[Too Many Wires] has a custom computer he’s building. He wanted a mouse, but USB is a bit of a stretch for the fledgling computer. We might have opted for PS/2, but he went for something even older: a serial mouse connected with a DE-9 (colloquially, a DB-9). Check it out in his recent video […]
[Michael Gardi] wrote in to let us know about his project: CPS-1: Imagining An Early 70s 4-bit Microcomputer. The CPS-1 was the first Canadian microprocessor-based computer. It was built by Microsystems International Ltd. (MIL) in Ottawa between 1972 and 1973 and it is unknown how many were made and in what configurations. The CPS-1 supported […]
Desktop environments are the norm as computer interfaces these days, but there was once a time when they were a futuristic novelty whose mere presence on a computer marked it out as something special. In the early 1980s you could buy an expensive but very fancy Mac from Apple, while on the PC there were […]
It is a common occurrence in old movies: Our hero checks in at a hotel in some exotic locale, and the desk clerk says, “Ah, Mr. Barker, there’s a letter for you.” Or maybe a telegram. Either way, since humans learned to write, they’ve been obsessed with getting their writing in the hands of someone […]
A team of hackers, [Jason T. Jacques], [Decle], and [Michael A. Wessel], have collaborated to deliver the Microtronic Phoenix Computer System. In 1981 the Busch 2090 Microtronic Computer System was released. It had a 4-bit Texas Instruments TMS1600 microcontroller, ran at 500 kHz, and had 576 bytes of RAM and 4,096 bytes of ROM. The […]
Tang FPGA boards are affordable, and [nand2mario] has been trying to get an x86 core running on one for a while. Looks like it finally worked out, as there is an early version of the ao486 design on a Tang FPGA board using a Gowin device. That core’s available on the MiSTer platform, which emulates […]
Over on YouTube [The 8-Bit Guy] shows us how the TI-99/4A home computer worked. [The 8-Bit Guy] runs us through this odd 16-bit home computer from back in the 1980s, starting with a mention of the mysterious extra “space” key on its antiquated keyboard. The port on the side is for two joysticks which share […]
[Scott Baker] is at it again and this time he has built a 4-bit single board computer based on the Intel 4004 microprocessor. In the board design [Scott] covers the CPU (both the Intel 4004 and 4040 are supported), and its support chips: the 4201A clock-generator, its crystal, and the 4289 Standard Memory Interface. The […]
Does the in 65F02 “F” stand for “fast” or “FPGA”? [Jurgen] doesn’t know, but his drop-in replacement board for the 6502 and 65c02 is out there and open source, whatever you want it to stand for. The “f” could easily be both, since at 100 MHz, the 65f02 is blazing fast by 6502 standards–literally 100 […]
For all its friendly countenance and award-winning industrial design, there’s one thing the venerable Macintosh Plus can’t do: fit into a 1U rack space. OK, if we’re being honest with ourselves, there are a lot of things a Mac from 1986 can’t do, but the rack space is what [identity4] was focused on when they […]