CGA Competitors From The 1980s

December 12, 2022 by Chris Lott 25 Comments

[David Murray], aka The 8-Bit Guy, did an interesting video (embedded below the break) on the time line of PC graphics cards from CGA through to EGA. Not only does he explain the different offerings of the day, but also proceeds to demonstrate most of them.

It’s interesting to learn about some of the video modes that went basically unused in these cards. Even if board designers include high resolution modes and better color palettes, if software programmers don’t use them they are forgotten.

We were particularly impressed by a couple of examples he had that were full-sized, double-stacked ISA cards — those were beasts. Both CGA and EGA sort of withered when the 1990s arrived.

According to [David]’s research, CGA monitors continued to be used for some time even after EGA was introduced — primarily because of cost. It might cost you $400 to get an ATI EGA Wonder card, and that or more for an EGA monitor. Many folks just upgraded the card first, and took advantage of the fact that the EGA Wonder could drive CGA monitors.

If you are interested in the history and technology of these old cards, check out our coverage from 2016 where [David] does a deep dive into CGA cards and discusses, among other things, the CGA composite video mode.

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PDP-8 Plays Period Popcorn Piece

December 11, 2022 by Chris Lott 18 Comments

[Kyle Owen], collector of antique tech, decided to try his hand at music arrangement — for the PDP-8 computer, that is (listen to the video below the break). He’s using a program submitted by Richard Wilson to the Digital Equipment Corporation Users Society (DECUS) in 1976, appropriately named MUSIC. It runs on OS/8 and is written in the PDP-8 assembly language PAL8. Using the syntax of MUSIC, [Kyle] arranged Gershon Kingsley’s famous Moog synthesizer hit “Popcorn” (the Hot Butter version from 1972).

You might notice the lack of a disk or tape drive in his setup. That’s because [Kyle] is using an RK05 disk emulator he wrote back in 2014. It’s running on a Raspberry Pi and connects over serial, which he says is slower than an RK05 but faster than a tape drive. He has connected up a Cordovox amplifier cabinet for this demonstration, but the original means of listening to the MUSIC output was an AM radio held near the computer (hear the second video below the break). This worked by executing the PDP-8 CAF instruction at a desired frequency, say 440 Hz.

Thus, when this instruction is executed, logic all over the computer goes “zap”, clearing out various registers. Now, if a radio is held close to the computer, it will pick up some of this energy, and at 440 times a second, will deliver a pulse to the speaker. The result is that you will hear a tone from the radio — as a matter of fact, you will hear an A.

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Gift Idea From 1969: A Kitchen Computer

December 6, 2022 by Al Williams 51 Comments

The end of the year is often a time for people to exchange presents and — of course — the rich want to buy each other the best presents. The Neiman Marcus company was famous for having a catalog of gift ideas. Many were what you’d consider normal gifts, but there were usually extreme ones, like a tank trunk filled with 100,000 gallons of cologne. One year, the strange gift was an authentic Chinese junk complete with sails and teak decks. They apparently sold three at $11,500 (in 1962 money, no less). Over the top? In 1969, they featured a kitchen computer.

Wait a minute! In 1969, computers were the purview of big companies, universities, and NASA, right? Well, not really. By that time, some industrial minicomputers were not millions of dollars but were still many thousands of dollars. The price in the catalog for the kitchen computer was $10,600. That’s about $86,000 in today’s money. The actual machine was a Honeywell 316, based on one of the computers that helped run the early Internet.

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Dirty TRS-80 Has A Surprise Hack

December 4, 2022 by Al Williams 12 Comments

[Adrian] had a TRS-80 model IV that looks like it was stored in a mulch pile. However, it seemed to have some surprises. The first hint that something was up was that the keyboard looks like a model III and there are two mystery knobs in the back.

So what’s going on? You” have to watch [Adrian’s] video below to find out. At about the six-minute mark, you’ll find that things are not at all what you might think.

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The PalmPilot Returns, This Time In Your Browser

December 4, 2022 by Al Williams 31 Comments

The PalmPilot doesn’t seem to get much retrocomputing love, but maybe it should. After all, it might not have been the very first handheld, but it was probably the most successful, and that ultimately led to the era of the smartphone. Whether you miss your old Palm applications, or never got to experience them the first time around, fear not. You can now relive them in all their glory in your browser thanks to the Internet Archive project.

There are over 500 applications and games all running in a browser-based emulator. Some of the programs don’t seem to work well, and some don’t make sense in the context of a virtual environment. But many work fine, and if you want the classic apps, just open up anything and press the home button. If you want a review of the Palm IIIe PDA from 1999, check out [VWestlife’s] video, below.

The Grafitti handwriting recognition system was state-of-the-art for the day. The key was the system could more easily recognize printing if it were mostly single strokes that always worked the same way. For example, the “A” had no crossbar and the “F” was missing the bottom horizontal line. As much as possible, you make letters with a single stroke and there was only one way to form each letter. Good times!

What was high tech back then you can now build out of spare parts. If you happen to have a Palm, you might consider giving it a much-needed backlight.

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A Cycle-Accurate Intel 8088 Core For All Your Retro PC Needs

December 3, 2022 by Jenny List 17 Comments

A problem faced increasingly by retrocomputer enthusiasts everywhere is the supply of chips. Once a piece of silicon goes out of production its demand can be supplied for a time by old stock and second hand parts, but as they become rare so the cost of what can be dubious parts accelerates out of reach. Happily for CPUs at least, there’s a ray of hope in the form of FPGA-based cores which can replace the real thing, and for early PC owners there’s a new one from [Ted Fried]. MCL86 is a cycle accurate Intel 8088 FPGA Core that can be used within an FPGA design or as a standalone in-circuit replacement for a real 8088. It even has a full-speed mode that sacrifices cycle accuracy and can accelerate those 8088 instructions by 400%.

Reading the posts on his blog, it’s clear that this is a capable design, and it’s even been extended with a mode that adds cache RAM to mirror the system memory at the processor’s speed. You can find all the code in a GitHub repository should you be curious enough to investigate for yourself. We’ve pondered in the past where the x86 single board computers are, perhaps it could be projects like this that provide some of them.

Stack Trace From The 1950s Punches Again

December 2, 2022 by Chris Lott 5 Comments

This repair/tutorial video by the telephone Connections Museum of Seattle features an amazing piece of electro-mechanical technology from the 1950s — the 5XB trouble recorder. Museum volunteer Sarah the “Switch Witch” has a deep passion for old phone equipment, and gives an excellent description of the trouble recorder, the problems it solved, and how it works, and how they went about fixing it.

As central office switching became more complex and more dense, the manual methods of hunting down faults became unmanageable. Semi-automatic approaches using trouble lamps, but even that had its limits. This “stack trace”, which could have hundreds of indicators, had to be frozen while the technician recorded the status on a form. If another fault came along during this time, it was lost. The solution, using the available technology of the day, was a mind-boggling punched card apparatus that punches over a thousand bits of information when an switching error is detected or when various watchdog timers expire.

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