Posted in retro on Jun 5th, 2025
Back in the day when we had x86 IBM PC systems with “turbo mode”, which was really a reverse euphemism for being able to slow down the CPU clock for older applications, snazzier cases had a LED readout on the front to show the current MHz instead of/in addition to just a plain turbo LED. […]
Posted in retro on Jun 3rd, 2025
At the recent Electronics Flea Market somebody had a stack of Diamond ISA and VESA Local Bus video cards for sale. Which is funny because I had just been looking to maybe take the splurge and try to find a VLB card with an Tseng ET4000/W32 to put into my 486. I currently have a […]
Posted in retro on Jun 2nd, 2025
I finally reached the point in my vintage gear lifestyle where I needed to replace old Dallas realtime clock chips that have dead batteries. I opted to try to find replacement chips, taking a gamble with “new old stock” units, instead of trying to grind down the side of the chip casing to attach leads […]
Posted in retro on May 19th, 2025
The Internet Archive is invaluable when working with old hardware or software when you need to go look at old version of a website to find manuals, drivers, or general info. Unfortunately a great number of files lived on FTP servers because the web wasn’t really up to hosting them in the 1990s, and many […]
TL;DR: I complain about my failings and show off pictures and log files. Later some gradual understanding of ISDN and why this probably won’t work with my particular version of the Courier I-modem with a U interface. Turns out U is electronically incompatible with S/T. In my telcom fiddlings to get a 56k dial-up modem […]
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 […]
