Clone Wars: IBM Edition

January 14, 2026 by Al Williams 24 Comments

If you search the Internet for “Clone Wars,” you’ll get a lot of Star Wars-related pages. But the original Clone Wars took place a long time ago in a galaxy much nearer to ours, and it has a lot to do with the computer you are probably using right now to read this. (Well, unless it is a Mac, something ARM-based, or an old retro-rig. I did say probably!)

IBM is a name that, for many years, was synonymous with computers, especially big mainframe computers. However, it didn’t start out that way. IBM originally made mechanical calculators and tabulating machines. That changed in 1952 with the IBM 701, IBM’s first computer that you’d recognize as a computer.

If you weren’t there, it is hard to understand how IBM dominated the computer market in the 1960s and 1970s. Sure, there were others like Univac, Honeywell, and Burroughs. But especially in the United States, IBM was the biggest fish in the pond. At one point, the computer market’s estimated worth was a bit more than $11 billion, and IBM’s five biggest competitors accounted for about $2 billion, with almost all of the rest going to IBM.

So it was somewhat surprising that IBM didn’t roll out the personal computer first, or at least very early. Even companies that made “small” computers for the day, like Digital Equipment Corporation or Data General, weren’t really expecting the truly personal computer. That push came from companies no one had heard of at the time, like MITS, SWTP, IMSAI, and Commodore. Continue reading “Clone Wars: IBM Edition” →

Atari Brings The Computer Age Home

January 13, 2026 by John Elliot V 14 Comments

[The 8-Bit Guy] tells us how 8-bit Atari computers work.

The first Atari came out in 1977, it was originally called the Atari Video Computer System. It was followed two years later, in 1979, by the Atari 400 and Atari 800. The Atari 800 had a music synthesizer, bit-mapped graphics, and sprites which compared favorably to the capabilities of the other systems of the day, known as the Trinity of 1977, being the Apple II, Commodore PET, and TRS-80. [The 8-Bit Guy] says the only real competition in terms of features came from the TI-99/4 which was released around the same time.

The main way to load software into the early Atari 400 and 800 computers was to plug in cartridges. The Atari 400 supported one cartridge and the Atari 800 supported two. The built-in keyboards were pretty terrible by today’s standards, but as [The 8-Bit Guy] points out there wasn’t really any expectations around keyboards back in the late 1970s because everything was new and not many precedents had been set.

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Playing Factorio On A Floppy Disk Cluster

January 13, 2026 by Fenix Guthrie 5 Comments

While a revolutionary storage system for their time, floppy disks are not terribly useful these days. Though high failure rates and slow speeds are an issue, for this project, the key issue is capacity. That’s because [DocJade’s] goal is playing the video game Factorio off floppy disks.

Storing several gigabytes of data on floppy disks is a rather daunting challenge. But instead of using a RAID array, only a single reader and a custom file system is deployed in this setup. A single disk is dedicated to storing pool information allowing for caching of file locations, reducing disk swaps. The file system can also store single files across multiple disks for storage of larger files. Everything mounts in fuse and is loosely POSIX compliment, but lacks some features like permissions and links.

With the data stored across thousands of disks, the user is prompted to insert a new disk when needed. This ends up being the limiting factor in read and write speeds, rather than the famously slow speeds of floppies. In fact, it takes about a week to load all of Factorio in this manner, even after optimizations to reduce disk swaps. Factorio is also one of the few games that could be installed in this manner, as it loads most of the game into memory at launch. Many other games that dynamically load textures and world maps would simply crash when a chunk is not immediately available.

Not a Factorio fan? No worries, you could always install modern Linux on a floppy!

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The ARCTURUS Computer Developed At Sydney University In The 1960s

January 12, 2026 by John Elliot V 5 Comments

[State of Electronics] have released their latest video about ARCTURUS, the 14th video in their series The Computer History of Australia.

