Posted in retro on May 17th, 2025
TL;DR: I complain about my failings and show off pictures and log files. Later some gradual understandings why this probably won’t work. In my telcom fiddlings to get a 56k dial-up modem to work I explored an Adtran Atlas 550 as an ISDN switch along with a USR Courier I-modem, which worked great. The original […]
TL;DR: replaced LH1056 solid state relay / optocoupler at U3 One of the USR Courier HST modems I purchased recently had a peculiar problem that if I plugged the phone line into the “wall” jack of the modem it returned NO DIALTONE when I tried to dial something, yet I was able to dial something […]
Posted in retro on Apr 29th, 2025
TL;DR: Original US Robotics I-modem power adapter is extremely rare. I cut mine open to document it. Original adapter provides 20 V AC (1500 mA capacity) across pins 3-4 of mini-DIN connector, no other voltages. Substituting a $15 24 V DC power adapter seems to work just fine. The US Robotics Courier I-Modem seems to […]
Posted in retro, Uncategorized on Mar 31st, 2025
A collection of stories of evolution, follies, starting from scratch, and what not to do. When I started my ISP back in the summer of 1996, how to bill customers and collect money from them was an afterthought. I started with nothing, not even a database, and not realizing what a vital chore it would […]
Posted in retro, Uncategorized on Mar 14th, 2025
I’ve been happily nerding out with vintage bulletin board system (BBS) software and UUCP to send/receive e-mail and newsgroups for a while. Something I kept seeing in BBS documentation was mention of the “.BAG format” or “UUCP BAG format” used by satellite providers when delivering Usenet feeds over satellite. I got curious about what exactly […]
The other night I was flipping through an old 1995 Computer Shopper, like you do, and wondered what the largest hard drive for sale at the time was. Turns out it’s a Seagate ST410800N, 9 gigabyte, 5.25″ full height, SCSI drive. In other words the biggest physical form factor PC drive. Virtually all other new […]
Posted in retro on Sep 3rd, 2024
Around 1995 I had a Zoom VFX V.32bis 14.4k modem as my main workhorse. It was a white plastic shell with a smoky brown translucent front face. I decided to buy one recently for old times sake: I also came into possession of a Telebit Netblazer PN (which I need to finish working on and […]
Posted in retro on May 28th, 2024
I wound up buying a completed FreHD kit for the TRS-80 model 4, along with the self-booting EEPROM. FreHD is a TRS-80 hard drive emulator that plugs into the I/O connector on the bottom of the system. Normally the TRS-80 hard drives required a DOS to be loaded off of a floppy disk first, then […]
Posted in retro on May 28th, 2024
This is mainly a reminder for myself so I don’t forget what I did. When using Qodem in iTerm2 on my Mac along with a Microsoft Natural Ergonomic 4000 keyboard, the “Alt” key wasn’t working inside Qodem. It was impossible to “Alt-Z” to bring up the help, the dialer screen, or anything. I didn’t have […]
Posted in retro, Uncategorized on May 25th, 2024
[photos: flickr – 1995 Tape backup pulls] Data has been recovered from my 1995 backup tapes! After badly mangling one of my three QIC-80 backup tapes trying to repair it to make it readable, I gave up before I screwed them up even more. Finally a couple of weeks ago I contacted Dmitry Brant, who […]
