Here at Hackaday we cover the world of retrocomputing, which means that we see all manner of older computers in our everyday work. We might even claim that we’ve seen them all, were it not that every now and then something comes along which surprises us. [Tynemouth Software] has done just that, with an unexpected […]
Before Linux, there was Unix. It was great, but it was and has been plagued by problems with licensing and proprietary competition. [Vintage Appartus] recalls, for example, the AT&T Unix PC from the 1980s. It was awesome, but you’ve probably never heard of it. For 1985, it was a nice setup. You got a 10 […]
Doing software archaeology can be a harrowing task, as rarely do you find complete snapshots of particular versions of software. Case in point the development of MS-DOS – also known as IBM PC DOS – from 86-DOS, which recently got a lucky break in the form of printed source listings. These printouts come courtesy of […]
You may not know what a ADM-3, a TV910, or a H1420 are, but you probably have at least heard of a VT-100. They are all terminals from around the same time, but the DEC VT-100 is the terminal that practically everything today at least somewhat emulates. Even though a real VT-100 is rare, since […]
USB wasn’t even a gleam in an engineer’s eye when the Sega Master System hit the market in 1985. Today, we’re up to USB 4 or something, and the USB C connector is becoming a defacto standard for just about everything except desktop computers. [Retrostalgia] is embracing this by mating the control pad from Sega’s […]
As unloved as IBM’s PCjr was, with only a one-year production run, it’s hard to complain about the documentation available for it. This includes the x86 assembly listing for the BIOS, which [dbalsom] recently used this print version to create an ASM project that can be built into a byte-identical copy of the PCjr BIOS. […]
One of the nice things about magnetic storage is that as long as the magnetic layer remains intact, the data it contains should stay readable pretty much indefinitely. That raises the prospect of recovering data from really old computer systems featuring magnetic memory, such as the 63-year old LGP-21 that [David Lovett] of Usagi Electric […]
Itanium was once meant to be the next step in computing, to compete with the likes of IBM, Sun and DEC, but also for Intel to have an architecture that couldn’t be taken from it, as the PC was from IBM by its clones. Today, however, Itanium is a relic of the past. [Asianometry] tells […]
Once the microcomputer era got going in earnest, the floppy disk quickly supplanted the tape as the portable storage method of choice. They were never particularly large, but they were fine for the average user to get by. At the same time, it wasn’t long before heavier-duty removable storage solutions hit the market for power […]
Once a pioneer in videocards, S3’s legacy is today mostly found in details like texture compression as well as the strong presence of S3-branded videocards in the retro-computing world. There’s however a bit of a funny issue with some of these S3 cards in what is often called a ‘brightness bug’, but which as [Bits […]