Retro computing Archive

Old Vintage Computing Research, by the incredibly knowledgeable Cameron Kaiser, is one of the best resources on the web about genuinely obscure retrocomputing, often diving quite deep in topics nobody else covers – or even can cover, considering how rare some of the hardware Kaiser covers is. I link to Old VCR all the time, and today I’ve got two more great articles by Kaiser for you. First, we’ve got the more well-known – relatively speaking – of the two devices covered today, and that’s the MIPS ThinkPad, officially known as the IBM WorkPad z50. This was a Windows CE 2.11 device powered by a NEC VR4120 MIPS processor, running at 131 Mhz, released in 1999. Astute readers might note the WorkPad branding, which IBM also used for several rebranded Palm Pilots. Kaiser goes into his usual great detail covering this device, with tons of photos, and I couldn’t stop reading for a second. There’s so much good information in here I have no clue what to highlight, but since OSNews has OS in the name, this section makes sense to focus on: The desktop shortcuts are pre-populated in ROM along with a whole bunch of applications. The marquee set that came on H/PC Pro machines was Microsoft Pocket Office (Pocket Word, Pocket Excel, Pocket Access and Pocket PowerPoint), Pocket Outlook (Calendar, Contacts, Inbox and Tasks) and Pocket Internet Explorer, but Microsoft also included Calculator, InkWriter (not too useful on the z50 without a touch screen), Microsoft Voice Recorder, World Clock, ActiveSync (a la Palm HotSync), PC Link (direct connect, not networked), Remote Networking, Terminal (serial port and modem), Windows Explorer and, of course, Solitaire. IBM additionally licensed and included some of bSquare’s software suite, including bFAX Pro for sending and receiving faxes with the softmodem, bPRINT for printing and bUSEFUL Backup Plus for system backups, along with a battery calibrator and a Rapid Access quick configuration tool. There is also a CMD.EXE command shell, though it too is smaller and less functional than its desktop counterpart. ↫ Old Vintage Computing Research Using especially these older versions of Windows CE is a wild experience, because you can clearly tell Microsoft was trying really hard to make it look and feel like ‘normal’ Windows, but as anyone who used Windows CE back then can attest, it was a rather poor imitation with a ton of weird limitations and design decisions borne from the limited hardware it was designed to run on. I absolutely adore the various incarnations of Windows CE and associated graphical shells it ran – especially the PocketPC days – but there’s no denying it always felt quite clunky. Moving on, the second Old VCR article I’m covering today is more difficult for me to write about, since I am too young to have any experience with the 8 bit era – save for some experience with the MSX platform as a wee child – so I have no affinity for machines like the Commodore 64 and similar machines from that era. And, well, this article just so happens to be covering something called the Commodore HHC-4. Once upon a time (and that time was Winter CES 1983), Commodore announced what was to be their one and only handheld computer, the Commodore HHC-4. It was never released and never seen again, at least not in that form. But it turns out that not only did the HHC-4 actually exist, it also wasn’t manufactured by Commodore — it was a Toshiba. Like Superman had Clark Kent, the Commodore HHC-4 had a secret identity too: the Toshiba Pasopia Mini IHC-8000, the very first portable computer Toshiba ever made. And like Clark Kent was Superman with glasses, compare the real device to the Commodore marketing photo and you can see that it’s the very same machine modulo a plastic palette swap. Of course there’s more to the story than that. ↫ Old Vintage Computing Research Of course, Kaiser hunted down an IHC-8000, and details his experiences with the little handheld, calculator-like machine. It turns out it’s most likely using some unspecified in-house Toshiba architecture, running at a few hundred kHz, and it’s apparently quite sluggish. It never made it to market in Commodore livery, most likely because of its abysmal performance. The amount of work required to make this little machine more capable and competitive probably couldn’t be recouped by its intended list price, Kaiser argues.

A YouTube channel has resurrected a programming language that hadn’t been seen since the 1980s — in a testament to both the enduring power of our technology, and of the communities that care about it. But best of all, Simpson uploaded the language to the Internet Archive, along with all his support materials, inviting his viewers to write their own programs (and saying he hoped his upstairs neighbor would’ve approved). And in our email interview, Simpson said since then it’s already been downloaded over 1,000 times — “which is pretty amazing for something so old.” ↫ David Cassel It’s great that this lost programming language, MicroText for the Commodore 64, was rediscovered, but I’m a bit confused as to how “lost” this language really was. I mean, it was “discovered” in a properly listed eBay listing, which feels like cheating to me. When I think of stories of discoveries of long-lost software, games, or media, it usually involves things like finding it in a shed after years of searching, or someone at a company going through that box of old hard drives discovering the game they worked on 32 years ago. I don’t know, something about this whole story feels off to me, and it’s ringing some alarm bells I can’t quite place. Regardless, it’s cool to have MicroText readily available on the web now, so that people can rediscover it and create awesome new things with it. Perhaps there’s old ideas to be relearned here.

