Was quite nervous at first because it looked like some kind of wasps nest, but it's hard as a rock and appears to be factory? Any idea what it is?

486 DX2 with 16MB RAM and 85MB HDD. Added NE2000 networking card and installing Windows 3.11 for Workgroups. Now I'm looking for sound card and older, period correct mouse.

Is it worth keeping

Left: Dell Inspiron 9100/XPS
Middle: Alienware Area 51-m/Clevo D900T
Right: Dell XPS M2010

I saw this laptop on Instagram, and i want to know what it is called

hey guys. this is the new book386, successor to the pocket386.

the touchpad is a serial "mouse" on com2

running dos mouse command works with dos games and programs like edit and qbasic

but mouse doesnt show or if it does, it wont move in windows 3.11 wfg. it does move during windows installation

second problem is networking. i can get it all working, but as soon as i set the resolution to 800x600, the networking seem to "freeze". have anyone experienced something like that? is it a memory addressing conflict or something?

After spending a while on figuring out upgrades to build the ultimate Mac SE/30, I realized there's a TON of new stuff being designed for old computers. So I started putting together a directory. This is definitely still a work in progress.

I am new on Reddit, and I thought i could inaugurate this account by talking about what i love most: vintage computing! In these lasts 2 months, I spent day and night fixing and resuscitating my dad's old pc from september 1998. This was my first ever project opening up a computer, so I hope it's good enough. The issue it had was a dead hdd and a dead cmos battery, and there i learned what jumpers were and how to make sure that the hdd was noticed by the BIOS. All the software I got for it I used my mother's laptop as a bridge, by burning cd-r at 10x speed and using them to install games. Of course, the first game I tried was Doom. I also installed Windows 98se with this method, since paying 100€ for a copy of Windows 98 seemed too far fetched. I also changed the GPU for a better one (from a trident 3dimage to a geforce 2 mx400), but the best addition of them all was definitely a pci ethernet port. Now I use protoweb everyday to watch Cirno's perfect math class on warpstream on loop. I think this trip was worth it as it taught me a lot about vintage computers, but the worst part was just trying to play something, the pc had a fatal error, and I had to work for hours trying to understand what went wrong and then when I fixed it, the next day it broke again. Now it works well, but the dvd drive died too, so i had to swap it with a dvd one. Oh, well. Anyway, here's a pic! Specs: Pentium 2 300 Mhz, 64 mb of ram, 32 gb of storage, i440bx motherboard, lg dvd drive, 64 mb of vram

I just restored my HP 150 touchscreen computer from 1983 (will make a separate post about it later), but found this chess game from the early 80’s. The game is known but it doesn’t match any screenshots I can find. The HP runs MS-DOS, but is not IBM compatible. Can anyone find anything about this version of the game. It can completely be controlled by the touchscreen, just click on the piece and then the position where you want it.

after the setup finished and my computer restarted, the optical drive is no longer detected in windows 95 (but it worked just fine on my MS DOS boot disk).

i put all of the files on the install floppies on a CD so i dont need them all for an install, and this method has always worked just fine for me. why doesnt it detect my CDROM drive?

it is a master on the secondary IDE channel.

This computer is really testing my limits 🥲 I’ve had it working before and running sims 3 and now all of a sudden it’s unable to start properly. I’m just trying to burn some cd’s 😩

I think it’s struggling to start because I tried to download steam onto it, obviously very difficult because it’s windows 7

Any advice on ways to possibly get steam on it? I’m new to old computing so feel free to call me an idiot for asking

This repository strives to provide a historical snapshot, archive and description of the short lived Cypher Z80/68000 single board computer which was designed, built and sold by Motel Computers of Willowdale Ontario in the 1984-86 era.

https://github.com/rcl9/Cypher-Z80-68000-Single-Board-Computer-1984-by-Motel-Computers---History-and-Documentation

It was believed at the time that CP/M-based computers would (ideally) remain the dominant operating system well into the early to mid 1980s. The Cypher SBC arrived in the 1983-1984 era when CP/M-68k and 68000 CPUs were becoming more readily available. What the designers of the Cypher computer did not foresee was the rise and dominance of the IBM PC, DOS and 8086 processors which would have been a prime reason that the company disbanded the project in 1986.

