ProtoWeb: Browsing The Information Superhighway Like It’s 1995

July 17, 2025 by John Elliot V 19 Comments

Feeling nostalgic? Weren’t around in the 90s but wonder what it was like? ProtoWeb has you covered! Over on his YouTube channel [RetroTech Chris] shows you how to browse the web like it’s 1995.

The service that [RetroTech Chris] introduces is on the web over here: protoweb.org. The way it works is that you configure your browser to use the service’s proxy server, then the service will be able to intercept your browsing activity and serve you old content from its cache. Also, for some supported sites, you will see present-day content but presented in the format you would have seen in the 90s. Once you have configured your browser to use the ProtoWeb proxy you can navigate to http://www.inode.com/ where you will find a directory listing of sites which have been archived or emulated within the service.

In his video [RetroTech Chris] actually demos some of the old web browsers running on old hardware, which is a very good recreation of what things were like. If you want the most realistic experience you can even configure ProtoWeb to slow down your network connection to the speed of a 56k dial-up modem. There are some things from the 90s that we miss, but waiting for websites to load isn’t one of them!

We had a look in our own archive to see how far back we here at Hackaday could go, and we found our first post, from September 2004: Radioshack Phone Dialer – Red Box. A red box! Spicy.

Continue reading “ProtoWeb: Browsing The Information Superhighway Like It’s 1995” →

Vintage Hardware Find Includes Time Capsule Of Data

July 16, 2025 by Bryan Cockfield 5 Comments

Before social media brought the Internet to the masses, and before even Napster, ICQ, and AIM gave those with a phone line a reason to connect online at all, those who went online often went to a BBS messageboard. By modern standards these text-only environments would have been extremely limited, with only weather updates, stock information, limited news, some email and messaging, and perhaps some classifieds or other miscellaneous information. This was an important time for the early Internet though, and [Nicola] recently discovered a time capsule of sorts from this era.

He first got a tip about a piece of vintage hardware, a DEC VAXstation II which was missing from his collection. But after painstakingly preserving the data on the hard drive he found it had been hosting one of these BBS servers and had plenty of gems from the era to show off. Not only does this build restore the DEC hardware but [Nicola] was able to virtualize the server using the data he recovered on a SIMH emulator, granting insights into how the Internet of this era was used.

[Nicola] also brought the BBS messaging system back online, although he notes that running it on the original hardware wouldn’t be feasible so for now it runs in the cloud. It’s a fascinating look into the Internet of the past, far beyond when many of us first went online as well. For a deep dive on how these systems worked, as well as an introduction to some of the Internet culture of the day, we saw this guide to the BBS a little while ago.

A History Of The Tandy Computers

July 15, 2025 by Al Williams 22 Comments

Radio Shack, despite being gone for a number of years, is still in our cultural consciousness. But do you know Tandy? And did you ever wonder how a leather company that started in 1919 became, briefly, a computer giant? Or even an electronics retailer? [Abort Retry Fail] has the story in three parts, framed with their computers. Well, three parts so far. They are only up to the Tandy 1000.

At first, the company made parts for shoes. But after World War II, they found that catering to leather crafting hobbyists was lucrative. Within a few years, they’d opened stores across the country, making sure that the store managers owned 25% of their stores, even if it meant they had to borrow money from the home office to do so. Meanwhile, Radio Shack was in Boston selling to radio amateurs. By 1935, Radio Shack was a corporation. In 1954, they started selling “Realist” brand equipment, that we would come to know as Realistic.

In 1961, Tandy decided to branch out into other hobby markets, including radio hobbyists. But Radio Shack, dabbling in consumer credit, was sunk with $800,000 of uncollectable consumer credit.

In 1963, Tandy purchased the struggling Radio Shack for $300,000, which was a substantial amount of money in those days. Tandy immediately set about making Radio Shack profitable. Tandy would eventually split into three companies, spinning off its original leather and craft businesses.

Then came computers. If you are at all interested in the history of early computers, the TRS-80, or any of the other Radio Shack computers, you’ll enjoy the story. It wasn’t all smooth sailing. We can’t wait to read part four, although sadly, we know how the story ends.

We don’t just miss the Radio Shack computers. We loved P-Box kits. Yeah, we know someone bought the brand. But if you visit the site, you’ll see it just isn’t the same.

A Chip8 Emulator For 68000-based Macs

July 15, 2025 by Tyler August 22 Comments

Among this crowd, it’s safe to say that the original 68000 Macintosh computers need no introduction, but it’s possible some of you aren’t familiar with Chip8. It was an interpreted virtual machine originally created for the COSMAC VIP microcomputer by [Joe Weisbecker] way back in 1977. It enabled coding simple games on the COSMAC VIP without getting into machine code on the VIP’s CDP1802 processor. For the obvious reason of “Why not?” [KenDesigns] decided to put the two together with Chip4Mac68000, a Chip8 emulator for the original Macintosh.

Chip4Mac68000 is not actually a Macintosh program; it doesn’t run in the System Software. Instead, it is a bootdisk that runs bare-metal on the 68000 processor, bypassing Apple’s ROM completely. Doing that is probably more impressive than emulating Chip8 — anyone who wants to get into writing emulators starts with Chip8. That’s not to knock on anyone who goes to the effort of writing an emulator, it’s just that given its origins in a 1970s micro, it’s understandably a very simple system. Not many people do bare-metal coding on this sort of hardware anymore; it’s not like there’s an SDK you can go grab.

