The PET opened, showing the motherboard. (Credit: Ken Shirriff) An unavoidable part of old home computer systems and kin like the Commodore PET is that due to the age of their components they will develop issues that go far beyond what was covered in the official repair manual, not to mention require unconventional repairs. A […]
Whilst recently perusing the fine wares for sale at the Vintage Computer Festival East, [Action Retro] ended up adopting a 1995 ProStar laptop. Unlike most laptops of the era, however, this one didn’t just have the typical trackpad and clicky mouse buttons, but also a D-pad and four suspiciously game controller looking buttons. This makes […]
Sound hardware has been built into PC motherboards for so long now it’s difficult to remember the days when a sound card was an expensive add-on peripheral. By the mid to late 1990s they were affordable and ubiquitous enough to be everywhere, but three decades later some of them are starting to fail. [Necroware] takes […]
It is hard to imagine that it has been more than four decades since two of the original designers of the Sinclair ZX Spectrum broke off to market the Jupiter Ace. [Nemanja Trifunovic] remembers the tiny computer in a recent post, and we always love to recall the old computers that used TVs for screens […]
As computers age, a dedicated few work towards keeping some of the more interesting ones running. This is often a losing battle of sorts, as the relentless march of time comes for us all, human and machine alike. So as fewer and fewer of these machines remain new methods are needed to keep them running […]
IBM mainframes are known for very unusual terminals. But IBM made many different things, including the IBM 3151 ASCII terminal, which uses a cartridge to emulate a VT220 terminal. [Norbert Keher] has one and explains in great detail how to connect it to a mainframe. It had the 3151 personality cartridge for emulating multiple IBM […]
Even if you aren’t a Disney fan, you probably know about EPCOT — Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow — a Disney attraction that promised a glimpse of the future. [ErnieTech] takes a glimpse at the UNIVAC computer that ran the operation in the 1980s. A lot of schools had UNIVAC 1100-series computers back in those […]
Should you travel around Europe, you may notice that things in France are ever so slightly different. Not necessarily better or worse, simply that the French prefer to plough their own furrow rather than importing cultural tends from their neighbors. In the 1980s this was evident in their home computers, because as well as a […]
There’s a dedicated group of users out there that aren’t ready to let their beloved IBM PC110 go to that Great Big Data Center in the Sky. Unfortunately, between the limited available technical information and rarity of replacement parts, repairing the diminutive palmtops can be tricky. Which is why [Ahmad Byagowi] has started a project […]
If Clive Sinclair’s genius in consumer electronics was in using ingenious hacks to make cheaper parts do greater things, then his Amstrad competitor Alan Sugar’s was in selling decade-old technology to consumers as new and exciting. His PCW series of computers are a great example, 1970s CP/M machines smartly marketed for late 1980s home offices. […]