After boiling the ocean with Claude paired up with DOSBox-X I finally have a followup to the “10310 BTInitIsam” error I wrote about in https://binaryfury.wann.net/2026/01/patching-wildcat-bbs-for-y2k-in-2026/. This was about the PatchWC program that applies Y2K patches to the Wildcat! BBS v4 software not being able to run in DOSBox-X. This may be helpful for other DOSBox-X […]
Category Archive for 'vintage'
New additions to the dial-up modem teardowns gallery. As usual yes I know a flickr album isn’t the best way to organize these, at least they’re alphabetical by name. Even with Claude I still haven’t got around to making something better. No, you can’t steal my photos and create your own modem website. US Robotics […]
Archiving a SunOS 4.x floppy disk written with tar
Posted in vintage on Jun 10th, 2026
I was trying to archive some old Livingston Portmaster software for SunOS from a 3.5″ floppy disk and suddenly realized I wasn’t sure how this was going to work with Greaseweazle, given it wasn’t a IBM formatted floppy, or really formatted at all. It was a tar archive written directly to the floppy disk by […]
O’Reilly UUCP books
Posted in vintage on Jun 8th, 2026
I’ve written about UUCP a few times and may have mentioned UUCP books but I don’t think I’ve actually explained the differences in what’s out there from O’Reilly and Associates. Dated technology calls for dated books! Most of the “modern” UUCP how-to guides found online are short, expect to be using UUCP over TCP/SSH, and […]
Syncing time on vintage Novell Netware servers?
Posted in vintage on May 14th, 2026
I was flipping through my new “The Complete Guide to NetWare 4.1” and noticed it mentioned syncing time on NetWare servers to external sources. This got me to wondering what server administrators might have used in the 1990s for setting time on their NetWare 3.x/4.x servers. Today we use NTP over the Internet, or GPS […]
Adtran Total Access 908e with voip.ms and inbound DID
Posted in troubleshooting, Uncategorized, vintage on May 6th, 2026
I’ve had an Adtran Total Access 908e (TA908e) VoIP/voice gateway for over a year now with the intent of replacing my collection of Cisco ATA and Grandstream ATA for the BBS and other modem stuff. Allegedly it does a better job at VoIP processing and gives me better line density, but first I need a […]
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, […]
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 […]
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 […]