Or there wasn’t, anyway, because in order to get this emulator to work, [KenDesigns] wrote a bare-metal SDK for 68000-based Macs. Note that when he says 68000, he does mean 68000 — anything newer than a Macintosh Classic is out. It’s 68000, not 680xx. It was not a trivial endeavour. In the demo video embedded below, you can see his 512k Macintosh in pieces because he’s been poking at it with a logic analyzer to verify the hardware does what he thinks it’s being told.

If you want to try it out, apparently you don’t need real hardware: [KenDesigns] says MAME is accurate enough to make it all work, but miniVmac is not. No word if it would work on the RP2040-based PicoMac; if you try it, let us know how it works out.

This isn’t the first time we’ve seen people writing new software for old Macs of late. If you’re working new magic on very old machines, drop us a line. We’d love to hear about it.

Continue reading “A Chip8 Emulator For 68000-based Macs” →

Explore The Granddaddy Of All Macs With LisaGUI

July 14, 2025 by Tyler August 23 Comments

Sure, Apple’s Lisa wasn’t the first computer released with a graphical user interface — Xerox was years ahead with the Alto and the Star workstation — but Lisa was the first that came within the reach of mere mortals. Which doesn’t mean many mortals got their hands on one; with only about 10,000 sold, they were never common, and are vanishingly rare nowadays. Enter [Andrew Yaros], who has graced the world with LisaGUI, an in-browser recreation of the Lisa Office System in Javascript.

Lisa’s GUI varies from modern conventions in a few interesting ways. For one, it is much more document-focused: if you double-click on LisaType, you do not start the program. Instead you “tear off” a document from the “pad” icon of LisaType, which you can then open with another double click. The desktop is also not a folder for files to live permanently, but a temporary space. You can “set aside” a file to the desktop, but its home on disk is unchanged.

Unlike the family of Mac emulators, LisaGUI does not purport to be a perfect replica. [Andrew] has made a few quality-of-life improvements for modern users, as well as a few innovations of his own. For instance, menus are now “sticky”– on the Lisa, you had to hold down the mouse to keep them open, and release on the appropriate entry. LisaGUI leaves the menu open for you to click the entry, as on a later Macintosh.

Obviously the menu bar clock and FPS counter are not native to the Lisa; nor is the ability to theme the icons and change (1-bit) colour palettes. The ability to draw unique icons to assign to documents is all [Andrew], but is something we wish we had back in the day. He also makes no attempt to enforce the original aspect ratio, so you’ll be dragging the window to get 4:3 if that’s your jam.

Right now it does not look as though there’s much original software aside from LisaType. We would have loved to see the famous LisaProject, which was the original “killer app” that led NASA to purchase the computer. Still, this is an Alpha and it’s possible more software is to come, if it doesn’t run afoul of Apple’s IP. Certainly we are not looking too hard at this gift horse’s chompers. What’s there is plenty to get a feel for the system, and LisaGUI should be a treat for retrocomputer enthusiasts who aren’t too anal about period-perfect accuracy.

We stumbled across this one in a video from [Action Retro] in which he (the lucky dog) also shows off his Lisa II, the slightly-more-common successor.

Get Roped Into Magnetic Core Memory With This 512 Bit Module

July 11, 2025 by Tyler August 19 Comments

Magnetic Core memory was the RAM at the heart of many computer systems through the 1970s, and is undergoing something of a resurgence today since it is easiest form of memory for an enterprising hacker to DIY. [Han] has an excellent writeup that goes deep in the best-practices of how to wire up core memory, that pairs with his 512-bit MagneticCoreMemoryController on GitHub.

Magnetic core memory works by storing data inside the magnetic flux of a ferrite ‘core’. Magnetize it in one direction, you have a 1; the other is a 0. Sensing is current-based, and erases the existing value, requiring a read-rewrite circuit. You want the gory details? Check out [Han]’s writeup; he explains it better than we can, complete with how to wire the ferrites and oscilloscope traces to explain why you want to wiring them that way. It may be the most complete design brief to be written about magnetic core memory to be written this decade.

This little memory pack [Han] built with this information is rock-solid: it ran for 24 hours straight, undergoing multiple continuous memory tests — a total of several gigabytes of information, with zero errors. That was always the strength of ferrite memory, though, along with the fact you can lose power and keep your data. In in the retrocomputer world, 512 bits doesn’t seem like much, but it’s enough to play with. We’ve even featured smaller magnetic core modules, like the Core 64. (No prize if you guess how many bits that is.) One could be excused for considering them toys; in the old days, you’d have had cabinets full of these sorts of hand-wound memory cards.

Magnetic core memory should not be confused with core-rope memory, which was a ROM solution of similar vintage. The legendary Apollo Guidance Computer used both.

We’d love to see a hack that makes real use of these pre-modern memory modality– if you know of one, send in a tip.

Four brown perf board circuits are visible in the foreground, each populated with many large DIP integrated circuits. The boards are connected with grey ribbon cable. Behind the boards a vacuum fluorescent display shows the words “DIY CPU.”

Designing A CPU With Only Memory Chips

July 11, 2025 by Aaron Beckendorf 14 Comments

Building a simple 8-bit computer is a great way to understand computing fundamentals, but there’s only so much you can learn by building a system around an existing processor. If you want to learn more, you’ll have to go further and build the CPU yourself, as [MINT] demonstrated with his EPROMINT project (video in Polish, but with English subtitles).

The CPU began when [MINT] began experimenting with uses for his collection of old memory chips, and quickly realized that they could do quite a bit more than store data. After building a development board for single-chip based programmable logic, he decided to build a full CPU out of (E)EPROMs. The resulting circuit spans four large pieces of perfboard, weighs in at over half a kilogram, and took several weeks of soldering to create. Continue reading “Designing A CPU With Only Memory Chips” →