Thanks to open source, no technology ever has to become obsolete, so long as a community remains to support it. You can sync Newtons and Palm Pilots with modern desktops, download web browsers for long-discontinued operating systems, or connect vintage computers like the Apple IIe to the modern internet via WiFi. Every year, new cartridges are released for old-school video game consoles like the Nintendo Entertainment System and Game Boy. People keep old software and online platforms alive as well. The Dreamwidth team forked an old version of the early social network LiveJournal’s source code and built a community around it. The dial-up bulletin board system software WWIV is still maintained and there are plenty of BBSes still around. Teams are working to restore aspects of early online services like AOL and Prodigy. And you can still use Gopher, the hypertext protocol that was — for a brief period in the early 1990s — bigger than the web. ↫ Klint Finley Retrocomputing is about a lot of things, and I feel like it differs per person. For me, it’s a little bit of nostalgia, but primarily it’s about learning, and experiencing hardware and software I was unable to experience when they were new, either due to high cost or just general unavailability. There’s a lot to learn from platforms that are no longer among us, and often it helps you improve your skills with the modern platforms you do still use. The linked article is right: open source is playing such a massive role in the retrocomputing community. The number of open source projects allowing you to somehow use decades-old platforms in conjunction with modern technologies is massive, and it goes far beyond just software – projects like BlueSCSI or very niche things like usb3sun highlights there’s also hardware-based solutions for just about anything retro you want to accomplish. And we really can’t forget NetBSD, which seems to be the go-to modern operating system for bringing new life to old and retro hardware, as it often runs on just about anything. When I got my PA-RISC workstation, the HP Visualize c3750, I couldn’t find working copies of HP-UX, so I, too, opted for NetBSD to at least be able to see if the computer was fully functional. NetBSD is now a tool in my toolbox when I’m dealing with older, unique hardware. Retrocomputing is in a great place right now, with the exception of the ballooning prices we’re all suffering from, with even successful mainstay YouTubers like LGR lamenting the state of the market. Still, if you do get your hands on something retro – odds are there’s a whole bunch of tools ready for you to make the most of it, even today.

In which I build WindEmu, an emulator for the Psion Series 5mx (a PDA from 1999 running EPOC – the OS that would become Symbian), over the course of just over a week, without access to the actual hardware. Yet another cursed project. ↫ Ash Wolf I had never seen this before, even though it’s from 2019. You can load the emulator in your browser and use EPOC32 as if it’s running on the real thing, and I have to say it feel remarkably realistic for a project completed in a little over a week. Of course, it may have been tweaked and improved over the years since 2019, but I don’t know by how much. The last GitHub commit was five years ago, so it seems there really hasn’t been much public work done on it since. An emulator like this is probably the closest most of us will get to the later devices from Psion, since as with all retrocomputing platforms, the number of working devices is rapidly dwindling, and prices for working examples on sites like eBay have gone through the roof.

Hewlett-Packard’s 9000 Series 300 (HP300) was a range of technical workstations based on Motorola 680×0 microprocessors. Superbly engineered in modular form, and ahead of the curve in terms of functionality, these workstations were used mainly as instrument controllers and for desktop technical computing. The HP300 series launched in 1985 with the models 310 (pictured below) and 320. It evolved through numerous variants of increasing power, concluding with the 38x models released in 1991. The series was officially obsolete as of 1997. The definitive website dedicated to vintage Hewlett-Packard computers is the wonderful HP Computer Museum, which has excellent and wide-ranging archival resources. The present site is focused specifically on the HP 9000 series 300 and is for anyone interested in the history, conservation and restoration of these personal workstations. ↫ hp-series300.net Everything you could possibly ever want to know about the series 300, in one place. It’s incredibly detailed, and if you have your eyes on buying one of these machines, I urge you to keep this resource in a permanently open tab so you know what you’re doing.

Do you ever sit at your 1981 vintage IBM PC and get the urge to pop onto that newfangled ‘WWW’ to stay up to date on all the goings-on in the world? Fret not, because Al’s Geek Lab has you covered with a new video, which you will unfortunately have to watch on a device that was made at the very least in the late 1990s. What makes this feat possible is a miniscule web browser called MicroWeb, created by jhhoward, that will happily run on an 8088 CPU or compatible, without requiring any fiddling with EMS or similar RAM extensions. Anything is possible, if you just want it hard enough.

The VAX served DEC well throughout the ’80s and into the ’90s, but as the latter decade went on, DEC began to face stiff competition from UNIX vendors, particularly Sun Microsystems. DEC struggled to change with the times, and the company ultimately failed. In 1998, DEC was acquired by Compaq, and in 2001, Compaq was acquired by Hewlett-Packard. The DEC line, including the VAX/VMS system, was discontinued and faded from the market. And yet it lives on today. Here’s how. Getting a DEC Alpha machine has been on my list for a long time, but they’re in very high demand, and extremely expensive. It’s quite impressive to see DEC’s continuing legacy laid out like this.

I had to do some digging into our archives to see if we ever covered GeckOS before, but apparently we haven’t – and that’s a shame. GeckOS is a pre-emptive multitasking operating system for the Commodore 64 and the PET, and should be easily portable to other 6502-based machines, and offers multithreading, TCP/IP networking, and more. Version 2.1 has just been released, and it adds a ton of new features and bugfixes.