Although the Apple II range of computers were based around the 6502 processor, they could still run x86 software using expansion cards that were effectively self-contained computers. This way an Apple IIe owner, for example, could install an Intel 8088-based AD8088 co-processor card by ALF Products and run CP/M-86 as well as MS-DOS. Unfortunately, as […]
The early history of colour TV had several false starts, of which perhaps one of the most interesting might-have-beens was the CBS field-sequential system. This was a rival to the nascent system which would become NTSC, which instead of encoding red, green, and blue all at once for each pixel, made sequential frames carry them. […]
Some PCB corrosion on the bottom of the 1541 drive. (Credit: TheRetroChannel, YouTube) Recently [TheRetroChannel] came across an interesting failure mode on a Commodore 1541 5.25″ floppy disk drive, in the form of the activity LED blinking just once after power-up with the drive motor continuously spinning. Since the Flash Codes that Commodore implemented and […]
With the RAM and storage crisis hitting personal computing very hard – along with new software increasingly suffering the effects of metastasizing ‘AI’ – more people than ever are pining for the ‘good old days’. For example, using that early 2000s desktop PC with Windows 98 SE might now seem to be a viable alternative […]
The restored PET/CBM 3032. (Credit: Drygol, retrohax.net) The Commodore CBM 3032 is a successor to the original Commodore PET 2001, yet due a conflicting trademark issue with Philips these first European PETs were called ‘CBM’ instead. Hence the labeling on the CBM 3032 that [Drygol] had in for a restoration, which would have been produced […]
During the 1990s the Chornobyl Nuclear Power Plant – formerly the Chernobyl NPP – continued operating with its remaining three RBMK reactors, but of course the 1970s-era automation with its very limited SKALA computer required some serious modernization. What was interesting here is that instead of just replacing this entire Soviet-era mainframe with a brand-new […]
It’s one thing to create your own relay-based computer; that’s already impressive enough, but what really makes [DiPDoT]’s design special– at least after this latest video— is swapping the SRAM he had been using for historically-plausible capacitor-based memory. A relay-based computer is really a 1940s type of design. There are various memory types that would […]
Last summer we took a look at FreeDOS as part of the Daily Drivers series, and found a faster and more complete successor to the DOS of old. The sojourn into the 16-bit OS wasn’t perfect though, as we couldn’t find drivers for the 2010-era network card on our newly DOS-ified netbook. Here’s [Inkbox] following […]
[Nagy Krisztián] had an Intel 286 CPU, only… There was no motherboard to install it in. Perhaps not wanting the processor to be lonely, [Nagy] built a simulated system to bring the chip back to life. Okay, 68 pins does look like a lot when you arrange them like that. The concept is simple enough. […]