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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Historical Microsoft And Apple Artifacts Among First Christie’s Auction Of Living Computers Museum

August 19, 2024 by 9 Comments

Recently the Christie’s auction house released the list of items that would be going up for sale as part of the first lot of Living Computer Museum items, under the banner “Gen One: Innovations from the Paul G. Allen Collection”. One auction covers many ‘firsts’ in the history of computing,  including a range of computers like an Apple 1, and a PDP-10, as well as early Microsoft memos and code printouts. The other auctions include such items like a Gemini Spacesuit as worn by [Ed White] and a signed 1939 letter from [Albert Einstein] to [US President Roosevelt] on the discovery by the Germans of a fissionable form of uranium from which a nuclear weapon could be constructed.

We previously reported on this auction when it was first announced in June of this year. At the time many were saddened at seeing the only computer history and its related educational facilities vanish, and there were worries among those who had donated items to the museum what would happen to these now that the museum’s inventory was being put up for sale. As these donations tend to be unconditional, the museum is free to do with the item as they see fit, but ‘being sold at auction’ to probably a private collector was likely not on their mind when filling in the donation form.

As the first auctions kick off in a few days we will just have to wait and see where the museum’s inventory ends up at, but it seems likely that many of these items which were publicly viewable will now be scattered across the globe in private collections.

Top image: A roughly 180° panorama of the “conditioned” room of the Living Computer Museum, Seattle, Washington, USA. Taken in 2014. (Credit: Joe Mabel)

Rebuilding The First Digital Personal Computer

August 16, 2024 by 15 Comments

When thinking of the first PCs, most of us might imagine something like the Apple I or the TRS-80. But even before that, there were a set of computers that often had no keyboard, or recognizable display beyond a few blinking lights. [Artem Kalinchuk] is attempting to recreate one of these very early digital computers, the Kenbak-1, using as many period-correct parts as possible.

Considered by many to be the world’s first personal computer, the Kenbak-1 was an 8-bit machine with 256 bytes of memory, using TTL integrated circuits for the logic as there was no commercially available microprocessor available at the time it was designed. For [Artem]’s build, most of these parts can still be sourced including the 7400-series chips and carbon resistors although the shift registers were a bit of a challenge to find. A custom PCB was built to replicate the original, and with all the parts in order it’s ready to be assembled and put into a case which was built using the drawings for the original unit.

Although [Artem] plans to build a period-correct linear power supply for this computer, right now he’s using a modern switching power supply for testing. The only other major components that are different are the status lamps, in this case switched to LEDs because he wasn’t able to source incandescent bulbs that drew low enough current, and the switches which he’s replaced with MX-style keys. We’ll stay tuned as he builds and tests this over the course of several videos, but in the meantime if you’re curious how this early computer actually worked we featured an emulator for it a while back.

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Apollo Computer: The Forgotten Workstations

August 4, 2024 by 26 Comments

Ever heard of Apollo Computer, Inc.? They were one of the first graphical workstation vendors in the 1980s, and at the time were competitors to Sun Microsystems.

But that’s enough dry historical context. Feast your eyes on this full-color, 26-page product brochure straight from 1988 for the Series 10000 “Personal Supercomputer” featuring multiple processors and more! It’s loaded with information about their hardware and design architecture, giving a unique glimpse into just how Apollo was positioning their offerings, and the markets they were targeting with their products.

Apollo produced their own hardware and software, which meant much of it was proprietary. Whatever happened to Apollo? They were acquired by Hewlett-Packard in 1989 and eventually shuttered over the following decade or so. Find yourself intrigued? [Jim Rees] of The Apollo Archive should be your next stop for everything Apollo-oriented.

Vintage computing has a real charm of its own, but no hardware lasts forever. Who knows? Perhaps we might someday see an Apollo workstation brought to life in VR, like we have with the Commodore 64 or the BBC Micro (which even went so far as to sample the sound of authentic keystrokes. Now that’s dedication.)

PC-9800 Boot Sounds For Modern Computers!

August 4, 2024 by 24 Comments

There have been many computers that played a little jingle to greet you upon booting. The NEC PC-9800 is a famous example, though almost all the Macintosh computers played either the soothing “booting” chord or sometimes the Sad Mac “error” chord. And of course, consoles have long played music on startup, with the original PlayStation boot music heralding a whole new era of video games. But modern machines don’t do anything, except maybe a single beep if you’re lucky. So why not pop in this M.2 card (JP) and bring some quirky flair to your PC?

While this particular card is aimed at the Japanese market and specifically evokes the PC-9800, we hope to see some hackers creating projects bringing other custom boot sounds to laptops and PCs around the rest of the world! A simple microcontroller, DAC, speaker and flash storage for the waveform would be all that’s required. It could even be capacitively coupled into the system’s sound output for some extra nerd points. You could pull the ultimate prank and have your friend’s laptop play the opening notes to “Never Gonna Give You Up” upon boot. Or you could have your favourite hacker movie quote play – “I can trace her physical location by looking at the binary!”. Brilliant!

In the meantime, if you want one of these cards, you’ll likely have to use a Japanese mail forwarding service as the cards are only available from Japanese retailer Kadenken — though for only ¥2880, or just under $20 USD, which is a great deal.

[via Techspot]

Steamdeck motherboard standing upright propped onto a USB-C dock it's wired up to, showing just how little you need to make the steamdeck board work.

Steam Deck, Or Single Board Computer?

August 3, 2024 by 8 Comments

With a number of repair-friendly companies entering the scene, we have gained motivation to dig deeper into devices they build, repurpose them in ways yet unseen, and uncover their secrets. One such secret was recently discovered by [Ayeitsyaboii] on Reddit – turns out, you can use the Steam Deck mainboard as a standalone CPU board for your device, no other parts required aside from cooling.

All you need is a USB-C dock with charging input and USB/video outputs, and you’re set – it doesn’t even need a battery plugged in. In essence, a Steam Deck motherboard is a small computer module with a Ryzen CPU and a hefty GPU! Add a battery if you want it to work in UPS mode, put an SSD or even an external GPU into the M.2 port, attach WiFi antennas for wireless connectivity – there’s a wide range of projects you can build.

Each such finding brings us closer to the future of purple neon lights, where hackers spend their evenings rearranging off-the-shelf devices into gadgets yet unseen. Of course, there’s companies that explicitly want us to hack their devices in such a manner – it’s a bet that Framework made to gain a strong foothold in the hacker community, for instance. This degree of openness is becoming a welcome trend, and it feels like we’re only starting to explore everything we can build – for now, if your Framework’s or SteamDeck’s screen breaks, you always have the option to build something cool with it.

[Via Dexerto]

Homebrew Relay Computer Features Motorized Clock

August 3, 2024 by 7 Comments

Before today, we probably would have said that scratch-built relay computers were the sole domain of only the most wizardly of graybeards. But this impressive build sent in by [Will Dana] shows that not only are there young hardware hackers out there that are still bold enough to leave the transistor behind, but that they can help communicate how core computing concepts can be implemented with a bundle of wires and switches.

Created for his YouTube channel WillsBuilds, every component of this computer was built by [Will] himself. Each of the nine relay-packed protoboards inside the machine took hours to solder, and when that was done, he went out to the garage to start cutting the wood that would become the cabinet they all get mounted in.

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