Hackaday Retro Edition Roundup

It’s time for another update chronicling the adventures and misadventures of getting really old computers to load our retro edition!

First up is [Andrew Hull] and his brilliant use of a Raspberry Pi to get an old Psion 5mx PDA on the Internet. The Raspi served as a wireless bridge, taking in Internet from a WiFi dongle and sending it back out via a serial port. Here’s a great guide for enabling PPPD on the Raspi, and giving just about anything with a serial port an Internet connection.

It may push the limits of being a retro submission, but [Glen]’s use of a modem to get on the Internet calls to us like a siren song.

Did you know Corel made computers? Well, [Victor] has one, and it’s actually a pretty interesting machine. ARM processor, an actual hard drive, and dual Ethernet ports. It was built in the late 90s and the hard drive has since died, but [Victor] booted it into Red Hat over his network and loaded up our retro site.

Finally, we come to [Greg]’s submission. He could have sent in a Mac SE/30 submission, but figured that was old hat (do you see one on there, [Greg]. No. And it’s the best computer Apple will ever make). Instead, he had an old Powerbook Duo 2300c with a Duo 230 screen lying around.

Powerbook Duos are pretty weird; they only had two ports – a single DIN-8 serial port and a dock connector. [Greg] had a Powerbook Duo dock that surprisingly had an Ethernet port. Third-party peripherals to the rescue, it seems. After plugging his Duo to his network and launching iCab, [Greg] was able to browse both the retro and main Hackaday editions. Picture Not bad for the smallest laptop Apple made before the Air.

Oh, [Greg] was also cool enough to write a tutorial for getting just about every Macintosh on the Internet. We’ve put that up on the retrocomputing guide portion of our retro site, and we’re always looking for new submissions.

You can check out the pics from all these submissions in a Web 2.0 WordPress gallery after the break, or head on over to the retro site and view them the way the gods of HTML intended.

[slideshow]

13 thoughts on “Hackaday Retro Edition Roundup

  1. Brainstorming here…what if someone were to set up a BBS, upload JPGs of HaD pages, and then use an ancient machine to physically dial into the BBS and download and display the page images? Would that count?

      1. Yes they did. Admittedly it was an aaui port, so it didn’t look like an ethernet port and you needed a dongle to connect it, but all the duo docks had ethernet.

        Yes, I have one in front of me…

    1. Apple Duo MiniDocks don’t have them. The full size Duo Dock can have them but they are preposterously large. The only Duo “MiniDock” that has an Ethernet port is a eMachines EtherDock, which is not compatible with the Duo 2300c. It is better to hunt for a MiniDock or something with Ethernet because the Duos are practically useless without a dock.

      Otherwise, you can get one of those hard to find UltraDock 16sce models (the 16sc has a RJ11 jack) or a EtherDock. It is just like a Duo floppy micro dock except it has an Ethernet port. Haven’t seen many of those floating around.

  2. maybe H.A.D. could serve-up a BBS access number for people that arent reading this right now lmao … cuz they cant yet read the http

    lol just kidding, seriously, i’d check it out!
    any chance of getting a TTY->BBS bridge so we can “browse” H.A.D. from a payphone with TTY keyboard??? lol that’d be SWEEEET

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