Reports coming in of the death of John C. Dvorak, apparently passed away on Monday (July 20th) from complications of heart bypass surgery. Dvorak started in wine and moved to silicon as an early columnist at InfoWorld, one of the pillar references for this particular blog bec...
Behold: the Guru of GNU! (Photo by Habib Mhenni, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0.)
True enlightment only comes from a truly free computing experience, probably! And while there is no nerd who lacks an opinion on Richard Stallman personally, likewise let none claim he doe...
Bobby Prince, '90s FPS game musician extraordinare and longtime id Software associate, has died at 81. Now, early on, there were things like Commander Keen and Eat Your Vegetables, which were cute and amusing yet almost completely orthogonal to his later output. Correspondin...
Some of our recent (and some upcoming) projects are oriented to systems with serial consoles, but it's been getting pretty old dragging around old CRT terminals or tying up Mac laptops with a serial port. I'd like something that's self-contained, a little more portable and a...
In 1982, as we mentioned at length with our history of the DEC Professional, Digital Equipment Corporation attempted to keep their PDP-11 minicomputer market-relevant by turning the venerable architecture into a largely incompatible desktop microcomputer. But that wasn't the...
The Tomy Tutor was my first computer, in late 1983. I was seven and we got it at Federated. I've acquired several more since then, but this is the actual one I used and it still works perfectly.
Using a design modeled on the doomed Texas Instruments 99/8, one of several u...
It's time for another save point in the continuing saga of the various ROMs for the Apple Network Server, Apple's first through-and-through Unix server (previously, previously). The Apple Network Server was only ever officially able to boot AIX, IBM's proprietary Power ISA-s...
I almost never buy e-books, but I decided to spring for an electronic copy of David Pogue's Apple: The First 50 Years to see if I even wanted to bother with the hardcover. Previously the essential tome on Apple (and especially Mac) history was Owen Linzmeyer's Apple Confid...
I'm doing periodic updates on some of my long-term projects, one of them being 6o6, a fully virtualized NMOS 6502 CPU core that runs on a 6502 written in 6502 assembly language. 6o6 implements a completely abstracted memory model and a fully controlled execution environmen...
I've mentioned previously my great affection for Alpha Microsystems hardware, which are rather obscure computers nowadays, but back in the 1980s and 1990s were fairly sophisticated 68000-based multiuser systems that turned up in all kinds of vertical markets. For example, my...
A more obscure Commodore employee (where he apparently met his wife), but still quite influential during the Amiga era. Along with more pedestrian units such as the Amiga 3000 and the monochrome Amiga 2024 monitor, my favourite device he worked on was the 1987 prototype SX-5...
Remember when Sega made consoles? Hideki Sato remembered, because he was involved in or designed all of them — from the 1982 SG-1000 under Sega Enterprises Ltd. president Hayao Nakayama, later reworked as the SC-3000 home computer, to of course the extremely popular Mega Drive/Genesis and the technologically overwrought Saturn, to the flawed but ahead-of-its-time 1999 Dreamcast, the very last console the company released to date and one of my favourite machines. Joining Sega in 1971, he later became acting president from 2001 to 2003, and finally retired from Sega in 2008. I can think of no better summation of his career than his own, a detailed retrospective on each machine translated from the Japanese. He passed away this weekend at the age of 77 (X.com link). Rest in peace.
Canadians, rejoice! Not only do you have curling, the Big Turk and Tim Hortons (and, when I was in BC last, Dr Pepper made with real cane sugar), you also have a number of interesting indigenous computers like the underappreciated Micro Computer Machines MCM/70 portable, t...
Grateful acknowledgement made to the several former Apple employees who materially contributed to this entry. This article wouldn't have been possible without you!
Here's why I need to do inventory more often.
This is an Apple prototype ROM I am ashamed to admit I found...
Very sorry to hear about the death of Stewart Cheifet at 87, long-time host of Computer Chronicles, which for a long time was the undisputed best show on computers on American public broadcasting. I watched it on PBS TV as a kid, and candidly I didn't understand much of what ...
A very happy holiday season and Merry Christmas to those of you who celebrate it (timezone may vary). Also, I don't think I nearly say thanks enough to my regular patrons through Ko-fi, and I want to also thank them on behalf of the geriatric systems their generosity — and a...
I've mentioned on the blog several times the continuum that exists between handheld computers and pocket computers, battery powered devices in rather small form factors that are nevertheless fully-fledged general purpose computers — arguably more so than the modern locked-do...
Way back (well, six months ago, anyway), when I was wiring up a Gremlin Blasto arcade board, we talked at length about this 1978 arcade game's history and its sole official home computer port by Milton Bradley to the Texas Instruments 99/4A. In the single player mode you r...
"Burger Becky" did a lot of great games, first at Interplay (Bard's Tale, Wasteland), then later at Logicware, where she and others did some great Mac ports including Jazz Jackrabbit and their Half-Life MacOS port which never actually saw the light of day, the infamous 3DO port of Doom, and of course the initial work on the IIgs version of Wolfenstein 3D. Naturally these are just the highlights that come to mind of a very long tenure in the computer gaming world. She was very complimentary of TenFourFox back in the day when I was still developing that, and I'd long hoped she would release Mac Half-Life like she did 3DO Doom for the archivists to pick over. Sadly, word has come out that she has finally succumbed to some sort of aggressive form of pulmonary adenocarcinoma. It's not a good way to go, and I hope her last moments were at peace.
I try not to write anything even vaguely political on this blog because we have a variety of views on a variety of subjects and no one is here for that. We can all enjoy our geriatric little silicon artifacts together regardless of your electoral persuasion. But I was hopp...
As Pibb is the official beverage of Old Vintage Computing Research, no doubt to the profound chagrin of the Coca-Cola Company, I feel compelled to offer a public service announcement.
Old and busted:
New hotness:
Yes, Mr Pibb (technically mr P!BB, though Coca-Cola i...
The 1996 Apple Network Server was Apple's first true Unix-through-and-through server (the Apple Workgroup Server 95, actually a Quadra 950 with a special PDS card limited to A/UX, doesn't really count) and through a complex history came to run IBM's AIX as its native opera...
Pretty sure this will end up as one of my longest-term restoration projects, but I'm back in the Southern Hemisphere for a little while to visit my wife's side of the family and giving me another opportunity to see if we can make progress on our defective PAL 128DCR, my fa...
America Online has ceased offering dialup access since first doing so in 1991 (using GeoWorks), and presumably any systems attempting to dial in will no longer be able to make a connection.
We actually had a fairly long history with AOL and its predecessors in our house. W...
It's one of my periodic downsizing cycles, which means checking the hardware inventory (and, intermittently, discovering things that were not on the hardware inventory) and deciding if I want to use it, store it or junk it. And so we come to this machine, which has been sitt...
It was probably going to happen sooner or later, but Microsoft has officially released the source code for 6502 BASIC. The specific revision is very Commodore-centric: it's the 1977 "8K" BASIC variant "1.1," which Commodore users know better as BASIC V2.0, the same BASIC use...
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