Retro computing Archive
Have you ever heard of the Encore 91 computer system, developed and built by Encore Computer Corporation? I stumbled upon the name of this system on the website for the Macintosh like virtual window manager (MLVWM), an old X11 window manager designed to copy some of the look and feel of the classic Mac OS, and wanted to know more about it. An old website from what appears to be a reseller of the Encore 91 has a detailed description and sales pitch of the machine still online, and it’s a great read. The hardware architecture of the Encore 91 series is based on the Motorola high-performance 88100 25MHz RISC processor. A basic system is a highly integrated fully symmetrical single board multiprocessor. The single board includes two or four 88100 processors with supporting cache memory, 16 megabytes of shared main memory, two synchronous SCSI ports, an Ethernet port, 4 asynchronous ports, real-time clocks, timers, interrupts and a VME-64 bus interface. The VME-64 bus provides full compatibility with VME plus enhancements for greater throughput. Shared main memory may be expanded to 272 megabytes (mb) by adding up to four expansion cards. The expansion memory boards have the same high-speed access characteristics as local memory. ↫ Encore computing 91 system The Encore 91 ran a combination of AT&T’s system V.3.2 UNIX and Encore’s POSIX-compliant MicroMPX real-time kernel, and would be followed by machines with more powerful processors in the 88xxx series, as well as machines based on the Alpha architecture. The company also created and sold its own modified RISC architecture, RSX, for which there are still some details available online. Bits and bobs of the company were spun off and sold off, and I don’t think much of the original company is still around today. Regardless, it’s an interesting system with an interesting history, but we’ll most likely never get to see oe in action – unless it turns up in some weird corner of the United States where the rare working examples of hardware like this invariably tends to end up.
After researching the first commercial transistor computer, the British Metrovick 950, Nina Kalinina wrote an emulator, simple assembler, and some additional “toys” (her word) so we can enjoy this machine today. First, what, exactly, is the Metrovick 950? Metrovick 950, the first commercial transistor computer, is an early British computer, released in 1956. It is a direct descendant of the Manchester Baby (1948), the first electronic stored-program computer ever. ↫ Nina Kalinina The Baby, formally known as Small-Scale Experimental Machine, was a foundation for the Manchester Mark I (1949). Mark I found commercial success as the Ferranti Mark I. A few years later, Manchester University built a variant of Mark I that used magnetic drum memory instead of Williams tubes and transistors instead of valves. This computer was called the Manchester Transistor Computer (1955). Engineers from Metropolitan-Vickers released a streamlined, somewhat simplified version of the Transistor Computer as Metrovick 950. The emulator she developed is “only” compatible on a source code level, and emulates “the CPU, a teleprinter with a paper tape punch/reader, a magnetic tape storage device, and a plotter”, at 200-300 operations per second. It’s complete enough you can play Lunar Lander on it, because is a computer you can’t play games on really a computer? Nina didn’t just create this emulator and its related components, but also wrote a ton of documentation to help you understand the machine and to get started. There’s an introduction to programming and using the Metrovick 950 emulator, additional notes on programming the emulator, and much more. She also posted a long thread on Fedi with a ton more details and background information, which is a great read, as well. This is amazing work, and interesting not just to programmers interested in ancient computers, but also to historians and people who really put the retro in retrocomputing.