ARCTURUS was a research computer system developed on a shoestring budget at Sydney University in the 1960s, and was in service until 1975. Particularly the system was developed by [David Wong] as a part of his PhD thesis: The design and construction of the digital computers snocom, nimbus and arcturus (PDF). [David] worked in collaboration with [Kevin R. Rosolen] who is interviewed in the video.

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A Much Faster Mac On A Microcontroller

January 11, 2026 by Jenny List 6 Comments

Emulating older computers on microcontrollers has been a staple of retrocomputing for many years now, with most 8-bit and some 16-bit machines available on Atmel, ARM, or ESP32 platforms. But there’s always been a horsepower limit, a point beyond which a microcontroller is no longer enough, and a “proper” computer is needed. One of those barriers now appears to have been broken, as microcontroller-based emulation moves into the 32-bit era. [Amcchord] has the Basilisk II emulator ported to the ESP32-P4 platform, providing a 68040 Mac able to run OS8.1. This early-1990s-spec machine might not seem like much in 2026, but it represents a major step forward.

The hardware it uses is the M5Stack Tab5, and it provides an emulated Mac with up to 16 MB of memory. Remember, in 1992 this would have been a high-spec machine. It manages a 15 frames per second refresh rate, which is adequate for productivity applications. The emulator uses the Tab5’s touchscreen to emulate the Mac mouse alongside support for USB input devices. To 1990 hackers, it’s almost the Mac tablet you didn’t know you would want in the future.

We like this project, both because it’s advancing the art of emulation on microcontrollers, and also because it delivers a computer that’s useful for some of the things you might have done with a Mac in 1992 and could even do today. Pulling this out on the train back then would have blown people’s minds. There’s even a chance that MacOS on something like this would turn a few heads in 2026. It’s certainly not the first emulated Mac we’ve seen though.

BASIC Programming With No Strings Attached

January 9, 2026 by John Elliot V 16 Comments

Today in programming language hacks we have string art rendered in BASIC. String art — also known as pin and thread art, or filography — is an art form where images are invoked by thread woven between pins on the border of an image. In this case the thread and the pins are virtual and there is a simple 67 line BASIC program which generates and renders them.

Of course BASIC, the Beginner’s All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code, isn’t just one thing and was a bit of a moving target over the years. Invented in 1964 at Dartmouth College by John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz it turned into a family of languages as a dynamic array of implementations added, removed, and changed implementation details as the future unrolled.

We remember GW-BASIC and QuickBASIC, but the landscape was much broader than that. Implementations of QuickBASIC came with a “compiler”, qb45.exe, which worked by bundling the BASIC script as p-code into an executable along with the runtime binary, which we used back in the day to make “real applications”, not mere scripts.

Thanks to [Keith Olson] for writing in to let us know about this one. If you’re interested in seeing what the state of the art in string art is, be sure to check out String Art Build Uses CNC To Make Stringy Art and CNC Router Frame Repurposed For Colorful String Art Bot. The best string art is in the real world, not software!

Repairing Brittle Plastic Retro Computer Cases

January 8, 2026 by Maya Posch 18 Comments

Using UV resin as glue for new case clips. (Credit: More Fun Making It, YouTube)

As computers like the venerable breadbox Commodore 64 age, their plastic doesn’t just turn increasing shades of yellow and brown, the ABS plastic also tends to get brittle. This is a problem that seems to plague many plastic cases and enclosures, but fortunately there are some ways to halt or even reverse the heavy toll of time, with the [More Fun Making It] YouTube channel exploring a number of methods, including UV-curable resin, PETG 3D-printed clips and silicone molds.

Aside from large-scale damage, screw posts tend to snap off a lot, either during shipping or when merely trying to open the case. The same is true for the clips around the edge of the C64 case, which rarely survive that long. Gluing a case clip back on with epoxy or such somewhat works, but is messy and not that durable.

Instead UV resin is used, together with newly printed clips in translucent PETG. The remnants of the old clips are removed, followed by the application of the resin. The clips are actually a modified version of a VIC-20 case clip design by [Ken Mills]. With the UV resin as glue, curing is almost instant with a UV lamp unlike the tedious process with epoxy.

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