demo, so that's kind of the point. Still, fitting 1/2 hour of music into 4kb, with visuals as well is something extraordinary to me. Also the songs are bangers.
- In the 90s, when Ethernet cards still cost like 50-100 bucks (more than us kids could afford), I got a large box of around 10 ISA ARCNet cards from a friend who just migrated a small office to Ethernet. There were no hubs or anything.
A "quick" internet search later (this was before Google, so it took a few hours total), I found the schematics for a passive ArcNet hub and built one using spare parts and a cheap plastic box.
It worked extremely well, and it was very flexible since you could mix and match star and bus topologies as you liked. So if someone only had a short cable, they could be connected to the computer next to them with a T connector and go to the central hub that way.
We used this setup for LAN parties for about 2 or 3 years, until everyone had gotten a 100mbit Ethernet card.
- Wow. That was quite the journey.
I remember the pizza box Sun machines fondly. I must have ordered hundreds of SPARCserver 20’s in the first couple of years in my career - the investment banks in London ran off them in the 1990’s, though I suppose we had a little bit of everything!
- C64 folks will know better. I assume their is about 900 bytes for audio playback and the remainder for audio defitions. I dont really know much about sound/music so I assume its some sort of instructions like a program to play the song by tweaking sound registers on the famous SID chip. Differen from MP3/CD which has samples which would make the storage constraint inmpossible
- Takes me back. First I heard of Future Crew and the demo scene was in Wired in print.a primitive time in the matrix when you just couldn’t access the internet wherever you were in Earth.
- :-)
- My favorite was the "Real Reality" spoof by Never a few years later for Mekka&Symposium. They re-made it entirely with shaky VHS home cameras and papercraft models... Extremely creative, for a time when video editing was still very much not in reach for most people
- Still always loved the Commodore 64 "port." I'm sure it started as a joke, but it really works.
- I backed it since I've wanted to get one every since they launched the first version. It's a shame that these are released like this... it makes them feel like unobtainium in an even worse way than Analogue does with their FPGA consoles. I understand that it's hard to get investor interest in a niche product like this and it's probably for the best but it makes the community around the Next feel very small and exclusive.
- A release by Conspiracy: https://bsky.app/profile/conspiracy.hu/post/3lvem4wbcak2g
Back in the day I was still hesitant to switch away from Amiga, so this is the first time I can watch this on my own PC! :) Kudos to gargaj and all contributors
- Wow. No less than four books on the original Macintosh Basic, the one Apple developed and Microsoft forced them to kill before release. Still wonder how different the world would have been if Apple had gotten that out the door. Microsoft’s Basic for the Mac was garbage.
- Checked my own copy of the font. It's pretty weird seeing the PowerPC logo just sitting there in some random font on my Mac 18 years after the Intel transition ended.
- Pretty nice indeed!
- The Commodore 64, as well as the Amiga 500, when they first came out offered vastly superior multimedia hardware yet were cheaper than the competition. This new device seems more comparable to MiSTer FPGA hardware than anything else. To bring back the value proposition of the original Commodore today would mean going up against Mac, Windows, and Linux machines but at a cheaper price and with new breakthrough technology.
- Same. More prosperous friends than I had them. I was burdened by a loan for a Mac II from university that was $5500. The comparison really wasnt much different than the Atari vs Apple II a decade earlier. You could do some really great things on the Apple equipment, but it wasn't one of Jay Miners kids...
- All in Colour and great artistry. I will gladly recommend anyone here visit this page specificially : https://16colo.rs/artist/viler
I like this one a lot. Gives Duke Nukem Vibes... https://16colo.rs/pack/mist1120/VILER-TDC17.ANS
- More
[0] The SHARP is roughly an Apple 2 type, 8 bit workstation in your pocket! It has BASIC, C compilier, machine monitor, assembler for both the Z80 and PIC, and a PIC programmer in ROM! The BASIC is full featured, a lot like Microsoft Extended BASIC, and the other tools are solid enough at first glance.
Graphical display like the Model 100 too! And if that were not enough, the thing offers the user 32K and has 11 GPIO pins on one side, and a full system bus, cartridge slot style, on the other!
That pretty much describes my Apple 2, which I do use as an 8 bit workstation. Many developers did just that back in the 80's. Apples developed many Atari, C64 and NES games.
There have been some expansions made for the Sharp. Haven't really gone looking.
Anyhow, very interesting device.