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 […]
Category Archive for 'vintage'
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 […]
Rescuing 20 year old Solaris 8 data from a failed RAID1
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 […]
Pretty good enough homemade Macintosh Quadra 700 drive sled
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 […]
Connecting a BBS to a Cisco aux port – with graceful disconnects
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 […]
I got into classic Macintoshes
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 […]
Tandy CCR-82 cassette recorder repair
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 […]
[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 […]
Dial-up UUCP to get email to a vintage DOS BBS
Posted in Uncategorized, vintage on Nov 16th, 2023
This year’s project has been running a vintage DOS-based bulletin board system like I use to run in 1995 before I started my ISP. I’m running Wildcat! 4.20 Multiline 10, the same as I did back then, except now under Windows 7 32-bit instead of Windows 95. It has real US Robotics Courier modems that […]
Running Qodem on MacOS + iTerm2
Posted in vintage on Sep 2nd, 2023
If you’re running Qodem on MacOS with iTerm2, you may notice extended ASCII/code page 437 characters don’t render as lines, but just a bunch of letters like PPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPP. Try unsetting the environment variable TERMINFO_DIRS (unset TERMINFO_DIRS) before starting Qodem. This seems to have fixed it for me. I figured this out by noticing when I […]
