Day: August 22, 2024

Tech In Plain Sight: Speedometers

August 22, 2024 by 29 Comments

In a modern car, your speedometer might look analog, but it is almost certainly digital and driven by the computer that has to monitor all sorts of things anyway. But how did they work before your car was a rolling computer complex? The electronic speedometer has been around for well over a century and, when you think about it, qualifies as a technlogical marvel.

If you already know how they work, this isn’t a fair question. But if you don’t, think about this. Your dashboard has a cable running into it. The inner part of the cable spins at some rate, which is related to either the car’s transmission or a wheel sensor. How do you make a needle deflect based on the speed?

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Running Stock MS-DOS On A Modern ThinkPad

August 22, 2024 by 33 Comments

It might seem like the days of MS-DOS were a lifetime ago because…well, they basically were. Version 6.22 of the venerable operating system, the last standalone release, came out back in 1994. That makes even the most recent version officially 30 years old. A lot has changed in the computing world since that time, so naturally trying to run such an ancient OS on even a half-way modern machine would be a waste of time. Right?

As it turns out, getting MS-DOS 6.22 running on a modern computer isn’t nearly as hard as you’d think. In fact, it works pretty much perfectly. Assuming, that is, you pick the right machine. [Yeo Kheng Meng] recently wrote in to share his experiments with running the final DOS release on his Intel-powered ThinkPad X13 from 2020, and the results are surprising to say the least.

To be clear, we’re not talking about some patched version of DOS here. There’s no emulator at work either. Granted [Yeo] did embrace a few modern conveniences, such as using a USB floppy drive emulator to load the disk images instead of fiddling with actual floppies, and installing DOS onto an external drive so as not to clobber his actual OS on the internal NVME drive. But other than that, the installation of DOS on the ThinkPad went along just as it would have in the 1990s.

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Happy Birthday To Dad, Retrocomputer Style

August 22, 2024 by 3 Comments

For those of us who lived through the early 8-bit computing revolution — the tail end, in our case — it’s hard to believe that there’s a second wave of retrocomputing nostalgia underway. But as this bit-banged TRS-80 birthday bonus pack shows, the first generation did a pretty good job passing the retro torch.

With his father’s 70th birthday coming up and full of “borrowed nostalgia” for the good old days, [Josh Sucher] scored a TRS-80 off eBay and experimented with what could be possible. After 50-odd years, the machine needed a bit of TLC, including a new power supply, some keyboard repairs, and the usual recapping. He also had to soup the machine up a bit, given that its original capabilities were so limited.

Chief among these mods was a rudimentary IP stack thanks to a TRS-IO card, which emulates a lot of functionality of the original TRS-80 Expansion Module and adds an ESP-32 for WiFi capability. This allowed [Josh] to get a neat “Dadbot” chatbot going on the machine, using years of his dad’s text messages to train the model. There’s also a game of Go, an RPG based on his parents’ lives, and a local news and weather app. Most impressive, though, is the bit-banged audio app that uses the TRS-80’s cassette interface to play a passable rendition of “Happy Birthday to You.” The video below has the full demo.

It’s clear that this lengthy project was a labor of love, and we approve of the results. It’s been a long, long time since we first caught wind of the TRS-80 through the Radio Shack catalog, and projects like this make us feel like scratching up one for ourselves to play with.

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