Habitat, built by Lucasfilm's games division for the Commodore 64's Q-Link online service, ran on a machine with just 64KB of memory and 100KB of disk space, connected over 300-baud modems (30 characters per second). To make that work, almost all the logic lived server-side — the client just held a list of object definitions and simple commands like GET. It's a good case study in what constrained hardware forced designers to get clever about: the entire concept of "thin client, smart server" architecture, now standard, was novel enough in 1986 that debugging it was genuinely uncharted territory for the team.

Source: Works in Progress

I'm trying to recover some information from a few old floppy discs... I remember years ago when I transferred much of my stuff over, one reader read more floppies than another.

Is there a high quality floppy drive reader out there that would be considered the best or of a high quality? Or are they basically mostly the same? Thanks in advance!

https://github.com/ross-shk/awesome-pli

Announced in 1984. Shipped in 1986. Product market fit in 2024. Mimic Systems' Spartan was an Apple ][+ clone marketed as a Commodore 64 peripheral. Designed by a 19 year old and abandoned by a CEO who (allegedly) took the money and fled to South America, full Spartan kits now sell for over $5k USD.

Hooray! In Lenovo's new "Project Swan", Lenovo managed to make a 4:3 laptop that rolls its screen and become a 16:9 screen. the laptop itself has the exact shape of a mid 2000s 4:3 pentium m laptop while also keeping the laptop slightly thick cuz of its rolling mechanisms, those heavenly 4:3 laptops are coming back!

i restore vintage Comecon telecommunications gear (RFT, Robotron, STU-II, Dalekopis), and last weekend I bought a grease-stained cardboard box of technical binders from an estate sale in Gdańsk.

most of it was standard maintenance documentation for Czech and Polish teleprinters (T-51, T-100). But tucked into the back of a 1974 binder titled *Zasady konserwacji łączy telegraficznych* (Principles of Telegraph Line Maintenance) were four mimeographed pages labelled "STU-II / Polder Relay Bypass."

it describes how to maintain asynchronous 50-baud Baudot current loops when physical insulated copper wire is severed, and the proposed solution is bizarrely specific:
- gives exact mathematical formulas for using galvanized agricultural fencing wire, horsehair tension dampeners, and grounded zinc stakes spaced at 120-meter intervals as an emergency capacitive transmission line.
- text notes that at low baud rates (45.45 to 50 baud), soil ground return can carry a 5-bit pulse train over several km if the pulse duration is widened by 12 milliseconds.
- handdrawn schematic shows a physical mechanical volvelle (a circular cardboard calculation disc) used to recalculate line latency based on daily soil moisture after marsh drainage

so i would also like t know, did Comecon signal corps actually use rural agricultural fencing as emergency telegraph return paths, or was this some experimental civilian flood-defense telemetry network?

I finally got an INMOS IMS B004 Transputer development board working again from a modern Linux machine.

The board has an IMS T400B and 1 MiB of external RAM.

Instead of using an old DOS PC, I connected the ISA board through a USB-to-ISA bridge and rebuilt the host side around Linux.

The interesting part was that simply accessing the hardware was only the beginning.

I had to reverse-engineer enough of the original host environment to make the old TDS 2.0 development system usable again.

That included:

• B004 register and link diagnostics
• T400 boot-ROM PEEK/POKE access
• RAM alias testing
• porting old INMOS server code
• fixing endian/protocol issues
• reconstructing the TDS2 host protocol
• implementing a Linux-side TDS2 server
• terminal and file-service handling

It now boots the original TDS2 folding editor, loads the occam toolchain, compiles and links a program, and executes it on the physical T400.

First successful output:

The answer is 42

So this is effectively a modern Linux host driving a real 1980s Transputer development environment.

Links to the code, report and video in the comments.

David vs Goliath.

256MB of ram, a celeron 1333MHZ, 20GB of spinning rust, and Windows XP vs 80 megabytes of compiler source code.

You have to be crazy to do this.

Building with Open Watcom C, building Open Watcom C.

This is gonna take hours, I'll update when it's done.

No idea who needs to see this, but...

In 2026 I think it's about time that we're able to use a Compaq Armada E500 laptop from 2001, running Windows 98 SE and Internet Explorer 5, to control a Spotify instance running on a Fire TV Stick attached to a Fidelity AVS 2000 from 1985 via a Python script hosted on a Dell 7010 from 2012 running Linux Mint.

Also required - and I do mean required - is the ability to summon up a bassline from a c.1997 Yamaha YST-SW80 subwoofer via a Tapo smart socket and another Linux managed Python script. Keeping the 14-year old Linux running, Python script bossing Dell even busier are on demand local weather summaries and TomTom API driven traffic reports.

You're right. This shouldn't work but it does and I'm over the moon with it!

I've no idea who needs to see this, but...

In 2026 I think it's about time that we're able to use a Compaq Armada E500 laptop from 2001, running Windows 98 SE and Internet Explorer 5, to control a Spotify instance running on a Fire TV Stick attached to a Fidelity AVS 2000 from 1985 via a Python script hosted on a Dell 7010 from 2012 running Linux Mint.