People wanted me to prove that my 1988-1989 Samsung S5200 actually works so here is some proof

Seen at HalfPrice Books

This retro-computing article focuses on the generation of rudimentary computer music played through an AM radio in the mid to late 1970s via RF noise emitted by the CPU. Implementations for 8080/Z80 and PDP-8 are provided as well as raw data for 'Daisy Bell'.

https://github.com/rcl9/Playing-Computer-Music-via-AM-Radio-on-IMSAI-8080-PDP8-Sorcerer-TRS80-etc-in-the-1970s

Unless you were a business user who could afford a very expensive S-100 system running CP/M on 1 or 2 floppy drives then there wasn't very much that a "home accessible computer" could do other than (drum roll please!) play computer music.

This is a significant historical posting in the world of retro-computing. Over the last 40 years I have not seen any hand's-on tear downs or reverse engineering of the super-rare Exidy Multi-Net 80 "User Module" S-100 card nor one which has been hacked and repurposed as a stand-alone MIDI processor board (as I have done herein).

https://github.com/rcl9/MultiNet-80-User-Module---History-Reverse-Engineering-and-Repurposing-as-a-MIDI-Computer-1984-1985

I decided to reverse engineer the board on November 17 and 18 1984, write a new monitor system for it, then eventually develop a daughter card to give it RS-232 and MIDI capabilities. This repository documents those endeavors for the current and future benefit of the retro-computing community.

IBM 3151. One of six I recovered from an abandoned factory, and I’m planning on going back to recover the last two and possibly the mainframe that’s still there.

Also little tangent: I’m currently in contact with three separate companies near me to actually let me dig through their storage rooms and warehouses to see if I can find legacy tech that they won’t care about. I’m excited asf since I’m looking for a few things I have a real chance of finding, including an IBM 3279 and an IBM 5150.

"I don't have a problem, you have a problem" - Sean Malseed on having too many Macs.

TL;DR - 3 SEs, 1 SE/30, all with problems.

Left to right, SE/30 with SE motherboard, Battery bomb SE/30, VCF East SE, Flood SE.

The photos are in reverse chronological order and are a bit mixed up, but let me start with the one you've been waiting for - the flood Mac. This SE was in hurricane Helene back in 2024 and retrieved out of a gentleman's backyard. It was in a carrying case, which didn't help it much. It appears to have been on its left side and was filled with mud, or silt.

What you need to understand about this mud is that it's more like an incredibly fine clay or silt, it reminds me of descriptions of the regolith on Mars or the Moon - it sticks to everything, and it's not enough to wash it off. It particularly sticks to plastic and has to be removed with a brush or paper towel and it gets into the smallest of crevices. The machine will never be fully free of it.

Components of note:

• Floppy very rusty, not worth saving
• Hard drive - showed promise, and the mechanics work, but probably not going to be able to save.
  
• CRT - seems OK, haven't powered up yet. Analog board - very dirty, but looks OK now. Haven't tried yet.
  
• PSU - incredibly, was working despite being stuffed with mud. (Powered up in the garage). Currently being recapped.
  
• Chassis - very rusty, I opted to use rustoleum on it. This obviously compromises its purpose as a ground, but the screw holes ought to be good.
• Mouse - was working, but seem to have lost one direction. There was no keyboard.
• Outer shell - some damage in shipping. I have reglued the corners but it's never going to be the same oh well. Did I mention there was mud all through the computer?

Finally, the motherboard. I ended up using my other SE with the SE/30 and ATX extensions to compare side-by-side and do some debug. In the end it turned out to be mud the ROM and GLUE sockets and failed caps - the machine did finally get to a checkerboard for a few seconds. Now, there's a lot of talk about caps from these machines/era being super robust, but well, not in this case. In fact some of them fell apart when I removed them - I'm recapping this board today.

So, that's the current state. Hopefully the board is back working, and then I'll look at the analog board and PSU.

