Forgotten Internet: UUCP

January 16, 2025 by Al Williams 81 Comments

What’s Forgotten Internet? It is the story of parts of the Internet — or Internet precursors — that you might have forgotten about or maybe you missed out on them. This time, we’re looking at Unix-to-Unix Copy, more commonly called UUCP. Developed in the late 1970s, UUCP was a solution for sending messages between systems that were not always connected together. It could also allow remote users to execute commands. By 1979, it was part of the 7th Edition of Unix.

Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie may have used UUCP on a PDP-11 like this one. (Photo via Computer History Museum/Gwen Bell)

Operation was simple. Each computer in a UUCP network had a list of neighbor systems. Don’t forget, they weren’t connected, so instead of an IP address, each system had the other’s phone number to connect to a dial up modem. You also needed a login name and password. Almost certainly, by the way, those modems operated at 300 baud or less.

If a computer could dial out, when someone wanted to send something or do a remote execution, the UUCP system would call a neighboring computer. However, some systems couldn’t dial out, so it was also possible for a neighbor to call in and poll to see if there was anything you needed to do. Files would go from one system to another using a variety of protocols.

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Modern AI On Vintage Hardware: LLama 2 Runs On Windows 98

January 13, 2025 by Donald Papp 27 Comments

[EXO Labs] demonstrated something pretty striking: a modified version of Llama 2 (a large language model) that runs on Windows 98. Why? Because when it comes to personal computing, if something can run on Windows 98, it can run on anything. More to the point: if something can run on Windows 98 then it’s something no tech company can control how you use, no matter how large or influential they may be. More on that in a minute.

Ever wanted to run a local LLM on 25 year old hardware? No? Well now you can, and at a respectable speed, too!

What’s it like to run an LLM on Windows 98? Aside from the struggles of things like finding compatible peripherals (back to PS/2 hardware!) and transferring the required files (FTP over Ethernet to the rescue) or even compilation (some porting required), it works maybe better than one might expect.

A Windows 98 machine with Pentium II processor and 128 MB of RAM generates a speedy 39.31 tokens per second with a 260K parameter Llama 2 model. A much larger 15M model generates 1.03 tokens per second. Slow, but it works. Going even larger will also work, just ever slower. There’s a video on X that shows it all in action.

It’s true that modern LLMs have billions of parameters so these models are tiny in comparison. But that doesn’t mean they can’t be useful. Models can be shockingly small and still be perfectly coherent and deliver surprisingly strong performance if their training and “job” is narrow enough, and the tools to do that for oneself are all on GitHub.

This is a good time to mention that this particular project (and its ongoing efforts) are part of a set of twelve projects by EXO Labs focusing on ensuring things like AI models can be run anywhere, by anyone, independent of tech giants aiming to hold all the strings.

And hey, if local AI and the command line is something that’s up your alley, did you know they already exist as single-file, multi-platform, command-line executables?

Usagi’s PDP-11 Supercomputer And Appeal For Floating Point Systems Info

January 12, 2025 by Maya Posch 21 Comments

With an exciting new year of retrocomputing ahead for [David Lovett] over at the Usagi Electric YouTube channel, recently some new hardware arrived at the farm. Specifically hardware from a company called Floating Point Systems (FPS), whose systems provide computing features to assist e.g. a minicomputer like [David]’s PDP-11/44 system with floating point operations. The goal here is to use a stack of 1980s-era FPS hardware to give the PDP-11/44 MIMD (multiple instructions, multiple data) computing features, which is a characteristic associated with supercomputers.

The FPS hardware is unfortunately both somewhat rare and not too much documentation, including schematics, has been found so far. This is where [David] would love some help from the community on finding more FPS hardware, documentation and any related information so that it can all be preserved.

FPS itself was acquired by Cray in 1991, before SGI took over Cray Research in 1996. As is usual with such acquisitions, a lot of older information tends to get lost, along with the hardware as it gets tossed out over the years by companies and others. So far [David] has acquired an FPS-100 array processor, an interface card for the PDP-11 and an FPS-3000, the latter of which appears to be a MIMD unit akin to the FPS-5000.

Without schematics, let alone significant documentation, it’s going to be an uphill battle to make it all work again, but with a bit of help from us retrocomputer enthusiasts, perhaps this might not be as impossible after all.

