retrocomputing

This is to challenge the creativity of the computer lover.

So yesterday I pulled out my old “luggable” IBM 5155 because I wanted to know if I could use it as a Terminal for a terminal.

Originally scheduled for a mid-June release, the makers now insist it will be available from December 4, 2026, with no changes to the machine specs or pricing.

rip.so :: the digital graveyard. A memorial to messengers, social networks, browsers, gadgets and websites the internet forgot.

IBM framed the announcement as American tech fighting back against Japan’s increasing domination of the memory market.

An implementation of sudo for DOS, to run the given command with full privileges. It can be used to edit important system files, run disk partitioning tools, and so on!

Former Xbox community chief Larry Hryb, aka Major Nelson, has joined the company behind the Commodore 64 revival as Community Development Advisor after he was laid off from game engine Unity in January.

(Thanks to /u/O_MORES for posting this elsewhere)

Does anyone know how I can cross-compile software for a 1999 iMac G3 with a PowerPC processor? Are there resources on how to develop for this CPU and is there any community around it?

TL;DR: .. hosting a website on a 25-year-old Sun Netra X1 SPARC server running OpenBSD 7.8. The setup includes: Noctua fan mods for quiet operation, httpd serving static HTML/CSS, OpenBSD’s pf firewall with default-deny rules, and Cloudflare tunnels to expose it safely without port forwarding. The server pulls ~55MB of RAM and serves pages from my garage. Check it out live at sparc.rup12.net - because why not?

If you have been warming up to the idea of owning physical media or preserving your existing collection before it fades away, then PicoIDE should interest you.

I’m quite late to finding out about this, but it’s quite awful to learn. I was hoping he’d be able to complete his documentary of Gary Kildall, but that may never happen now.

Useful map

A lot of retrocomputer enthusiasts have a favourite system, to the point of keeping up 40 year old flame wars over which system was “best”. In spite of the serious, boring nature of the PC/AT and its descendants, those early IBMs have a certain style that Compaq and the Clones never quite matched. Somehow, we live in a world where there are people nostalgic for Big Blue. That’s why [AnneBarela] built a miniature IBM PC using an Adafruit Fruit Jam board.

[Ronan] likes 35mm film photography, but the world, of course, has gone digital. He picked up an Epson FilmScan 200 for about €10. This wonder device from 1997 promised to convert 35mm film to digital at 1200 DPI resolution. But there was a catch: it connects via SCSI. Worse, the drivers were forever locked to Windows 95/98 and Mac System 7/8.

Last year, researchers at the University of Utah found a copy of Unix lying around on a 9-track magnetic tape. It’s special because that version of Unix was lost until it was recovered from that magnetic tape 52 years later. The researchers managed to successfully reconstruct it, and then they made the copy public. Anyone can download it and run it inside a virtual machine. So I did just that, and it made me so giddy to use it.

How CP/M 2.2’s Success Delayed the 8086 Port — and Whether It Really Mattered

Before DOOM would run on any computing system ever produced, and indeed before it even ran on its first computer, the game that would run on any computer of the pre-DOOM era was Zork. This was a text-based adventure game first published in the late 70s that could run on a number of platforms thanks to a virtual machine that interpreted the game code. This let the programmers write a new VM for each platform rather than porting the game every time. [smbakeryt] wanted to see how far he could push this design and got the classic game running on one of the oldest computers ever produced.

COBOL turned 66 this year and is still in use today. Major retail and commercial banks continue to run core account processing, ATM networks, credit card clearing, and batch end-of-day settlement. On top of that, many payment networks, stock exchanges, and clearinghouses rely on COBOL for high‑volume, high‑reliability batch and online transaction processing on mainframes.

A retro hardware modder has recreated the classic Commodore 1084 monitor in miniature form using 3D printing, pairing an 8-inch LCD with a custom-designed shell to match the Amiga A500 Mini and C64 Mini. The project, documented in detail on YouTube, combines modern display tech with faithfully styled housing, offering a sharp, compact alternative to original CRTs for today’s mini retro systems.

Computer History Museum software curator Al Kossow has successfully retrieved the contents of the over-half-a-century old tape found at the University of Utah last month.

Amiga computers may have been popular in the late 1980s and early 1990s, especially in media production, but their filesystems are not directly compatible with modern computers. The new ‘amifuse’ project aims to fix that with a new filesystem driver built around an invisible m68k CPU emulator.

Hello. I’ve been doing some digging on how tripcodes worked on old BBS and imageboards and tried to write a small article about it. I’m not a seasoned expert by any means so all criticism is welcome.

The Amiga 600 was in its day the machine nobody really wanted — a final attempt to flog the almost original spec 68000 platform from 1985, in 1992. Sure it had a PCMCIA slot nobody used, and an IDE interface for a laptop hard drive, but it served only to really annoy anyone who’d bought one when a few months later the higher-spec 1200 appeared. It’s had a rehabilitation in recent years though as a retrocomputer, and [LinuxJedi] has a 600 motherboard in need of some attention.

I hope I look this good in 30 years time.

Candy Cruncher stands as an interesting piece of Linux gaming convergence, with it pulling on almost all of the major threads that defined the industry up to that point. The lead developer of the game was Brian Hook, who is best known for being one of the key architects behind the Glide API for 3dfx, but he would also find success working on both Quake II and Quake III Arena at id Software; founding Pyrogon was his attempt at a slower pace after being at the top of his field for so very long.