Sound cards on PC-compatible computer systems have a rather involved and convoluted history, with not only a wide diversity of proprietary standards, but also a collection of sound cards that were never advertised as such. Case in point the 1985 Mindscape Music Board, which was an add-on ISA card that came bundled with [Glen Clancy]’s […]
Ever heard of VENIX? There were lots of variants of Unix back in the day, and VENIX was one for the DEC Professional 380, which was — sort of — a PDP 11. The 1982 machine normally ran the unfortunately (but perhaps aptly) named P/OS, but you could get VENIX, too. [OldVCR] wanted to put […]
After [Andy]’s discovery of an old ISA soundcard at his parents’ place that once was inside the family PC, the onset of a wave of nostalgia for those old-school sounds drove him off the deep end. This is how we get [Andy] building the fastest MS-DOS gaming system ever, with ISA slot and full hardware […]
The Amiga has a lot of fans, and rightly so. The machine broke a lot of ground. However, according to [Dave Farquhar], one of the most popular models today — the Amiga 600 — was reviled in 1992 by just about everyone. One of the last Amigas, it was supposed to be a low-cost home […]
MSX computers were not very common in the United States, and we didn’t know what we were missing when they were popular. [Re:Enthused] shows us what would have been a fine machine in its day: a Panasonic FS-A1FM. Have a look at the video below to see the like-new machine. The machine isn’t just an […]
If you were one of the earliest of early adopters in the home computing revolution, you might have had to settle for paper tape mass storage. It was slow, it was bulky, but it was what you had, and that gave it a certain charm that’s hard to resist. And that charm is what [Joshua […]
If you’ve ever fancied building a ZX Spectrum clone without hunting down ancient ULAs or soldering your way through 60+ chips, [Alex J. Lowry] has just dropped an exciting build. He has recreated the Leningrad-1, a Soviet-built Spectrum clone from 1988, with a refreshingly low component count: 44 off-the-shelf ICs, as he wrote us. That’s […]
If you’ve ever been configuring a router or other network device and noticed that you can set up IPv4 and IPv6, you might have wondered what happened to IPv5. Well, thanks to [Navek], you don’t have to wonder anymore. Just watch the video below. We will warn you of two things. First, the video takes […]
Movies mirror the time they were made. [ErnieTech] asserts that we can see what people thought about computers back in 1957 by watching the classic Spencer Tracy/Katharine Hepburn movie “Desk Set.” What’s more, he thinks this might be the first movie appearance of a human-like computer. On a side note, in the UK this movie […]
[Ken Shirriff] has been sharing a really low-level look at Intel’s Pentium (1993) processor. The Pentium’s architecture was highly innovative in many ways, and one of [Ken]’s most recent discoveries is that it contains a complex circuit — containing around 9,000 transistors — whose sole purpose is to multiply specifically by three. Why does such […]