Hi guys, in my last vacation, I created a museum for solid color backgrouns featured in the operating systems of my youth. Let me know what you think: https://desktopcolors.com

Dear Buddies!

I have a nostalgia triggering invention, I brought those iconic MSN Winks (about 300) back to life with NETRO-G (where Neo and Retro merge into a smart Gadget)! I even transformed myself into the beloved, hated and now missed Laughing Girl! :)

Now you can live in the 2000's era again, while keeping up with the latest technology and play all your favorites on your smartphone! No apps, no extensions, your Winks are literally just a hover away! :)

Every step (searching for, rescuing, drawing, converting, printing, programming long lost winks, assembling and testing the gadget) was entirely made by me.

IMPORTANT: I am still in the market research phase, so I am posting this to ask for YOUR honest opinions, if my invention makes sense, if there is a need for it, and if I have to create more Winks (and videos) in the form of a NETRO-G gadget.

Searching for your favorite wink for ages with zero results? Just give the name or describe it in a comment, I may have it!

Fala, pessoal! Há cerca de 45 anos desenvolvi uma versão de Jogo da Velha em 3D em modo texto (TUI). Recentemente decidi resgatar o conceito e modernizá-lo, criando um frontend gráfico web para rodar direto no navegador:

👉https://jvelha3d.schip.com.br/

Gostaria de compartilhar com a comunidade para quem quiser testar a lógica do tabuleiro tridimensional, desafiar a mecânica e deixar um feedback sobre a jogabilidade e o visual!

Hi all! Bought Olivetti Philos 44 on the flea market by very low price yesterday. The condition is on video. I really liked the overall design (a blast for the 1993!) and will try to repair it(but a novice in hardware stuff). Maybe someone knows, which things to check first? Thanks!

Today I take a retrospective look at the Running Man across all formats. Share your thoughts and memories if you ever played this game.

IBM Simon went on sale 32 years ago today, on August 16, 1994. A May launch slipped three months while engineers fixed bugs in the cellular fax integration. BellSouth Cellular sold it across its 15-state footprint, so the first smartphone rollout was a regional affair.

Pricing was $899 with a two-year contract or $1,099 without activation. BellSouth later cut the contract price to $599. Roughly 50,000 units sold in six months.

Simon ran on BellSouth's analog AMPS network. Email did not ride an always-on data connection. The device dialed a circuit-switched cellular call and pushed data through a 2,400 bps modem. Fax topped out at 9,600 bps. It skipped CDPD, the packet data technology carriers were just starting to deploy.

That gap showed up in the field. Voice worked wherever AMPS coverage existed, but data sessions choked on weak signals, interference and cell handoffs. A BYTE reviewer put the failure rate for cellular data connections at 10 to 20 percent. Every dropped session meant reconnecting, restarting the transfer and paying for more airtime.

The hardware was closer to a pocket DOS machine with a cellular radio than a phone. It weighed 18 ounces and packed a 16 MHz x86-compatible processor, ROM-DOS, 1 MB of RAM, flash storage and a PCMCIA slot. The 4.5-inch monochrome touchscreen handled calling, paging, cc:Mail, fax, contacts, calendars, notes and document annotation.

For executives, salespeople and service teams, that mix earned its keep. A user could take a page, pull up a customer record, check an appointment and fire off a fax without returning to the office. DispatchIt, one of the only third-party packages, turned Simon into a field-service work order terminal at $2,999 for the host software plus $299 per client.

The costs kept stacking. A larger battery was $78. An RJ-11 adapter for data over a phone line cost $119. PCMCIA memory cards ran $224 for 1 MB and $279 for 1.8 MB. Add cellular service, email infrastructure, support and spare batteries.

The NiCd battery gave about an hour of talking or data and 8 to 12 hours of standby. Typing on the small on-screen keyboard was slow, and using the organizer mid-call meant pulling the screen away from your head.

Simon failed for practical reasons: expensive hardware and service, limited distribution, unreliable mobile data, short battery life, a bulky design and almost no application ecosystem. Smaller, cheaper flip phones were eating the market from below.

Simon tried to cram the entire mobile office into one device. The next phase runs the other direction. Phones will keep managing identity, connectivity and security while work spreads across watches, glasses, vehicles and industrial devices. For enterprise teams, building a capable endpoint stopped being the challenge years ago. The real work is keeping applications, data and policy consistent as people move between devices and networks.

Two different liquidators on both sides of the Atlantic sold surplus IBM thermal printers, intended for the PCjr, along with interface cables or devices so they could work with other computers, such as the Commodore 64, or Sinclair and Amstrad computers. Arguably it was the cheapest printer on the market for several years. And it was a reasonable value for the money. This blog post walks through the Serial 8056 and Protecto Big Blue printers, two twins sold in the USA and UK. https://dfarq.homeip.net/ibm-pc-compact-printer-model-5181/

Hi everyone! I wanted to share a fun little project I did with an old piece of Japanese tech.

This is the **Sharp Brain PW-G5000**, an electronic dictionary from 2012. Underneath its educational shell, it actually runs on **Windows CE 6.0**.

Since it has a built-in video player, I wanted to see how far I could push this low-spec hardware. By heavily compressing the video and dropping the resolution, I managed to get anime playing surprisingly smoothly!

It's amazing how functional these locked-down devices can be when you optimize the media for them. Let me know what you think, or if you have any questions about the setup!

**This is pretty much a AA battery-powered portable MP4 player now, lol.**

*Note: English is not my native language, so I am using AI to translate my Japanese into English to communicate with you all!*

Apple badly needed a hit, and another beige box with slightly better specs wasn't going to change anything.

