Cathode Ray Dude did a video about this. Glimpse at early laptops as they transitioned from the Compaq/Kaypro/IBM luggables.

IBM Made The Longest Laptop Ever https://youtu.be/htl_JbZIcUU?si=LW8hWuk_TX-BN5g_

My favorite kind of projects. New software for a device that was EOL or at least end of sales in 2014.

Assuming you’ve scavenged eBay, kijiji and the like. You’re not soliciting a sale why not tap our community.

Must be a rare item. When I google for cit-102 the number one , non ad link for a cut-102 is this post :-)

Oh my gosh! This brings back memories!

My first real Internet machine was a 386/25, no 387 as it was an SX model CPU.

Windows 3.11

Winsock Extensions

14.4 modem

Number Nine VGA (wish I had kept that! It could do tricks with EGA, TV and such) running a 1024x768 interlaced display. Yes, turn the contrast down, and life was pretty good.

And get this:

5, count em, 12345 Megabytes of RAM!

1 on mainboard, 4 in some slot or other.

Now, 5 gave one the advantage of being able to run some programs that required 8 megabytes They would run terribly, if they ran at all, because disk thrashing, but running was better than not, so yay!

And I would run my copy of Netscape and off to the races we go!

It's cool to see those, though I admit I was never a fan of the weird Media Player skins and always kept with the simplest possible one (as that just got out of the way of the content).

What an amazing time to be alive where MAME is a development environment.

Yes, it was very painful at first. The things that offset the pain is that at the start, the code was strictly the same (C code) for x86-64 and 6502, so I could iterate bugs out with the x86-64 decoder before trying with the 6502 code, in a few milliseconds. Afterwards, once I started going assembly on the 6502 code I iterated over that using MAME's Apple IIgs with 16MHz ZipChip, making the wait ~5 minutes instead of 70 at start, and less and less as I progressed.

This is the early incarnation of sco from a more civilized age. before caldera and the dark times.

Today I was thinking about this more. Yes. The optimization is cool. But the original 70 minutes runtime. 70 minuets to know if your code works. On average this is about 73 pixels a second. Like watching paint dry.

No chance this ran correct the first time. How many times it ran before it was like oh crap. Try again. That’s some serious dedication.

Good catch. Those were only in p5 and p6+ I was watching baseball in the easy chair when I wrote that. Fixed.

It's missing the Unix Hater's Handbook:

https://wiki.unix-haters.org/lib/exe/fetch.php?media=uhf:bib...

specifically Chapter 14: Nightmare File System

RDPMC was introduced with the Pentium; was there some other instruction or method you were thinking of for 386 or 486 CPUs?

This article is an absolute treasure - a work of art, in itself.

I never dived into the C64 video architecture much back in the day when C64 was fresh - I instead had an Oric-1/Atmos and thus had other thorns to deal with - but I have always respected the levels to which the C64 has been pushed.

In the Oric-1/Atmos world, we too have strange attributes to exploit and derive new tricks, never once considered feasible, for the platform.

I have often thought of what it'd take to add a camera to the Oric, and thought to just glom an ESP32 with a realtime libpipi [1] or Pictconv [2] implementation, generating LDA/STA's for the Orics very humble HIRES mode straight into its DATA lines.

There is a great deal of satisfaction in seeing such insane optimisations being developed with 21st century optimism for the 'retro' computers. Making them do insane new things makes them new again.

[1] - http://caca.zoy.org/wiki/libpipi/oric [2] - https://www.osdk.org/index.php?page=documentation&subpag...

Thanks :) I do time the 6502 code using the MAME emulator, its debugger's trace feature, and a profiler I made. It's far from perfect (gets very confused by tricks like pha/pha/rts in the IIe ROM) but works under IIc emulation and allows me to precisely count cycles in my code: https://www.colino.net/wordpress/en/a2trace-debug-and-profil.../

First machine I could personally afford that ran OpenGL. I started professional work doing PHiGS and then OpenGL in SGI

For the younger enthusiasts MCP in this era is a Microsoft Certified Professional not the model context protocol (MCP) from the vibe coding world.

I remember ripscript as being part of the major bbs during that brief before AOL and trumpet / mosaic took over the world.

This was my first serious Windows environment!

Got my MCP on NT 3.51 and ran quite a lot of higher end software. And 3.51 was a solid OS, with the graphical shell customizable to a high degree. You could make a damn cool looking desktop.

Yeah, it was a good optimization effort.

My preference was to work in cycles. Many systems have a timer one can use to get the cycle counts. There isn't one on a stock Apple 2. Many cards have the PIA chip, 6522, which does have two timers, though they are only 16 bit.

Or, a quick hand timing gets fairly close. On that, the only real difficulty is finding a task that scales well with our perceptual slowness.

The provoking price!

Love how this chronicles the instruction count at 301 million and then for each optimization and compromise it cuts xx million instructions of the runtime.

I think the 6502 final would need to be run in an emulator to get the retired instruction count. On 586+ cpu such a function is baked into the hardware.

In case the video is TL;DW:

Enthusiasts bond twelve 56K modems together to set dial-up broadband records — a dozen screeching boxes achieve record 668 kbps download speeds

https://www.tomshardware.com/networking/enthusiasts-bond-twe...

Confirmed. Kind of strange that a hobbyist site would redirect based on a sniffer browser agent.

OG title :

Apple Introduces the First Low Cost Microcomputer System with a Video Terminal and 8K Bytes of RAM on a Single PC Card.

weird. I visited this earlier (on my phone?) and it actually went to a page about the relay computer with a photo, like this archive.org view: https://web.archive.org/web/20230222205807/https://relaysbc....

now, at my desktop, it's redirecting to https://sourceforge.net/projects/relaysbc/ which is useless by comparison. It gives little idea about what's going on.

just SF being SF I guess.

In the age of 3D printing, single board computers, and hobbyist kits and cases there are tons of projects. Atari, NES, GBA, up to Saturn and PS1 and even MAME.

I suspect that many if the 1UP cabinets are just an SBC running MAME but I can’t be certain. I’ve never had a closeup look.