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 […]
Posted in retro on May 14th, 2024
TL;DR I hex edit a binary to make it work with my “newer” Courier modems TL;DR 2: Less than 12 hours later posting I find an updated version of USRSTAT2.EXE from 1997 that fixed my bug and makes my hacking irrelevant Way back on the US Robotics BBS (USR BBS) they had a door program […]
Posted in retro on May 13th, 2024
Good news! A new video RAM chip fixed the lingering video artifacts I had. I looked up the IC model that was in it “HM6116LP-2” and found some on eBay. I had to wait a couple of weeks for them to arrive from China, but popped the first one in and it worked like a […]
Posted in retro on May 7th, 2024
I finally got around to working on the TRS-80 model 4 again, specifically troubleshooting the floppy drives. Last time I tried to boot it, the drive light would come on and it didn’t sound like it was doing anything. I suspected the belt on the bottom had deteriorated/and or lost tension and wasn’t spinning the […]