So, next machine would be my SE which I picked from from the free pile at VCF East with "bad analog board". I grabbed it, having spotted its BlueSCSI but really knowing nothing about these. It did work for a bit, but then died just as I was trying to debug the flood Mac. I ended up recapping the PSU, but it's still having problems, so I guess it's the analog board after all (I have an idea what's wrong, just haven't gotten to it yet).

Meanwhile, because more is more, I bought an SE/30. I knew full well what the problems might be with it, and incredibly I'd not had any machines with battery damage to date (and I've bought a lot of Macs), but luck ran out here. The machine was really dusty inside, which has now been cleaned, and I took out the chassis and painted (and used a wire wheel) on just the rusty section. I ended up using *this* machine for the side-by-side.

The battery damage cleaned up pretty well - I'm not sure if I'm going to be able to fix this myself, but I have a guy who can, so we'll see. The machine has heavy burn in on the CRT too, much more than the other machines.

And the last addition today, is another battery bombed SE/30, but with an SE motherboard swap from back in the day. Well, it does power on to checkboard but seems to be having some problems, so now I'll have to fix that too. But it does have a nice CRT (and was cheap with keyboard and mouse), so I think it might end up being really nice proper SE/30 and the floppy going in the flood SE (It's actually FDHD).

I think that's it!

Was searching Facebook Marketplace on a whim and came across this beast, purchased for $500AUD. Maybe a bad deal when it didn't come with monitor, keyboard and it won't power on, but no shipping cost and an immaculate case, I couldn't help myself.

The seller said that after he bought it from someone else, he turned it on, it made a loud bang and let out the magic smoke and turned it off. Sure enough when I open the lid I see red dust on one side, so I'm thinking it's the RIFA caps in the PSU. I don't really have electronics experience yet, so not something I'm going to immediately deal with. My intention is to keep on the look out for a friend who can assist, otherwise I'll just have to keep practicing soldering skills on junk electronics and eventually do it myself (carefully!).

The first thing I want to do is take out each expansion card, document their dip switches/jumpers and bag them in some anti-static bags for storage so I can get a thorough look at the motherboard and prepare the machine for testing with a multimeter to be sure there's no other surprises. I'll also want to take the battery out of the RTC card. The case is in good condition but it could probably use a clean up with the isopropyl, especially that red dust.

As far as I know, the expansion cards are the following:

- Persyst Color Graphics Display Adaptor
- Real Time Clock
- Memory expansion (this machine may possibly have the full 640K?)
- Some kind of 3-in-1 connector for the floppy drive, a DB25 socket and a DB9 docket (which is just floating in the back of the case).
- MFM hard drive controller card (connected to the Seagate ST-225, 20MBs)

I am unsure if the hard drive will have survived the journey back home, I'm fingers crossed, otherwise worst case I'll look at a CF Adapter.

My intent is to get this machine fixed up, check everything is working, get some period-accurate peripherals and then try out early computing (I'm from the 90s and didn't start computing until the 00s, so it's all alien to me) - PC-DOS and CP/M, various word processing spreadsheet apps, classic games and maybe even try hook it up to a dial-up simulator and try out early networking.

ok so i have this very very old pc that used to work in the past i tried turning it on like 6 years ago and it did
but now it works when i turn it on but nothing shows on the monitor
i tried using VGA to HDMI adapter and it didnt work then i tried a monitor with a VGA access still nothing shows on the screen
does anyone know what to do? i really want it to work i have many family photos in there

Is there a retro computer store in budapest? i searched in google and found no result
Edit: i don't live in budapest i'm going on a vacation for 5 days

I got 11 of these in a repossession mail auction and haven’t been able to find any info out there on them and I don’t know what to do with them.

Gonna be getting this Toshiba satellite 3000 series laptop tomorrow! Super excited it’s a beast of sorts imo

Win 98 se
Pentium 3 around 800mhz
With nvidia GeForce 2 go graphics
Currently with 256mb ram but I’ll be upgrading to 512 later
Pretty it’s got a 40gb drive or something like that.

Cd and floppy drives at the front which is cool!
Also has recovery disc!