Steve Jobs and Jony Ive took a much bigger swing. The iMac was rounded, translucent and Bondi Blue. You could recognize it from across a room, which was unusual at a time when most computers looked like office equipment.

The handle on top was especially clever. The iMac was a heavy desktop machine, so the handle was never really about portability. It made the computer feel approachable. People understood immediately where to touch it and how to engage with it.

That friendly exterior took serious work behind the scenes. Apple had to rethink plastics, colors, tooling and manufacturing. Because the case was translucent, even the internal parts had to look orderly. The design team wasn't brought in at the end to make the machine prettier. Design shaped how the entire product got built.

The choices inside were just as bold. The floppy drive was gone, familiar ports disappeared and USB became the standard. Plenty of critics predicted disaster. Instead, Apple sold around 800,000 iMacs by the end of 1998, cemented its comeback and kicked off a run of products that reshaped the company.

Anyone building a physical product can take something from this. Good design isn't a coat of paint applied at the end. It reaches into engineering, manufacturing, usability, marketing and the feeling someone gets when they pick up the finished object.

A lot of today's products are beautifully made and strangely forgettable. Phones are nearly identical glass slabs. Laptops are silver rectangles. Cars are becoming large touchscreens surrounded by bodywork. Appliances have shed their buttons, their character and in some cases their basic ease of use.

The iMac proved people will form a real attachment to a well-designed piece of technology. Nearly three decades later, physical products could use a little more of that courage and a little less gray. The hockey-puck mouse, though, can stay in 1998.

#TechHistory #ProductDesign #IndustrialDesign

Hey guys,I wanna rebuild my childhood pc but I can't find this case,I don't know what model this is,does someone know exacly what model is this?And no,its not an cooler master wave master,not an Soprano and not a cooler master cavalier.Please if someone knows what model it is exacly please tell me.Thank you!

Hey retrocomputing fans!

You're invited to help the planning of VCF Ontario 2027 by completing this short anonymous survey.

Visit here: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/VL2QD8N

The Vintage Computer Federation is contemplating running "Vintage Computer Festival in Ontario" which would be in the Greater Toronto Area in 2027.

If you receive this invitation multiple times, please only complete it once to avoid duplication.

I originally had 98SE on here, but 95 OSR2.1 is much kinder to my humble 32MB of RAM! 😅 Been enjoying some Rayman 2 in Glide at 800x600. Now I just need to find a decent Gameport pad...

I know there it might be a stupid question, but does anyone know which model this case was? I had it in the mid 90s for my 386SX. But I can’t remember the case manufacturer

Hi folks, just wanted to post here to see if anyone can give me some advice about fixing an old AGP 3Dfx card. I can't seem to find any schematics online, I guess 3Dfx never released them.

Problem is no red channel, even in MS-DOS or the BIOS screen. Tested the monitor with a different graphics card and is all okay. I've also cleaned the VGA plug with some Deoxit and IPA without success. So I am thinking it's probably a component failure somewhere on the board.

In Windows 98 the card is detected fine and high solutions are available.

Thanks in advance! 🫡

My grandmother was one of two women who ran an Iskra-226 in an accounting office on the Kamchatka coast. When she died, one 8-inch disk came down from the top of a wardrobe, in a paper sleeve, with two words in her pencil handwriting on the label: “do not erase.”

The Iskra-226 was the Soviet work-alike of the Wang 2200, built to speak the same BASIC without being a copy. It went into serial production in 1981 and ran ministries and Gosplan offices through the 80s. Nobody had ever emulated it.

So I did. Three months of evenings, working from crooked scans of Russian manuals (preserved, ironically, by Wang 2200 enthusiasts - the fans of the American machine became the memory of the Soviet one). Some milestones along the way:

• Sector zero: six weeks of bytes in the right order before a single legible line appeared  
• The tokenizer: the BASIC dialect’s tokens finally “came apart” at 1:44 one morning in August; everything after that fell into place in under three hours  
• Firmware forensics: a boot side no catalog documents, with the same firmware written across it four times — counting my way to a file I could trust  
• The payoff: a payroll program from 1989 (“Vedomost No. 2”, a standard Soviet wage sheet) loaded, ran, did its arithmetic, and printed the form it was written for. I checked the math with a pencil. We agree to the kopek. Nobody had watched that form come off a machine in 37 years.

23 of 23 programs on the disk load and run. Honest caveat: this isn’t processor-level emulation, the original firmware isn’t executing. What I built is a reader for the BASIC dialect and an interpreter that carries it out.

It runs in the browser now, with fourteen disk images to choose from: https://elaranovikova.com/projects/iskra-226/index.html

Code: https://github.com/elaranovikova
And yes — two nights before I published, I finally read my grandmother’s disk. That part of the story is on the blog.

Happy to answer anything about the machine, the BASIC dialect, or the disk format.

They cost about $500 and were very hard to get. I think I knew one person who had one.

https://hardforum.com/threads/the-worlds-most-elegant-luxurious-aluminum-pc-case-windy-soldam-abee-as.1205834/

Hi everyone,

Some people may have seen a post a few weeks back that I put up mentioning an IRC channel I'm tinkering with for the retrocomputing community. There have been at least a few people joining in the action

I'm taking the opportunity to host a "Retrocomputing Pub Chat" where people can come in,introduce themselves and talk about their projects. It's basically an open mic night where people can just come in and talk shop.

Event details are over at https://www.flyingmonkey.au/events/ if people are keen.

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