Bytefest is over. I gave away a few servers (Itanium2, PA-RISC) to @mainlinedbutter and @morciatka and brought home an Evans & Sutherland graphics card - Compaq PowerStorm 350. It has 30MB frame buffer and 32MB for textures. E&S were pioneers of 2D and 3D graphics since 1960s 😍

I friend of mine brought me a working Apple Lisa so I can play with it for a few days. Lisa OS is a really interesting environment and very far from GUI systems not much newer 🤯

I always had that soft spot for amber CRTs 🥹 This one is connected to a fairly low-end AT clone from the early 90s (12MHz Am286, 1MB RAM, Hercules video, 20MB MFM HDD). I am thinking if such machines were sold new in the west world in 1990/1991 or the low-end there had at least

It seems that the screen on my Apple PowerBook 1400cs/166 died. It is not a mechanical damage but definitely looks like one. Not sure what happened here 🤯

I am just curious how many of you vintage computer collectors also drive vintage cars. My summer daily driver is a 1988 Jaguar XJ40... 200HP 3.6 straight six, 4-speed automatic, A/C and cruise control. I don't need more. Everytime, I enjoy the calm cruising with it at night...🥰

The computer is now working but this should not be the end state (no support for 1.44MB diskettes and cannot use full 12MHz). The next stop is to check what is wrong with the original controller. There were leaking caps (now replaced). Maybe some chip/trace is corroded...🤷🧵6/6

Why did it happen? The HDD was low-level formated with sector interleave 1 ("no interleave) but the computer is now too slow to handle the sequential access as the platters rotate. To get full performance, we needed to do new low-level format, now with interleave =2...🧵5/6

The "new" (older) controller does not work with 12MHz, so turbo was switched off (6MHz). Also no support for 1.44MB floppy. I made "fake" 720KB boot floppy to boot the computer. Now, we can access the HDD and confirmed that it has no errors. Now, it is just too slow...🧵4/6.

If booted from floppy, the HDD was readable but boot files were corrupted together with few other files (including their names). Every 4th character is wrong on new files. No CRC errors... we decided that the issue was not in the drive but in the controller and replaced it.🔋3/6

Somebody threw this into our company scrap. 12MHz 286, 1MB RAM, simple Hercules Graphics card clone (single chip containing the logic and US ASCII character set) and 20MB MFM drive with a "very modern" ST-506 controller. The computer did not boot from HDD...🧵2/6

There are two ST-506 HDD controllers for MFM drives - top from 1985 and bottom from 1990. Last time, I talked about doing the low-level hard disk format on a pre-IDE era drive. Let's look at why I did that (for the first time in my life)...➡️🧵1/6

This is the first time I need to do a low-level format of a hard drive and do things like manual entry of bad tracks and proper selection of interleaving so the drive provides the best performance. When I started maintaining PCs in the early 1990s, IDE drives just replaced the

This 386 laptop has a nice solution for a pointing device. You can indeed connect a PS/2 mouse. The other option is a clip-on trackball. If nothing is connected, it still pretends there is a PS/2 mouse connected and you can move the cursor using Fn and arrows (see green icons).

💾Microsoft Visual C++ 4.0 Cross-Development Edition for Macintosh💾 Finally, I've done it! 🥹 Visual C++ 4.x contains an optional PowerPC/68k cross-compiler for Macintosh targets. You develop on your WinNT PC but there is a remote debugger and VC++ file transfer process running

It is time to move with this again and start using Visual C++ 4.0 for making native MacOS 68k/PPC apps. I am still surprised that Visual C++ 4.x supported building programs for so many platforms: x86/Win, PowerPC/Win, MIPS/Win, Alpha/Win, PowerPC/Mac and 68K/Mac.

This is my colleague David's desk😅 (@david_klusacek). It is hard to mistake it for any other at office... Fun fact: there are 10 computer there but only two of them are x86 🤫 (4x PA-RISC, 1x Alpha, 3x Itanium)

There are easy ways to make this GUI modern though 🥹: 1) Increase padding between all clickable elements by at least 500% 2) Hide top menu under a single hamburger menu, so you need an extra mouse click 3) Make all icons just 1bit black&white 4) Replace most of the icons with

TRS-80 Model 100 from 1983 is one of my favorite machines thanks to its incredible battery life and a perfect keyboard comparable with profesional desktop terminals. The OS in ROM (including BASIC, serial terminal, text editor etc.) was written by Microsoft. The BASIC did not

After half a year being disassembled, my Digital DECpc 325 (a rebranded AST) is recapped and working. This one is worth preserving because how often could you see a 386 laptop with a color screen (albeit crappy one) and an SVGA chip supporting 256 colors in 640x480/800x600?

It was a bit painful process and David fixed it with thin wires. The video below better shows how thin they needed to be 🫢 Next time, I will show you what this card can do and how much it helped with CAD rendering. Stay tuned! 🧵5/5