The 1980s saw a flurry of graphical user interfaces pop up, almost all of them in some way made by people who got to see the work done by Xerox. Today’s topic is no exception – GEM was developed by Lee Jay Lorenzen, who worked at Xerox and wished to create a cheaper, less resource-intensive alternative to the Xerox Star, which he got to do at DRI after leaving Xerox. His work was then shown off to Atari, who were interested in using it. The entire situation was pretty hectic for a while: DRI’s graphics group worked on the PC version of GEM on MS-DOS; Atari developers were porting it to Apple Lisas running CP/M-68K; and Loveman was building GEMDOS. Against all odds, they succeeded. The operating system for Atari ST consisting of GEM running on top of GEMDOS was named TOS which simply meant “the operating system”, although many believed “T” actually stood for “Tramiel”. Atari 520 ST, soon nicknamed “Jackintosh”, was introduced at the 1985 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas and became an immediate hit. GEM ran smoothly on the powerful ST’s hardware, and there were no clones to worry about. Atari developed its branch of GEM independently of Digital Research until 1993, when the Atari ST line of computers was discontinued. ↫ Nemanja Trifunovic at Programming at the right level Other than through articles like these and the occasional virtual machine, I have no experience with the various failed graphical user interfaces of the 1980s, since I was too young at the time. Even from the current day, though, it’s easy to see how all of them can be traced back directly to the work done at Xerox, and just how much we owe to the people working there at the time. Now that the technology industry is as massive as it is, with the stakes being so high, it’s unlikely we’ll ever see a place like Xerox PARC ever again. Everything is secretive now, and if a line of research doesn’t obviously lead to massive short-term gains, it’s canned before it even starts. The golden age of wild, random computer research without a profit motive is clearly behind us, and that’s sad.
For an operating system that was once incredibly popular and expected to become a standard for a long time to come, it’s remarkable how little experience most people have with CP/M. In fact, many conventions and historical limitations you might be aware of – like the 8.3 filename convention of DOS – come straight from CP/M, as it influenced DOS considerably. It’s quite easy to emulate CP/M today, but it’s just old and different enough that getting into it might be a but confusing, but that’s where Eerie Linux’s introduction to CP/M comes into play. This article is just what the headline promises: an introduction to the CP/M operating system. No previous knowledge of 1970s and early ’80s operating systems is required. However, some familiarity with Linux or a BSD-style operating system is assumed, as the setup process suggested here involves using a package manager and command-line tools. But why explore CP/M in the 2020s? There are (at least) two good reasons: 1) historical education 2) gaining a better understanding of how computers actually work. ↫ Eerie Linux This article is a great way to get up and running with CP/M fairly quickly, and I intend to do just that when I find some time to mess around with it. What are some of the core, crucial applications that one should try on CP/M? Things people would be using back when CP/M was properly in use?
Security isn’t exactly a strong point of X11, and improving it is one of the main reasons why Wayland is such a vast improvement over X11. Just one of the many examples of X11 being inherently insecure is that keyloggers are entirely trivial on X11, because keylogger functionality is effectively built into it. Of course, this isn’t exactly news, and as Peter Hofmann details, there is an old X11 extension that adds somewhat rudimentary security to X11: the X11 SECURITY extension. This extension is part of every X.org installation, but it hasn’t seen any meaningful work in a long, long time. What it does is allow you to do is set X11 clients as “trusted” and “untrusted”, where untrusted clients cannot interact with tusted ones. This provides some basic security – it actually prevents keylogging! – but only very basic, as Hoffman notes: The thing is that it’s immediately clear that this extension — in its current state — is not the answer to “X11 is insecure”: You only have two classes, trusted and untrusted. That’s not enough. For example: When you run your browser as untrusted, you can’t simultaneously run some sandboxed program (Snap, Flatpak, …) in a meaningful way, because those two clients can spy on each other again. You want a proper per-client isolation instead. Sandboxing plays an important role here. If you run programs “the traditional way” (i.e., full access to the filesystem and network), then an attacker can do all kinds of things and X11 keylogging is just one of a million concerns. ↫ Peter Hofmann but it also happens to break a lot of things, and many applications simply don’t work with it at all. Oddly enough, Firefox has no issues with it, and will happily run in untrusted mode. The biggest problem, however, is that untrusted clients only have access to exactly two other X11 extensions, which leads to a whole host of problems, like no scaling, broken keyboard layouts, no 3D acceleration, and so on. On top of all of that, it breaks clipboard functionality, as anything copied in an untrusted client cannot be pasted anywhere else. As such, Hoffman concludes: In its current state, I’d say the SECURITY extension is “somewhat useful”, but more work would have to be done. Both in X.Org and in the clients. You would have to come up with a new clipboard protocol, for example. And the list goes on. (See where I’m going with this?) It’s not that simple. ↫ Peter Hofmann Since pretty much nobody adopted it when this extension came out in the ’90s, and it hasn’t seen much work since, the amount of work that would be required to bring it up to modern standards would be astronomical, and trying to get clients to adopt it would probably prove fruitless considering Wayland already exists, and offers all of the potential security benefits and then some. People often claim it would be “easy” to modernise X11, but just this one particular issue – security, kind of important – shows just how quickly the X11 house of cards comes crashing down if you try to do anything to drag it out of its ’80s and ’90s mindset.
