I picked up a couple of “widebody” USR Courier HST modems and have been working through documenting power adapters for them and sorting out what goes with what. I figured out almost all Courier and HST models have different power supplies and voltage requirements. I’ve been tracking down manuals and cross-referencing the FCC IDs in […]
Category Archive for 'retro'
A story of doing ISP customer billing
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 […]
Digging through some more files from my old backup tapes, I found some of the price lists I was giving out when I was building and selling computers. This also gives some idea of version numbers that were going around that time. I didn’t carry any inventory at all, these would have been bought at […]
Holding the bag: the .BAG UUCP file format
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 […]
Vintage dial-up modem teardowns
Posted in retro, Uncategorized, vintage on Nov 16th, 2024
[photos: flickr – Vintage dial-up modem teardowns] [photos: flickr – Analog telephone adapters] For several months I’ve been buying old popular models of dial-up modems from the 1990s to test how they fare over VoIP connections along with different analog telephone adapters. To my great annoyance maybe a quarter of them didn’t include an AC […]
What happened between the Zoom VFX and Telebit TeleBlazer?
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 […]
FreHD up and running with the TRS-80
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 […]
iTerm2 + Qodem + MS Natural Keyboard
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 […]
[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 […]
