Ceefax: The Original News On Demand

September 30, 2024 by Heidi Ulrich 21 Comments

Long before we had internet newsfeeds or Twitter, Ceefax delivered up-to-the-minute news right to your television screen. Launched by the BBC in 1974, Ceefax was the world’s first teletext service, offering millions of viewers a mix of news, sports, weather, and entertainment on demand. Fast forward 50 years, and the iconic service is being honored with a special exhibition at the Centre for Computing History in Cambridge.

At its peak, Ceefax reached over 22 million users. [Ian Morton-Smith], one of Ceefax’s original journalists, remembers the thrill of breaking stories directly to viewers, bypassing scheduled TV bulletins. The teletext interface, with its limited 80-word entries, taught him to be concise, a skill crucial to news writing even today.

We’ve talked about Ceefax in the past, including in 2022 when we explored a project bringing Ceefax back to life using a Raspberry Pi. Prior to that, we delved into its broader influence on early text-based information systems in a 2021 article.

But Ceefax wasn’t just news—it was a global movement toward interactive media, preceding the internet age. Services like Viditel and the French Minitel carried forward the idea of interactive text and graphics on screen.

The Last Sun Sparc Workstation

September 28, 2024 by Al Williams 38 Comments

The truth is, our desktop computers today would have been classed as supercomputers only a few decades ago. There was a time when people who needed real desktop power looked down their noses at anyone with a Mac or a PC with any operating system on it. The workstation crowd used Sun computers. Sun used the Sparc processor, and the machine had specs that are laughable now but were enviable in their day. [RetroBytes] shows off Sun’s final entry in the category, the Ultra 45 from 2007.

Confusingly, the model numbers don’t necessarily increase. The Ultra 80, for example, is an older computer than the 45. Then there were machines like the Ultra 20, 24, 27, and 40 that all used x86 CPUs. A ’45 had one or two UltraSPARC III 64-bit CPUs running at 1.6 GHz and up to a whopping 16 GB of RAM (the one in the video has 8GB). Sure, we see less powerful computers today, but they are usually Chromebooks or very cheap PCs.

The Ultra line started back in 1995 but went underground for a few years with a re-branding. Sun brought the name back in 2005, and the Ultra 45 hit the streets in 2006, only to discontinue the machine in late 2008. According to [RetroBytes], the Sun team knew the Workstation days were numbered and wanted to produce a final awesome workstation. Partially, the reason for sparing few expenses was that anyone who was buying a SPARC workstation in 2006 probably had a reason not to move to cheaper hardware, so you have them over a proverbial barrel.

We liked the CPU cooler, which looked hefty. Honestly, except for the type of CPUs in it, the box could pass itself off as a mid-range desktop tower today with PCI express sockets. The operating system was Sun’s brand of Unix, Solaris, now owned by Oracle.

Sun’s big competitor for a while was Apollo. We’d point out that if all you want is to run Solaris, you don’t need to buy new old hardware.

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Remembering CompuServe: The Online Experience Before The World Wide Web

September 25, 2024 by Maya Posch 29 Comments

July 1981 cover of CompuServe's magazine. — July 1981 cover of CompuServe’s magazine.

Long before the advent of the Internet and the World Wide Web, there were other ways to go online, with Ohio-based CompuServe being the first to offer a consumer-oriented service on September 24, 1979. In an article by [Michael De Bonis] a listener-submitted question to WOSU’s Curious Cbus is answered, interspersed with recollections of former users of the service. So what was CompuServe’s contribution to society that was so important that the state of Ohio gave historical status to the building that once housed this company?

The history of CompuServe and the consumer-facing services which it would develop started in 1969, when it was a timesharing and remote access service for businesses who wanted to buy some time on the PDP-10s that Golden United Life Insurance as the company’s subsidiary used. CompuServe divested in 1975 to become its own, NASDAQ-listed company. As noted in the article, while selling timeshares to businesses went well, after business hours they would have these big computer systems sitting mostly idly. This was developed by 1979 into a plan to give consumers with their newfangled microcomputers like the TRS-80 access.

Originally called MicroNet and marketed by Radio Shack, the service offered the CompuServe menu to users when they logged in, giving access to features like email, weather, stock quotes, online shipping and booking of airline tickets, as well as online forums and interactive text games.

Later renamed to CompuServe Information Service (CIS), it remained competitive with competitors like AOL and Prodigy until the mid-90s, even buying one competitor called The Source. Ultimately it was the rise of Internet and the WWW that would close the door on this chapter of computing history, even as for CompuServe users this new Internet age would have felt very familiar, indeed.

Reviving A 15-Year Old Asus EeePC With Modern MX Linux

September 25, 2024 by Maya Posch 71 Comments

It’s often said these days that computers don’t become outdated nearly as quickly as they did in the past, with even a decade-old computer still more than capable of handling daily tasks for the average person. Testing that theory, [Igor Ljubuncic] revisited the Asus eeePC which he purchased back in 2010. Although it’s not specified exactly which model it is, it features an Intel Atom N450 (1 core, 2 threads) running at 1.67 GHz, 1 GB of 667 MHz DDR2 and a 250 GB HDD, all falling into that ultra-portable, 10.1″ Netbook category.