Ice-T is a terminal emulator, allowing Atari computers with extended memory (128KB or more) to connect to remote dialup and Telnet hosts, such as Unix shells and BBSs. A limited version for machines without extended memory is also available. ↫ Ice-T 2.8.0 release announcement Version 2.8.0 was released a few days ago, the first new release in almost twelve years. It comes with a ton of improvements, such as VT-102 support, limited ANSI coloured text support, macros, and a lot more.
Of course you can run Doom on a $10,000+ Apple server running IBM AIX. Of course you can. Well, you can now. Now, let’s go ahead and get the grumbling out of the way. No, the ANS is not running Linux or NetBSD. No, this is not a backport of NCommander’s AIX Doom, because that runs on AIX 4.3. The Apple Network Server could run no version of AIX later than 4.1.5 and there are substantial technical differences. (As it happens, the very fact it won’t run on an ANS was what prompted me to embark on this port in the first place.) And no, this is not merely an exercise in flogging a geriatric compiler into building Doom Generic, though we’ll necessarily do that as part of the conversion. There’s no AIX sound driver for ANS audio, so this port is mute, but at the end we’ll have a Doom executable that runs well on the ANS console under CDE and has no other system prerequisites. We’ll even test it on one of IBM’s PowerPC AIX laptops as well. Because we should. ↫ Cameron Kaiser Excellent reading, as always, from Cameron Kaiser.
Every so often people yearn for a lost (1980s or so) era of ‘single user computers’, whether these are simple personal computers or high end things like Lisp machines and Smalltalk workstations. It’s my view that the whole idea of a 1980s style “single user computer” is not what we actually want and has some significant flaws in practice. ↫ Chris Siebenmann I think the premise of this entire article is flawed, and borders on being a strawman argument. I honestly don’t think there’s many people out there who genuinely and seriously want to use an ’80s home computer for all their computing tasks, but this article seems to think that there are. Virtually every single person expressing interest in and a desire for classic computers does so from a point of nostalgia, as a learning experience, or as a hobby. They’re definitely not interested in using any of those ’80s machine to do their banking or to collaborate with their colleagues. Additionally, the problems and issues people have with modern computing platforms is not that they are too complex, but that they are no longer designed with the user in mind. Windows, macOS, iOS; they’re all first and foremost designed to extract money from you through ads, upsells, nag screens, and similar anti-user features, and it’s those things that people are sick of. Coincidentally, they are all things we didn’t have to deal with back in the ’80s and ’90s. In other words, remove the user-hostility from modern operating systems, and people wouldn’t complain about them so much. Which seems rather obvious, doesn’t it? It’s why using a Linux desktop like Fedora is such a breath of fresh air. There’s no upsells for cloud storage or streaming services, no restrictions on what I can and cannot install to protect some multitrillion euro company’s revenue streams, no ads and nag screens infesting my operating system – it’s just an operating system waiting for me to tell it what it do, and then it does it. It’s wild how increasingly revolutionary that’s becoming. Whenever I am forced to interact with Windows 11 or whatever the current version of macOS is, I feel such a profound and deep sadness for what they’ve become, and it seems only natural to me that this sadness is fueling a longing for back when these systems weren’t so user-hostile.
