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 troubleshooting, 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 […]
Posted in vintage on Sep 22nd, 2024
[photos: flickr – Macintosh Quara 700 drive sled] The Quadra 700 I acquired had the internal plastic assembly that held the floppy drive and hard drives, but didn’t have the sled that the hard drive went in and clipped into the system. These are hard to find on top of an already hard to find […]
Posted in Uncategorized, vintage on Aug 26th, 2024
This is part of the project to connect my Wildcat! BBS to a retro X.25 network, but it also applies more broadly to “reverse telnet” operation of a Cisco router where you telnet/ssh to a router at a given port to access a serial device hanging off of the aux or a terminal line. I […]
Posted in vintage on Aug 25th, 2024
I think I may have used a classic Macintosh once in my life, at a Kinko’s copy location of all places. We didn’t have them in school, we went from Commodore CBMs, to Apple IIe, to IBM PC 8088 clones. At the ISP I borrowed a customer’s PowerBook overnight so I could get experience with […]
Posted in vintage on Aug 25th, 2024
[photos: flickr – Tandy CCR-82 tape recorder] Between VCF West and the Electronics Flea Market I have been inundated with projects! I wasn’t intending to mess with cassette tape on the TRS-80, despite having a cassette of Talking Eliza. At VCF I ran across a Tandy tape recorder in good shape in a box for […]