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Retro Big Iron For You

January 8, 2025 by Al Williams 30 Comments

Many of us used “big iron” back in the day. Computers like the IBM S/360 or 3090 are hard to find, transport, and operate, so you don’t see many retrocomputer enthusiasts with an S/370 in their garages. We’ve known for a while that the Hercules emulators would let you run virtual copies of these old mainframes, but every time we’ve looked at setting any up, it winds up being more work than we wanted to spend. Enter [Ernie] of [ErnieTech’s Little Mainframes]. He’s started a channel to show you how to “build” your own mainframe — emulated, of course.

One problem with the mainframe environment is that there are a bunch of operating system-like things like MVS, VM/CMS, and TSO. There were even custom systems like MUSIC/SP, which he shows in the video below.

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Thirty Years Later, The Windows 3.1 Video Driver You Needed

January 6, 2025 by Jenny List 52 Comments

Over the course of the 1990s we saw huge developments in the world of PC graphics cards, going from little more than the original IBM VGA standard through super VGA and then so-called “Windows accelerator” cards which brought the kind of hardware acceleration the console and 16 bit home computer users had been used to for a while. At the end of the decade we had the first generation of 3D accelerator chipsets which are ancestors of today’s GPUs.

It was a great time to be a hardware enthusiast, but as anyone who was around at the time will tell you, the software for the drivers hadn’t caught up. Particularly for Windows 3.1 it could be something of a lottery, so [PluMGMK]’s modern generic SVGA driver could have been extremely useful had it appeared at the time.

As many of you will be aware, there is a set of VESA standardized BIOS extensions for video modes. There were generic VESA drivers back in the day, but they would only provide a disappointing selection of options for what the cards could do even then. The new driver provides support for all the available modes supported by a card, at all color depths. Windows 3.1 in true-color full HD? No problem!

It’s unexpected to see Program Manager and a selection of windows spread across so much real-estate, almost reminiscent of the uncluttered desktops from early ’90s workstations if you disregard the bright colors. We can’t help noticing it wins in one way over even the latest version of MacOS at these resolutions though, as anyone who has ever used a 4K screen on a Mac and found the menus remain miles away up in the top corner will tell you. Meanwhile if you’ve not had your fill of 16-bit Windows, how about sticking it in a ThinkPad BIOS?

Stacy’s Computer Has Got It Going On

January 5, 2025 by Al Williams 14 Comments

According to [ClassicHasClass], the best way to open an Atari Stacy is to not open an Atari Stacy. Apparently, these old computers were not pleasant to work on. The cables were not keyed and were prone to short against things. Screws easily strip out plastic holes. Of course, there wouldn’t be a story if there wasn’t a teardown and an upgrade that you can check out in the post.

The Stacy was one of Atari’s earliest portable systems and the first ST portable (that is, STacy). There’s a backlit LCD, a keyboard and trackball, and the usual ports. You could make do with a single floppy or spring for a second floppy or an internal SCSI hard drive. The 8 MHz 68000-based machine would set you back north of $2,300 back in 1989.

The original plan was to run the thing on C-cell batteries, but that would give you about 15 minutes of operation. They finally decided it was a luggable — you’d have to plug it into the wall. The battery compartment was there, but empty and glued shut.

Apparently, there were about 35,000 of these made, but they seem somewhat rare. But we do like a rare retrocomputer. Or even some that aren’t so rare.

Atari 65XE In Laptop Form

January 5, 2025 by Bryan Cockfield 4 Comments

For better or worse, Atari is no longer a household name in computing, but for a time in the 1980s, it was a huge mover in the industry. They not only produced PCs but also a huge number of video game consoles. Although they were a major contributor to the video game crash of the 1980s, they managed to limp along a few more years afterward and produce some interesting machines in the following years, even though they weren’t ultimately able to compete with Nintendo or Sega. One of those computers from that era was a PC-console hybrid of sorts called the Atari XE, and [Sideburn] was able to turn one into a laptop.

The retro laptop began life as an Arabic PAL version of the 65XE, the PC version of the ubiquitous 65-series computer. A large portion of the computer was reworked, including the removal of the power supply in favor of a rechargeable battery with a 6-hour life. Also among the list of scrapped components was the video and sound connectors as well as the RF modulator, which would have been common for displays at the time, but this laptop is getting a 1920×1080 LCD panel to replace all of that old hardware. A 1MB memory upgrade, new speakers and amp, a WiFi card, and an SD floppy card emulator round out the build.

The final part of the build is assembling it all into a custom 3D printed case, and the resulting laptop that [Sideburn] calls the XE Book is a faithful adaptation of this niche computer into what could have been a laptop we would have seen in the late 80s or early 90s similar to the Toshiba T3200SXC. It matches the original’s footprint and still uses all of the core components, so it’s not too difficult to imagine something like this having existed in the past.

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