Retro computing Archive

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.

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.

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.