Old Vintage Computing Research, by the incredibly knowledgeable Cameron Kaiser, is one of the best resources on the web about genuinely obscure retrocomputing, often diving quite deep in topics nobody else covers – or even can cover, considering how rare some of the hardware Kaiser covers is. I link to Old VCR all the time, and today I’ve got two more great articles by Kaiser for you. First, we’ve got the more well-known – relatively speaking – of the two devices covered today, and that’s the MIPS ThinkPad, officially known as the IBM WorkPad z50. This was a Windows CE 2.11 device powered by a NEC VR4120 MIPS processor, running at 131 Mhz, released in 1999. Astute readers might note the WorkPad branding, which IBM also used for several rebranded Palm Pilots. Kaiser goes into his usual great detail covering this device, with tons of photos, and I couldn’t stop reading for a second. There’s so much good information in here I have no clue what to highlight, but since OSNews has OS in the name, this section makes sense to focus on: The desktop shortcuts are pre-populated in ROM along with a whole bunch of applications. The marquee set that came on H/PC Pro machines was Microsoft Pocket Office (Pocket Word, Pocket Excel, Pocket Access and Pocket PowerPoint), Pocket Outlook (Calendar, Contacts, Inbox and Tasks) and Pocket Internet Explorer, but Microsoft also included Calculator, InkWriter (not too useful on the z50 without a touch screen), Microsoft Voice Recorder, World Clock, ActiveSync (a la Palm HotSync), PC Link (direct connect, not networked), Remote Networking, Terminal (serial port and modem), Windows Explorer and, of course, Solitaire. IBM additionally licensed and included some of bSquare’s software suite, including bFAX Pro for sending and receiving faxes with the softmodem, bPRINT for printing and bUSEFUL Backup Plus for system backups, along with a battery calibrator and a Rapid Access quick configuration tool. There is also a CMD.EXE command shell, though it too is smaller and less functional than its desktop counterpart. ↫ Old Vintage Computing Research Using especially these older versions of Windows CE is a wild experience, because you can clearly tell Microsoft was trying really hard to make it look and feel like ‘normal’ Windows, but as anyone who used Windows CE back then can attest, it was a rather poor imitation with a ton of weird limitations and design decisions borne from the limited hardware it was designed to run on. I absolutely adore the various incarnations of Windows CE and associated graphical shells it ran – especially the PocketPC days – but there’s no denying it always felt quite clunky. Moving on, the second Old VCR article I’m covering today is more difficult for me to write about, since I am too young to have any experience with the 8 bit era – save for some experience with the MSX platform as a wee child – so I have no affinity for machines like the Commodore 64 and similar machines from that era. And, well, this article just so happens to be covering something called the Commodore HHC-4. Once upon a time (and that time was Winter CES 1983), Commodore announced what was to be their one and only handheld computer, the Commodore HHC-4. It was never released and never seen again, at least not in that form. But it turns out that not only did the HHC-4 actually exist, it also wasn’t manufactured by Commodore — it was a Toshiba. Like Superman had Clark Kent, the Commodore HHC-4 had a secret identity too: the Toshiba Pasopia Mini IHC-8000, the very first portable computer Toshiba ever made. And like Clark Kent was Superman with glasses, compare the real device to the Commodore marketing photo and you can see that it’s the very same machine modulo a plastic palette swap. Of course there’s more to the story than that. ↫ Old Vintage Computing Research Of course, Kaiser hunted down an IHC-8000, and details his experiences with the little handheld, calculator-like machine. It turns out it’s most likely using some unspecified in-house Toshiba architecture, running at a few hundred kHz, and it’s apparently quite sluggish. It never made it to market in Commodore livery, most likely because of its abysmal performance. The amount of work required to make this little machine more capable and competitive probably couldn’t be recouped by its intended list price, Kaiser argues.
A YouTube channel has resurrected a programming language that hadn’t been seen since the 1980s — in a testament to both the enduring power of our technology, and of the communities that care about it. But best of all, Simpson uploaded the language to the Internet Archive, along with all his support materials, inviting his viewers to write their own programs (and saying he hoped his upstairs neighbor would’ve approved). And in our email interview, Simpson said since then it’s already been downloaded over 1,000 times — “which is pretty amazing for something so old.” ↫ David Cassel It’s great that this lost programming language, MicroText for the Commodore 64, was rediscovered, but I’m a bit confused as to how “lost” this language really was. I mean, it was “discovered” in a properly listed eBay listing, which feels like cheating to me. When I think of stories of discoveries of long-lost software, games, or media, it usually involves things like finding it in a shed after years of searching, or someone at a company going through that box of old hard drives discovering the game they worked on 32 years ago. I don’t know, something about this whole story feels off to me, and it’s ringing some alarm bells I can’t quite place. Regardless, it’s cool to have MicroText readily available on the web now, so that people can rediscover it and create awesome new things with it. Perhaps there’s old ideas to be relearned here.