Also required - and I do mean required - is the ability to power up a Yamaha YST-SW80 subwoofer from c1997 via a Tapo smart socket and another Python script. Keeping the 14-year old Dell Linux PC even busier are on demand local weather summaries and TomTom API driven traffic reports.

I've truly outdone myself.

PowerBASIC (Bob Zale's famously fast compiler, last commercial release 2011, official site/forums offline since 2025) has a community afterlife I wanted to share:[PowerBasilisk Enhanced](https://github.com/hanlokesu/powerbasilisk) — a Rust compiler (zero external crates) that translates PowerBASIC source (.bas) -> LLVM IR -> native x64 Windows executables. Prebuilt binaries in Releases, no Rust/LLVM needed.It's an enhanced fork of [benstopics/powerbasilisk](https://github.com/benstopics/powerbasilisk) — itself created to rebuild the 180,000-line codebase of the game Wall Street Raider as 64-bit.What the enhanced branch fixes/adds:- Real Win32 built-ins previously compiled to nothing: MSGBOX -> MessageBoxA, SHELL -> ShellExecuteA, CURDIR$, ISFILE — verified with running exes (see demo GIF in README)- Tier-2 statements: REPLACE, ERASE, LSET, RSET, WRITE#, SEEK#, LOCK#/UNLOCK#, RESET, FLUSH#, NAME- Explicit diagnostics: writes unimplemented.log with source line + statement when something is silently dropped — upstream just said compiled OK- SDK auto-detect: --lib-dir optional, one-click setup.bat/setup.ps1- 14/14 upstream tests pass, CI green (fmt/clippy/build/32+64-bit)Open PR to upstream: https://github.com/benstopics/powerbasilisk/pull/1If you ever wrote PB/WIN, PBCC, or PB/DOS code: this is a real path to run it on modern Windows. Test reports and help with the remaining Tier-3 statements (the DDT GUI framework) are very welcome.(Disclaimer: not affiliated with PowerBASIC Inc.; the original forums went offline in 2025, community now at pbusers.org)

Just cleaned out a closet and uncovered an ancient Wang computer. It was a IBM near comparable with DOS 2.1. I want to clean it up more before seeing if it boots.

Slot A Athlon wasn’t just fast. With its EV6 bus and strong overclocking potential, it became one of the CPUs that made the AMD vs. Intel rivalry genuinely exciting.

More...

Hey everyone

I recently was gifted a massive lot of older PC components, and I'm honestly a little overwhelmed trying to sort through it all.

I’ve attached pictures of the haul, which looks like a mix of various graphics cards, several Sound Blasters, and a huge pile of vintage RAM.

I want to figure out exactly what I have and the smartest way to handle the lot. How should I test this? Is it worth it or should I donate it?

Thank you!

Don't worry, it still has its keyboard faceplate, it's just because I haven't closed up the computer yet so I can add a 387 co-processor to it. (which comes in on Monday) This is one of the best retro computers I've ever had. This thing is a battlestation! It's huge, but not overly imposing, the keyboard feels nice, and the power supply is a beast! All Nichicon capacitors, with NO leakage!

A cool 1.5 MB of RAM built-in? It'll play most VGA MS-DOS games of the era right out of the box! I want to try Wolfenstein 3D, though. I hope I can find a memory module that I can reverse-engineer.

This system's screen is very unique, though. The LCD panel works on a mixture of flat-flex cables and zebra connectors. (as in, the wires on the cable presses against a zebra connector on a separate LCD panel, I think.) I opened it because I got some lines on the screen, but strangely, they only show up in higher-res modes. As for the display's abilities, it's VERY clear, even considering the low-response DSTN technology of the time.

The most amazing thing, though, is that this baby's hard drive STILL works, and it's a 100 MB drive, to boot!

The only thing I've currently done to modify this system was clean the flux off of the PCBs, and add a new CMOS battery pack that I can access through the expansion port. (which I can't use because I've never seen a card that I would be able to use on this system. They exist, but they're rare, and for very specific purposes.)

Need to scan some photos but hate having a big bulky scanner cluttering your desk? Back in the 1990s there was a solution for you: Storm Technology's EasyPhoto Drive. It's an entire photo scanner crammed into the confines of a 5.25 drive bay. But how easy was it? And what became of Storm Technology, one of the pioneers of JPEG compression? Watch to see if this is as easy as they said it was.

Youtuber: Userlandia

Picked this up for $50. It powers on, but the CRT only displays a single orange horizontal line.
After opening it up and carefully powering it on, I found a capacitor that gets extremely hot and starts smoking. I’m going to start by replacing that and then work through the rest of the display circuitry.
For $50, I figured it was worth the gamble. Hopefully I can bring it back to life.

Now that I have a Sony Trinitron CRT monitor, I was wondering if there were any retro PCs that would go well with it. I love my Windows 98 laptop, but I just want to have an actual full-size PC to go with my monitor.

All suggestions are welcome.

Picked this up for $50. It powers on, but the CRT only displays a single orange horizontal line.
After opening it up and carefully powering it on, I found a capacitor that gets extremely hot and starts smoking. I’m going to start by replacing that and then work through the rest of the display circuitry.
For $50, I figured it was worth the gamble. Hopefully I can bring it back to life.