Note that the version history on unixdude's site is not up to date, the most recent version is 3.1, which was published by Andreas yesterday.

The current source code can be found in the "branch_softfloat" branch on sourceforge's svn: https://sourceforge.net/projects/previous/

I guy I worked with years ago used one of these as part of a delivery job he had in college. He wrote a Basic program to do all the paperwork and it made him the most efficient driver the company had. It was a remarkably useful computer.

Fun read!

I grew up with Apple at school, Atari at home.

The Atari machines were well conceived in some ways mentioned in the article. SIO peripheral connections came with device independent I/O support in ROM, for example.

Another was the controller ports! Paddles, joysticks, trac-balls, and more were useful for games, and other things! The joystick ports delivered 16 bits of bidirectional I/O that I found useful.

And there is FujiNET! Until that device showed up, my Atari gathered dust.

I have never quit using my Apple 2e though.

It is the better 8 bit workstation and the ability to add expansion cards, PC style is what really made the difference! Doing that is not cheap, but it is powerful.

The one item I crave is 80 column text, and the Apple does that well, and does reasonable color graphics well, no sprites aside.

Back in the day, that text got me on the Internet, was good for office type work, writing papers, programming.

Interestingly, I can get a FujiNET for my Apple, meaning both machines can participate in games and applications online!

One thing not mentioned was how bloody slow the 1542 disk system was compared to an Atari 810 or 1050 drive. I remember there were specialty cartridges to make the disk faster but didn’t help.

The 810 was twice the speed but half the capacity of the 1541.

Here's to the Crazy ones. The ones still using their computer long after it should have been retired. I am not lucky to have an original Mac (with a signed inside case) but I do still use my Atari 1200xl at least a little but not as my daily driver like these folks do.

I made money in my teens helping people wire real keyboards on these. Miniaturized version. Don’t really understand.

Still waiting for the modernized 800xl from Revive

https://revive-machines.com/index-en.html

Yep, just wget. Here's my wget-mirror shell function, newlines added for readability:

  wget-mirror () {
    wget --mirror --convert-links --adjust-extension
    --page-requisites --no-parent --content-disposition
    --header="Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8"
    --user-agent="Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:119.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/122.0"
    --restrict-file-names="windows,nocontrol" -e robots=off --no-check-certificate "$1"
  }

a recent podcast on the jupiter ace i found interesting. https://radiopublic.com/advent-of-computing-60Q1LB/s1!cb0eb

Remember watching this as a child when it came out Yul Brynner was terrifying, so relentless. And the SFX were so realistic for me. The heat/infrared vision images. A total experience for me who was younger than the recommended 14 years old.

Happy new year!

Hey there, fellow nerds and geeks! Happy 24 to all who find joy in the aroma of solder, the thrill of twiddling bits, nostalgia of retro gaming and keepers of the Konami Code! Up, up, down, down, happy 24 to us all!

🎮🔧👾

Merry Christmas. Thanks for creating Two Stop Bits!

Merry Christmas! Thank you for making the site that I've so often wanted to exist!

Thanks for the links.

Here is yet another one: https://github.com/rochus-keller/LisaPascal

There's a second Lisa emulator, idle (Incomplete Draft of a Lisa Emulator):

  https://idle-lisa-emu.sourceforge.net

There are quite a lot of activities around the Lisa right now. A number of projects recreate the Lisa hardware using (mostly) original components:

https://github.com/warmech/lisa-hardware/

https://github.com/alexthecat123/Lisa-PCBs/

https://github.com/alexthecat123/Lisa-GALSCSI-Card/

Patrick Schäfer has provided Lisa hardware and tools for many years:

http://john.ccac.rwth-aachen.de:8000/patrick/idefile.htm

and there is an Arduino-based ProFile hard disk emulator (currently only working with the Lisa 2/5 I/O board):

https://github.com/alexthecat123/ArduinoFile

...plus one based on a BeagleBoard:

http://www.arcanebyte.com/harddrive-product/

...bigmessowires' floppy emulator, which also works with Lisas

https://www.bigmessowires.com/floppy-emu/

...and, of course, the Lisa OS and application source code which was published in early 2023:

https://computerhistory.org/blog/the-lisa-apples-most-influe.../

...plus more interesting source code including GEM, e.g. available at:

https://stardot.org.uk/forums/viewtopic.php?t=20964

https://github.com/stepleton/

The RM Nimbus PC-186 was moderately popular in UK educational facilities, and obviously used the 80186.

Once upon a time I came across some unnamed PC clone, skulking in our university's business department that actually used the even rarer 80188, at the time no-one even believed me that it existed, but the modern internet thankfully makes it clear that it did.

I'm really excited to watch this. I also need to download Sigil 2. It makes me so happy that Doom has a thriving community thirty years on

I have both a STacy and a Mac Portable, and they're not even in the same class. The Portable has a fabulous screen and a wonderful full-stroke keyboard, and feels solid and professional. The STacy feels cheap and thrown together. The Portable can be relatively easily worked on, the degenerating plastics notwithstanding; the STacy hides screws and flexed dangerously even when it was new.

But the STacy is an ST, and it's the only one I've got.

I worked at Xerox and got a chance to actually see an Alto up close, although it was not in operating condition. When I started in the mid-90s GlobalView, the successor to the OS that ran on the Star (which was a successor of the Alto), had been ported to run on Sun workstations and was still in use inside the company. They also ported it to run on top of Windows but performance was horrible and people only used it if they had to.

This weird little machine has an entry on the Obsolete Computer Museum

http://www.obsoletecomputermuseum.org/siigs286/

Ugh, thats crazy stuff.. I remember playing DOOM on my 386DX40 and peformance was not good. I had to reduce screen size and do double pixels. 486SX25 peformed much better, especially when I overclocked it to 33MHz.

Well, that is why I have a C64 and an Amiga 500.

The five other C64s an Amiga 500, 500+ and 1200, Amstrad CPC6128, Macintosh FDHD, LCII, Apple G4, Apple G5, Atari ST and every console are all illusions... nope nothing to see.

To be fair, I love repairing and exploring the old software more than cupboard space.

edit: forgot about the Dragons and the Apple IIs...

This submission uses the HTTPS protocol, but the web server has a self-signed certificate. If that's a problem, it seems to work via regular HTTP also.

Part 2: https://www.abortretry.fail/p/the-history-of-commodore-part-...

Part 3: https://www.abortretry.fail/p/the-history-of-commodore-part-...

Your wish is my command! It's done.

It's $750 so I can imagine it's out of a lot of price ranges but I love my 5XPro and have a 4k tv so I'm definitely tempted to sell that and pick this up.

Nice work.

I wish more sites took linkrot seriously like this.

This is a great addition! Thanks!

It even includes the MouseText glyphs introduced with Unicode 13.

Now if only I could find a library for drawing MouseText interfaces on a modern terminal...

To clarify the title, this isn't a library of images of retro computers. It is a code library (and executables) to read retro image formats of various computers.