When new, the netbook came with Windows 7 Starter Edition, which [Igor] replaced with Ubuntu Netbook Remix 10.04, which was its own adventure, but the netbook worked well and got dragged around the world on work and leisure assignments. With increasingly bloated updates, Ubuntu got replaced by MX Linux 18, which improved matters, but with the little CPU struggling more and more, [Igor] retired the netbook in 2019. That is, until reviving it recently.

Upon booting, the CMOS battery was of course empty, but the system happily continued booting into MX Linux. The Debian update repositories were of course gone, but changing these to the archive version allowed for some (very old) updates. This raised the question of whether modern Linux would even run on this ancient Atom CPU, the answer of which turned out to be a resounding ‘yes’, as MX Linux still offers 32-bit builds of its most recent releases. A 15 minute upgrade process later, and a 2 minute boot later, the system was running a Linux 6.1 kernel with Xfce desktop.

As for the performance, it’s rather what you expect, with video playback topping out at 480p (on the 1024×600 display) and applications like Firefox lacking the compact density mode, wasting a lot of screen space. Amazingly the original battery seems to still deliver about half the runtime it did when new. All of which is to say that yes, even a ‘low-end’ 2010-era netbook can still be a very usable system in 2024, with a modern OS.

New Release Of Vision Basic: Hot New Features!

September 23, 2024 by Alexander Rowsell 7 Comments

As the Commodore 64 ages, it seems to be taking on a second life. Case in point: Vision BASIC is a customized, special version of the BASIC programming language with a ton of features to enable Commodore 64 programs to be written more easily and with all sorts of optimizations. We’ve tested out both the original 1.0 version of Vision BASIC, and now with version 1.1 being released there are a whole host of tweaks and updates to make the experience even better!

One of the only limitation of Vision BASIC is the requirement for expanded RAM. It will not run on an unexpanded C64 — but the compiled programs will, so you can easily distribute software made using Vision on any C64. A feature introduced in version 1.1 is support for GeoRAM, a different RAM expansion cartridge, and modern versions of GeoRAM like the NeoRAM which has battery-backed RAM. This allows almost instantaneous booting into the Vision BASIC development environment.

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Where Did The Japanese Computers Go?

September 22, 2024 by Al Williams 23 Comments

If you are a retrocomputer person, at least in North America and Europe, you probably only have a hazy idea of what computers were in the Japanese market at the time we were all buying MSDOS-based computers. You may have heard of PC-98, but there were many Japanese-only computers out there, and a recent post by [Misty De Meo] asks the question: What happened to the Japanese computers?

To answer that question, you need a history lesson on PC-98 (NEC), FM Towns (Fujitsu), and the X68000 (Sharp). The PC-98 was originally a text-only MSDOS-based computer. But eventually, Microsoft and NEC ported Windows to the machine.

The FM Towns had its own GUI operating system. However, it too had a Windows port and the machine became just another Windows platform. The X68000, as you may well have guessed, used a 68000 CPU. Arguably, this was a great choice at the time. However, history shows that it didn’t work out, and when Sharp began making x86-based Windows machines — and, of course, they did — there was no migration path.

[Misty] makes an interesting point. While we often think of software like Microsoft Office as driving Windows adoption, that wasn’t the case in Japan. It turns out that multitasking was the key feature since Office, at the time, wasn’t very friendly to the native language.

So where did the Japanese computers go? The answer for two of them is: nowhere. They just morphed into commodity Windows computers. The 68000 was the exception — it just withered away.

Japanese pocket computers were common at one time and have an interesting backstory. Japanese can be a challenge for input but, of course, hackers are up to the challenge.

There’s No Lower Spec Linux Machine Than This One

September 21, 2024 by Jenny List 47 Comments

It’s not uncommon for a new distro version to come out, and a grudging admission that maybe a faster laptop is on the cards. Perhaps after seeing this project though, you’ll never again complain about that two-generations-ago 64-bit multi-core behemoth, because [Dimitri Grinberg] — who else! — has succeeded in booting an up-to-date Linux on the real most basic of processors. We’re not talking about 386s, ATmegas, or 6502s, instead he’s gone right back to the beginning. The Intel 4004 was the first commercially available microprocessor back in 1971, and now it can run Linux.

So, given the 4004’s very limited architecture and 4-bit bus, how can it perform this impossible feat? As you might expect, the kernel isn’t being compiled to run natively on such ancient hardware. Instead he’s achieved the equally impossible-sounding task of writing a MIPS emulator for the venerable silicon, and paring back the emulated hardware to the extent that it remains capable given the limitations of the 1970s support chips in interfacing to the more recent parts such as RAM for the MIPS, an SD card, and a VFD display. The result is shown in the video below the break, and even though it’s sped up it’s clear that this is not a quick machine by any means.

We’d recommend the article as a good read even if you’ll never put Linux on a 4004, because of its detailed description of the architecture. Meanwhile we’ve had a few 4004 stories over the years, and this one’s not even the first time we’ve seen it emulate something else.

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