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- Hideki Sato has diedFeb 15, 2026ClassicHasClass
Remember when Sega made consoles? Hideki Sato remembered, because he was involved in or designed all of them — from the 1982 SG-1000 under Sega Enterprises Ltd. president Hayao Nakayama, later reworked as the SC-3000 home computer, to of course the extremely popular Mega Drive/Genesis and the technologically overwrought Saturn, to the flawed but ahead-of-its-time 1999 Dreamcast, the very last cons
- The Scriptovision Super Micro Script video titler is almost a home computerFeb 08, 2026ClassicHasClass
Notwithstanding filmed art and transparencies, early static television titles were generated by monoscopes, modified cathode ray tubes that fired their electron guns at embedded plates marked with a metallized image. These units then assimilated the reflected particles into a sharp monochrome video signal. Related devices like the 1953 Hughes Typotron or 1954 Convair Charactron used a double-defle
- Hands-on with two Apple Network Server prototype ROMsJan 25, 2026ClassicHasClass
Grateful acknowledgement made to the several former Apple employees who materially contributed to this entry. This article wouldn't have been possible without you! Here's why I need to do inventory more often. its complicated history is a microcosm of some of Apple's strangest days during the mid-1990s. At $10,000+ a pop (in 2026 dollars over $20,700), not counting the AIX license, they sold po
- Stewart Cheifet has diedDec 31, 2025ClassicHasClass
Very sorry to hear about the death of Stewart Cheifet at 87, long-time host of Computer Chronicles, which for a long time was the undisputed best show on computers on American public broadcasting. I watched it on PBS TV as a kid, and candidly I didn't understand much of what was going on at the time, but I learned a lot and rewatching the episodes now really demonstrates what a treasure trove of p
- A Christmas 2007 video present from Old VCR with Jack Tramiel et alDec 24, 2025ClassicHasClass
A very happy holiday season and Merry Christmas to those of you who celebrate it (timezone may vary). Also, I don't think I nearly say thanks enough to my regular patrons through Ko-fi, and I want to also thank them on behalf of the geriatric systems their generosity — and all of you who have chipped in at one time or another — helps keep running. I've got more projects to finish in 2026 and I hop
- The Texas Instruments CC-40 invades Gopherspace (plus TI-74 BASICALC)Dec 21, 2025ClassicHasClass
I've mentioned on the blog several times the continuum that exists between handheld computers and pocket computers, battery powered devices in rather small form factors that are nevertheless fully-fledged general purpose computers — arguably more so than the modern locked-down smartphone has become. Some of these diminutive systems are best considered "handhelds," with larger size, larger keyboard
- Oblast: a better Blasto game for the Commodore 64Dec 06, 2025ClassicHasClass
wiring up a Gremlin Blasto arcade board, we talked at length about this 1978 arcade game's history and its sole official home computer port by Milton Bradley to the Texas Instruments 99/4A. In the single player mode you run around in a maze and try to blow up all the mines, which can set off sometimes impressive chain reactions, all the while making sure you yourself don't go up in flames in the p
- Rebecca Heineman has diedNov 18, 2025ClassicHasClass
"Burger Becky" did a lot of great games, first at Interplay (Bard's Tale, Wasteland), then later at Logicware, where she and others did some great Mac ports including Jazz Jackrabbit and their Half-Life MacOS port which never actually saw the light of day, the infamous 3DO port of Doom, and of course the initial work on the IIgs version of Wolfenstein 3D. Naturally these are just the highlights th
- When UPS charged me a $684 tariff on $355 of vintage computer partsNov 15, 2025ClassicHasClass
Although we make regular trips down under, your humble author is based in California and so is the Floodgap computer lab. For newly manufactured items and parts it has generally been my policy to buy parts from United States sellers even prior to the tariffs, mostly because that gets around various irregularities and it arrives more quickly. If they're going to drop-ship then it's their problem, n
- They call it Mister Pibb (again)Nov 02, 2025ClassicHasClass
As Pibb is the official beverage of Old Vintage Computing Research, no doubt to the profound chagrin of the Coca-Cola Company, I feel compelled to offer a public service announcement. Old and busted: inconsistent on their own brand name) is back and Pibb Xtra, the face of Pibb since 2001, is relegated to the dust heap with Peppo. This explains why I had been unable to buy any more Pibb Xtra fo
- The Apple Network Server MacOS ROMs have resurfacedOct 26, 2025ClassicHasClass
through a complex history came to run IBM's AIX as its native operating system. I actually had an ANS 500 when it was almost new, in 1998, and it ran Floodgap until 2012. It is still in my collection and still runs, along with an ANS 700 I later acquired and a (sadly battery bombed) "Shiner ESB" prototype that used to be at Netscape. AIX was your only choice — no other operating system was support
- Back to the Southern Hemisphere Commodore 128DCROct 12, 2025ClassicHasClass
defective PAL 128DCR, my favourite Commodore 8-bit. When we left it last Christmas, it had an obviously defective U19 colour RAM and the serial bus locked up on any access to the internal disk drive or the included printer. As few chips on the DCR are socketed and certainly none of the likely suspects, the relevant chip replacements on this unit would require desoldering and I wasn't sure wheth