The other day a friend asked me a pretty interesting question: what happened to all those companies who made those Japanese computer platforms that were never released outside Japan? I thought it’d be worth expanding that answer into a full-size post. ↫ Misty De Meo Japan had a number of computer makers that sold platforms that looked and felt like western PCs, but were actually quite different hardware-wise, and incompatible with the IBM PC. None of these exist anymore today, and the reason is simple: Windows 95. The Japanese platforms compatible enough with the IBM PC that they could get a Windows 95 port turned into a commodity with little to distinguish them from regular IBM PCs, and the odd platform that didn’t use an x86 chip at all – like the X68000 – didn’t get a Windows port and thus just died off. The one platform mentioned in this article that I had never heard of was FM Towns, made by Fujitsu, which had its own graphical operating system called Towns OS. The FM Towns machines and the Towns OS were notable and unique at the time in that it was the first operating system to boot from CD-ROM, and it just so happens that Joe Groff published an article earlier this year detailing this boot process, including a custom bootable image he made. Here in the west we mostly tend to remember the PC-98 and X86000 platforms for their gaming catalogs and stunning designs, but that’s like only remembering the IBM PC for its own gaming catalog. These machines weren’t just glorified game consoles – they were full-fledged desktop computers used for the same boring work stuff we used the IBM PC for, and it truly makes me sad I don’t speak a single character of Japanese, so a unique operating system like Towns OS will always remain a curiosity for me.
Thanks to open source, no technology ever has to become obsolete, so long as a community remains to support it. You can sync Newtons and Palm Pilots with modern desktops, download web browsers for long-discontinued operating systems, or connect vintage computers like the Apple IIe to the modern internet via WiFi. Every year, new cartridges are released for old-school video game consoles like the Nintendo Entertainment System and Game Boy. People keep old software and online platforms alive as well. The Dreamwidth team forked an old version of the early social network LiveJournal’s source code and built a community around it. The dial-up bulletin board system software WWIV is still maintained and there are plenty of BBSes still around. Teams are working to restore aspects of early online services like AOL and Prodigy. And you can still use Gopher, the hypertext protocol that was — for a brief period in the early 1990s — bigger than the web. ↫ Klint Finley Retrocomputing is about a lot of things, and I feel like it differs per person. For me, it’s a little bit of nostalgia, but primarily it’s about learning, and experiencing hardware and software I was unable to experience when they were new, either due to high cost or just general unavailability. There’s a lot to learn from platforms that are no longer among us, and often it helps you improve your skills with the modern platforms you do still use. The linked article is right: open source is playing such a massive role in the retrocomputing community. The number of open source projects allowing you to somehow use decades-old platforms in conjunction with modern technologies is massive, and it goes far beyond just software – projects like BlueSCSI or very niche things like usb3sun highlights there’s also hardware-based solutions for just about anything retro you want to accomplish. And we really can’t forget NetBSD, which seems to be the go-to modern operating system for bringing new life to old and retro hardware, as it often runs on just about anything. When I got my PA-RISC workstation, the HP Visualize c3750, I couldn’t find working copies of HP-UX, so I, too, opted for NetBSD to at least be able to see if the computer was fully functional. NetBSD is now a tool in my toolbox when I’m dealing with older, unique hardware. Retrocomputing is in a great place right now, with the exception of the ballooning prices we’re all suffering from, with even successful mainstay YouTubers like LGR lamenting the state of the market. Still, if you do get your hands on something retro – odds are there’s a whole bunch of tools ready for you to make the most of it, even today.
