Posted in vintage on Jan 3rd, 2026
TL;DR: re-re-patching vintage Turbo Pascal programs so they work in modern times on modern hardware Wildcat! v4, a MS-DOS based bulletin board system was written in the 1990s in Borland Turbo Pascal and was not completely Y2k compatible. Internally the Wildcat! database understands the four-digit year just fine. (Wildcat! was not the only BBS software […]
Some new additions to the modem teardown album: US Robotics Courier 9600 HST (manual, photos), “widebody” FCC ID CJE794FAST. This is similar to the 14400 HST I already have in the album, except this one takes 16 VAC power with a male DIN-5 plug. A PDF of the manual already is online at vtda.org, […]
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 vintage on Apr 16th, 2025
After proving my HST worked in my previous post with an ATX power supply, I went looking for triple-output power adapters (5 VDC, 12 VDC, -12 VDC). I finally found something that works, an ELPAC WM113TT AC-DC power adapter along with a new female DIN 5 connector. 21-Jul-2025: update to the update below, may have […]
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 […]
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 […]
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, 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 […]
Posted in vintage on Sep 24th, 2024
TL;DR: Controller said RAID1 was lost after disks being powered on for first time after 20 years, I didn’t believe it. Booted into Linux and dd’d the last good disk. Recovered the UFS filesystem, I have 20 year old artifacts to sift through. Always take images of your drives before mucking with them. The main […]