- The end of AOL dialupOct 05, 2025ClassicHasClass
America Online has ceased offering dialup access since first doing so in 1991 (using GeoWorks), and presumably any systems attempting to dial in will no longer be able to make a connection. We actually had a fairly long history with AOL and its predecessors in our house. We got a copy of PlayNET as a door prize at the local Commodore computer club meeting (dunno where that went) and my folks init
- Refurb weekend: Silicon Graphics Indigo² IMPACT 10000Sep 14, 2025ClassicHasClass
It's one of my periodic downsizing cycles, which means checking the hardware inventory (and, intermittently, discovering things that were not on the hardware inventory) and deciding if I want to use it, store it or junk it. And so we come to this machine, which has been sitting in the lab as a practical objet d'art when I picked it up from a fellow collector for the cost of take-it-away almost exa
- Microsoft makes 6502 BASIC open sourceSep 03, 2025ClassicHasClass
It was probably going to happen sooner or later, but Microsoft has officially released the source code for 6502 BASIC. The specific revision is very Commodore-centric: it's the 1977 "8K" BASIC variant "1.1," which Commodore users know better as BASIC V2.0, the same BASIC used in the early PET and with later spot changes from Commodore (including removing Bill Gates' famous Easter egg) in the VIC-2
- Reverse-engineering Roadsearch Plus, or, roadgeeking with an 8-bit CPUAug 24, 2025ClassicHasClass
other irredeemably nerdy habit is roadgeeking, exploring and mapping highways both old and new, and it turns out that 8-bit roadgeeking on ordinary home computers was absolutely possible. For computers of this class, devising an optimal highway route becomes an exercise not only in how to encode sufficient map data to a floppy disk, but also performing efficient graph traversal with limited hardw
- A real PowerBook: the Macintosh Application Environment on a PA-RISC laptopAug 03, 2025ClassicHasClass
I like the Power ISA very much, but there's nothing architecturally obvious to say that the next natural step from the Motorola 68000 family must be to PowerPC. For example, the Palm OS moved from the DragonBall to ARM, and it's not necessarily a well-known fact that the successor to Commodore's 68K Amigas was intended to be based on PA-RISC, Hewlett-Packard's "Precision Architecture" processor fa
- So I saw this headlineJul 29, 2025ClassicHasClass
reading it was, "Is he Deommodore 64?" (No, unfortunately, Deommodore Lenoir's jersey number is 2, and I'm not even a 49ers fan.)
- Refurb weekend: Gremlin Blasto arcade boardJun 29, 2025ClassicHasClass
totally unreasonable price for a completely untested item, as-was, no returns, with no power supply, no wiring harness and no auxiliary daughterboards. At the end of this article, we'll have it fully playable and wired up to a standard ATX power supply, a composite monitor and off-the-shelf Atari joysticks, and because this board was used for other related games from that era, the process should w
- See Jane 128 by Arktronics run (featuring Magic Desk, 3-Plus-1 and the Thomson MO5)Jun 21, 2025ClassicHasClass
"Look," says Jane. "I'm a computer program. Run, computer program, run." Commodore 128DCR is the best 8-bit computer Commodore ever made: built-in 1571 disk drive, burst mode serial, detachable keyboard, 2MHz operation, separate 40 and 80 column video, CP/M option, a powerful native mode, full Commodore 64 compatibility and no external power brick. But when the O.G. "flat" 128 was coming to mark
- There's not much point in buying CommodoreJun 08, 2025ClassicHasClass
Bona fides: Commodore 128DCR on my desk with a second 1571, Ultimate II+-L and a ZoomFloppy, three SX-64s I use for various projects, heaps of spare 128DCRs, breadbox 64s, 16s, Plus/4s and VIC-20s on standby, multiple Commodore collectables (blue-label PET 2001, C64GS, 116, TV Games, 1551, 1570), a couple A500s, an A3000 and a AmigaOS 3.9 QuikPak A4000T with '060 CPU, Picasso IV RTG card and Ether
- RIP Bill AtkinsonJun 07, 2025ClassicHasClass
As posted by his family (Facebook link), Bill Atkinson passed away on June 5 from pancreatic cancer at the age of 74. The Macintosh would not have been the same without him (QuickDraw, MacPaint, HyperCard, and so much more), nor would Magic Cap have been a thing. Rest in peace.
- Harpoom: of course the Apple Network Server can be hacked into running DoomJun 01, 2025ClassicHasClass
a $10,000+ Apple server running IBM AIX. Of course you can. Well, you can now. Now, let's go ahead and get the grumbling out of the way. No, the ANS is not running Linux or NetBSD. No, this is not a backport of NCommander's AIX Doom, because that runs on AIX 4.3. The Apple Network Server could run no version of AIX later than 4.1.5 and there are substantial technical differences. (As it happens,
- prior-art-dept.: The hierarchical hypermedia world of Hyper-GMay 25, 2025ClassicHasClass
Prior Art Department and today we'll consider a forgotten yet still extant sidebar of the early 1990s Internet. If you had Internet access at home back then, it was almost certainly dialup modem (like I did); only the filthy rich had T1 lines or ISDN. Moreover, from a user perspective, the hosts you connected to were their own universe. Things may have originated elsewhere, but everything on the h
- What went wrong with wireless USBMay 04, 2025ClassicHasClass
(Hat tip to the late Bill Strauss and The Capitol Steps' Lirty Dies.) take my Palm OS Fossil Wrist PDA smartwatch mobile. It has no on-board networking libraries but can be coerced into doing PPP over its serial port (via USB) by using the libraries from my Palm m505. Of course, that then requires it be constantly connected to a USB port, which is rather inconvenient for a wristwatch. But what