This Refurb Weekend is a sequel in two ways. Six years ago I fixed the power supply and case fan in my 68EC030-based Alpha Microsystems Eagle 300, a more modernized and substantially faster Alpha Micro running AMOS, their unique DEC-inspired multiuser operating system. These blue-collar boxes were very common in many vertical markets due to their tightly integrated business-specific software packa

Australians! They walk among us ! Do not be deceived by those charming faces! They might be your parent! They might sleep in the same bed as you at night! A half-breed might write the very blog you read! For the preservation of our precious bodily fluids , we must remove the scurrilous larrikin influence of Australia upon our American home computers, and I know exactly where to start! Why allow Di

Last November UPS mistakenly charged me a $684 tariff on $355 worth of computer parts shipped from Europe. It was shortly afterwards reduced to $51.30, but I had prepaid the tariff to avoid warehouse fees, so UPS owed me $632.70. They finally issued the refund in July after repeatedly E-mailing their accounting office in India approximately monthly. (Phone number? Ha ha ha.) I don't know if these

As is typical here in the Floodgap lab, it all started so innocently: rebuilding a flaky Apple Workgroup Server 9150, the odd duck of the Workgroup Server line and older cousin to our beloved Apple Network Server. And then I just had to pimp it out for MkLinux. Before the sui generis IBM AIX-based Apple Network Server , one of our favourite machines here at Floodgap, there were the WGSes, the Work

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 because of its studious regular reporting, and most notably for PC Magazine where he had no less than two columns since at lea

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 does not practice what he preaches. Why, the very laptop in front of him was selected deliberately because it can operate with no b

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. Correspondingly, his transitional work in Wolfenstein 3D was fine (especially The Ultimate Challenge ) but clearly all of a particular

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 bit less heavy. I'm sure there's any number of all-in-one setups you can buy to do this, but I'm cheap, so I'm going to DIY

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 only PDP-series mini it happened to, and it wasn't even the first: the PDP-8 actually got the shrink-ray treatment several

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 unreleased successors to the TI 99/4A, the Tomy Tutor and its overseas siblings, the Japanese Pyuuta (ぴゅう太) series, promised an

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-specific Unix, though it was originally intended to run Novell NetWare and was demonstrated booting Mac OS with early pre-

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 Confidential , still on my shelf in the well-thumbed 2.0 paperback. I was prepared to find this book lightweight on the technical sid

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 environment, but by using the host's ALU and providing a primitive means of instruction fusion it can be faster than a naïve interpreter.

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 first Alpha Micro (an Eagle 300) came from a party supplies store, my Eagle 450 was in a 9-1-1 emergency dispatch centre, an

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-500 . That's exactly what it sounds like: an Amiga 500 crammed into a portable SX-64 case, even keeping the same 5" colour scr

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 co

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, the Tarot Electronics MIMIC (not to be confused with the more notorious Spartan Mimic), the Dynalogic Hyperion and of course the

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 in my own box of junk from various Apple Network Server parts someone at Apple Austin sent me in 2003. The 1996 Apple Network Ser

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 was going on at the time, but I learned a lot and rewatching the episodes now really demonstrates what a treasure trove of p

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 all of you who have chipped in at one time or another — helps keep running. I've got more projects to finish in 2026 and I hop