In which I build WindEmu, an emulator for the Psion Series 5mx (a PDA from 1999 running EPOC – the OS that would become Symbian), over the course of just over a week, without access to the actual hardware. Yet another cursed project. ↫ Ash Wolf I had never seen this before, even though it’s from 2019. You can load the emulator in your browser and use EPOC32 as if it’s running on the real thing, and I have to say it feel remarkably realistic for a project completed in a little over a week. Of course, it may have been tweaked and improved over the years since 2019, but I don’t know by how much. The last GitHub commit was five years ago, so it seems there really hasn’t been much public work done on it since. An emulator like this is probably the closest most of us will get to the later devices from Psion, since as with all retrocomputing platforms, the number of working devices is rapidly dwindling, and prices for working examples on sites like eBay have gone through the roof.
So looking back, it is obvious that neither Atari or Commodore would really be able to succeed in the long-term, although perhaps one of them could have become the 3rd “also-ran”. For a while, Atari really thought they could be that third choice and some of their late-model computers have some impressive innovations. With that preamble over with, let’s talk about the last Atari computer: the Falcon030. ↫ Paul Lefebvre In my mind, Atari is a game and console company, not a computer company – I don’t have any sale figures, but I feel like the Atari general computers weren’t quite as popular in The Netherlands as they were in some other places.
Hewlett-Packard’s 9000 Series 300 (HP300) was a range of technical workstations based on Motorola 680×0 microprocessors. Superbly engineered in modular form, and ahead of the curve in terms of functionality, these workstations were used mainly as instrument controllers and for desktop technical computing. The HP300 series launched in 1985 with the models 310 (pictured below) and 320. It evolved through numerous variants of increasing power, concluding with the 38x models released in 1991. The series was officially obsolete as of 1997. The definitive website dedicated to vintage Hewlett-Packard computers is the wonderful HP Computer Museum, which has excellent and wide-ranging archival resources. The present site is focused specifically on the HP 9000 series 300 and is for anyone interested in the history, conservation and restoration of these personal workstations. ↫ hp-series300.net Everything you could possibly ever want to know about the series 300, in one place. It’s incredibly detailed, and if you have your eyes on buying one of these machines, I urge you to keep this resource in a permanently open tab so you know what you’re doing.
Do you ever sit at your 1981 vintage IBM PC and get the urge to pop onto that newfangled ‘WWW’ to stay up to date on all the goings-on in the world? Fret not, because Al’s Geek Lab has you covered with a new video, which you will unfortunately have to watch on a device that was made at the very least in the late 1990s. What makes this feat possible is a miniscule web browser called MicroWeb, created by jhhoward, that will happily run on an 8088 CPU or compatible, without requiring any fiddling with EMS or similar RAM extensions. Anything is possible, if you just want it hard enough.
Apple released their first Quicktake camera, the Quicktake 100, in 1994, ten years after the Apple //c. On the box, they very boldly wrote: “Requirements: 386, 486 or superior; 2MB of RAM, 10MB of free hard disk space; an 1.44MB floppy drive; a VGA, SVGA or superior card”. But was this true? No. They were just being lazy, or trying to get you to upgrade a perfectly functional 8-bit, 1MHz computer with 128kB of RAM and 140kB floppies. In fact, it was absolutely possible to do digital photography on an Apple //c. Useless projects are the best projects.
The VAX served DEC well throughout the ’80s and into the ’90s, but as the latter decade went on, DEC began to face stiff competition from UNIX vendors, particularly Sun Microsystems. DEC struggled to change with the times, and the company ultimately failed. In 1998, DEC was acquired by Compaq, and in 2001, Compaq was acquired by Hewlett-Packard. The DEC line, including the VAX/VMS system, was discontinued and faded from the market. And yet it lives on today. Here’s how. Getting a DEC Alpha machine has been on my list for a long time, but they’re in very high demand, and extremely expensive. It’s quite impressive to see DEC’s continuing legacy laid out like this.
I had to do some digging into our archives to see if we ever covered GeckOS before, but apparently we haven’t – and that’s a shame. GeckOS is a pre-emptive multitasking operating system for the Commodore 64 and the PET, and should be easily portable to other 6502-based machines, and offers multithreading, TCP/IP networking, and more. Version 2.1 has just been released, and it adds a ton of new features and bugfixes.
