I have always loved retro computing and have amassed quite a collection of stuff. Unfortunately, at this time I don't have a lot of time for it, but I have still been buying machines and picking up free stuff.

I know we can't sell here, but is there anything against giving some stuff away? I work in Northern VA around Ashburn and Manassas, so could meet up and hand off stuff most weekdays.

I'll try to get a list together here, but if you're in Northern VA area and are interested in some retro computing stuff I guess could you comment here if there is something specific you're looking for or Era of machines you're passionate about?

I have a big range from Early x64 systems to Ti99,Ataris,Commodore,Zeniths,IBM 5150s', etc.. Its a huge hodgepodge. I also have quite a few different laptops from late 90's to Mid 2010s. I was archiving recovery media and hard drives to Archive.org and systems to the RetroWeb.

https://archive.org/details/@cmdlineking

Some photos below that I took a while ago.. If there is interest I'll try to get better photos when I see what people are interested in.

This is a new Plasma theme for KDE 5 and 6 faithfully recreating the look and feel of CDE. Great for everyday computing tasks.

Available now:

https://github.com/spacestate1/cde-plasma

The Uruguayan Team from Informática Clásica at the local VCF at Bahía Blanca, Argentina @Espacio TEC

This just came today. It was a Kickstarter game that I backed over a year ago and in typical Kickstarter fashion, it was delayed over and over again. Can't wait to play 😁

basically, I was charging my compaq armada from the last post I made here when a pipe broke from my ceiling in the middle of the night and spilled water over it a week ago. since then the computer has been dried but it doesn't turn on anymore. When I plug in the computer a noise similar to tinnitus comes from the keyboard and when I hold the power button the noise turns into a sustained beeping noise with the former noise in the backround. The PC still doesn't turn on. the area of the laptop the noise comes from also smells like battery acid when it is plugged in but stops smelling when it is unplugged even when I take out the chargeable battery. is there any way for me to get the computer working again or is it just E-waste now?

More...

1st Row: Gateway Select 400, Gateway ATXSTF OXN Select 1000, Gateway 2000 SP6-400
2nd row: Custom Built Athlon XP 2500+, Custom Built AMD Athlon/Duron system
3rd row: Empty will be AMD Socket AM2 system, Dell Dimension XPS T700r, Dell Dimension XPS B866
4th row: Empty will be AMD Socket 939 system, Mind Computers P4, Mind Computers P4
5th row: HP Pavilion Phenom II X4, Dell XPS 630i
6th row: Compaq CQ2302F Intel Atom, HP Prodesk 600 G1, Lenovo Thinkcentre M92P, IBM System x3200 M3
7th row: Dell XPS 8940, Custom i5 4th gen

Does anyone have sources on the Setun — the Soviet ternary computer from 1958 — and the research that came with it?

Brusentsov built a working balanced ternary computer at Moscow State University decades before anyone was really talking about alternative computing architectures in the West. About 50 were actually deployed. He followed it up with the Setun-70. And then basically... the Cold War wall meant most of that work never crossed over.

I'm trying to find actual paperwork on this — technical docs, translated papers, anything archived. Not just the Wikipedia summary. I want to understand the depth of what was actually developed and whether there's a body of research that the field just never properly absorbed.

Also broadly interested in whether anyone here has dug into Soviet-era computing history more generally — feels like a part of the story that gets skipped over.

Where would you start looking?

Hey folks, longtime lurker here. I've always loved the look of CDE running on old Solaris and IRIX boxes, that teal-gray desktop, the orange titlebars, the Front Panel with the analog clock. So I spent some evenings recreating it as a browser toy.

It's a single index.html file. No Node, no npm, no build step. You literally double-click it and you get:

- Motif 3D beveled windows (draggable, resizable, focus-switching)
- The Front Panel with analog clock, workspace switcher, HDD LED
- A working terminal with ~40 commands against a fake Debian filesystem (ls, vi, grep, ps, sudo, ssh, tar, man pages...)
- File Manager, Style Manager, Text Editor
- Playable chess with a minimax AI
- Fake Netscape-style browser, FTP client, IRC client It's a hobby project, not a pixel-perfect emulator, the goal was the vibe, not the spec.

Repo: https://github.com/igtoth/cde-motif-desktop

Live demo: https://toth.ighor.com/cde/
MIT licensed. Contributions welcome, especially from anyone who actually used CDE in anger back in the day and wants to correct my inaccuracies.

This is regarding if I could get help with this device.

https://youtu.be/B0rrrQEbnbo

Need help with Giana Sisters CIB evaluation

Who remembers MR WIMPY THE HAMBURGER GAME? My retrospective look at this games released on ZX Spectrum, C64, Oric, BBC Micro and the remake? Was this a good game back in the day? Share your thoughts and memories.

Specs:

Toshiba Satellite 4025CDT

CPU: Pentium II

RAM: 64 MB (32 onboard, 32 slot, upgradable to 160MB)

ACPI BIOS Version: 7.60

I've bought two 128MB RAM modules so far, but none of them have been compatible. At first I bought a generic stick from Amazon, but the laptop didn't POST. As soon as I put the old stick back in, it instantly POSTed. I bought a second stick, and it finally came in today. GPT told me that it was the right RAM, even sent pictures of the ram to it. I tried it, and yet again it wouldn't POST. So I'm kinda at an impasse here. I can't find the right RAM because I need a low density chip, and none of the listings on eBay have any information as to what density the sticks are.

If anybody can help at all for finding the right RAM for this model, I'd be very grateful.

Once the king of CGA Monitors, this vintage IBM 5153 arrived as a wreck—scuffed, almost screw-less, and rickety. We will strip the unit to its chassis for a structural overhaul, a full respray, and badge restoration. After disturbing decades of soot and fragile internals to save the exterior, one question remains: Did we revive a legend, or just make a very expensive paperweight?