The 12 Disks of Christmas

Oh my FUCKING GOD

I finished dumping 99.99% of a very old, damaged, backup CDROM that was previously unreadable. It took 3 days and I was super excited to find out what old data I put on it. The disc had UDF sessions, because that was common at the time for just Adding Files to non-rewritable media.

So I mount that shit in my Windows 98SE box, and lo and behold, this is all that was on it.

I would be absolutely upset if it wasn't so fucking funny

You know what the problem with modern #computers is? There's not a single laser or scanning electron beam anywhere in the whole system.

Edit: Unless you have a laser mouse, but in my experience those are terrible.

Unix historians: who changed the /usr/games/lib/fortunes.dat file between 4.1cBSD and 4.2BSD to attribute Ken Thompson instead of Brian Kernighan with creating a car for the experienced driver with a single unlabeled warning light?

So, when presented with the option to buy an Apple II clone, with a floppy drive and 182 floppy disks, is this just a hobbyist purchase or a philanthropic journey? Someone send me some AppleSauce. Boost if you agree.

I once had a rather peculiar #floppy drive.

It occupied a single 5¼ half-height slot, but the unit contained *two* drives: a 5¼ drive and a 3½ drive.

Even more interestingly, the 5¼ drive had no lever. There wasn't enough room for one. Instead, the drive mechanism would engage when you pushed a 5¼ disk all the way into the drive, and you pushed a button to eject the disk, just like how 3½ drives work.

Too bad I don't still have it. #Retrocomputing YouTubers might have wanted it.

Rate my networking setup 💁

IT WORKS! AppleTalk over barbed wire fence is a go! :D
#LiveLaughLocalTalk
#GlobalTalk
#RetroComputing

This time round I’ve hacked a phone cable in half and soldered alligator clips to the other sides so we get a decent connection to the fence.

It’s a nice day. Work is in a hurry-up-and-wait phase. Let’s try getting AppleTalk running over barbed wire again!
#LiveLaughLocalTalk
#GlobalTalk

I'm desperately seeking information about this chip.

It is a custom #Psion RS232 IC used in the Series 3c, codenamed CONDOR.

If you were involved in the development of the 3c or knew someone who worked for Psion around 1994-1997 who might have been involved, please get in touch.

We want to emulate this chip in #MAME so that it can be added to the existing Psion SIBO hardware #emulation.

This could also help with 3mx serial emulation.

just setting up my #InternetAdvisor...

#retrocomputing friends: today I turned on my #InternetAdvisor and the display looks like this — any idea what's going on? 😭

#HP #Agilent #WAN #Internet #protocol #analyzer #J2300E

just setting up my #InternetAdvisor...

#HP #Agilent #WAN #Internet #protocol #analyzer #J2300E #retrocomputing

It's that yearly moment where I reminisce about my Palm PDAs and Pocket PCs of old, and I realize that I actually miss the stupid Palm Graffiti alphabet as a stylus driven input method.

When you got good at it, you could jot down things shockingly quick. Unfortunately, It also ended up shaping my already weird and shitty handwriting into something weirder and shittier still.

I haven't been comfortable taking notes on anything not keyboard driven since.

First SCSI emulator working on the Pico2! #BlueSCSI

The PROTON PT8010F is a clone of the more widespread Faraday FE2010A. Both are basically XTs on a chip. Just add a CPU and DRAM, ROM and a bit of glue logic and you have got an IBM PC.

@FreeCAD I finally nailed down the production process for manufacturing tiny keyboard keycaps 🎉.
These pics are the 1U keycaps. You wouldn't believe how many ding dang materials and processes I went through before landing where I am now but that's R&D, I guess.
As these are 1:3 scale, the largest glyphs are 1.7mm tall and the smallest are 1.3mm. 🙀
The tricky part was figuring out how to produce 83 keycaps for each keyboard with minimal labor and few rejects.

To celebrate the X Window System's 40th birthday, I did a deep dive on something about it: the iconography of its boot-up stipple (that gray pattern you first see as the X Server starts up):

https://matttproud.com/blog/posts/x-window-system-boot-stipple.html

Did you know the stipple has a name, age, and cultural significance to the ecosystem? I'll share my personal history with it. What's yours?

#XWindowSystem #UNIX

Who remembers hit counters?