The Workstation You Wanted In 1990, In Your Pocket

July 3, 2024 by Jenny List 59 Comments

Years ago there was a sharp divide in desktop computing between the mundane PC-type machines, and the so-called workstations which were the UNIX powerhouses of the day. A lot of familiar names produced these high-end systems, including the king of the minicomputer world, DEC. The late-80s version of their DECstation line had a MIPS processor, and ran ULTRIX and DECWindows, their versions of UNIX and X respectively. When we used one back in the day it was a very high-end machine, but now as [rscott2049] shows us, it can be emulated on an RP2040 microcontroller.

On the business card sized board is an RP2040, 32 MB of PSRAM, an Ethernet interface, and a VGA socket. The keyboard and mouse are USB. It drives a monochrome screen at 1024 x 864 pixels, which would have been quite something over three decades ago.

It’s difficult to communicate how powerful a machine like this felt back in the very early 1990s, when by today’s standards it seems laughably low-spec. It’s worth remembering though that the software of the day was much less demanding and lacking in bloat. We’d be interested to see whether this could be used as an X server to display a more up-to-date application on another machine, for at least an illusion of a modern web browser loading Hackaday on DECWindows.

Full details of the project can be found in its GitHub repository.

8-Bits And 1,120 Triodes

June 27, 2024 by Al Williams 16 Comments

While it’s currently the start of summer in the Northern Hemisphere, it will inevitably get cold again. If you’re looking for a unique way of heating your workshop this year, you could do worse than build an 8-bit computer with a bunch of 6N3P vacuum tubes. While there are some technical details, you might find it a challenging build. But it is still an impressive sight, and it took 18 months to build a prototype and the final version. You can find the technical details if you want to try your hand. Oh, did we mention it takes about 200 amps? One of the prototype computers plays Pong on a decidedly low-tech display, which you can see below.

The architecture has 8 data bits and 12 address bits. It only provides six instructions, but that keeps the tube count manageable. Each tube has two triodes in one envelope and form a NOR gate which is sufficient to build everything else you need. In addition to tubes, there are reed relays and some NVRAM, a modern conceit.

Operating instructions are to turn it on and wait for the 560 tubes to warm up. Then, to quote the designer, “… I check the fire extinguisher is full, and run the code.” We wonder if one of the six instructions is halt and catch fire. Another quote from the builder is: “It has been a ridiculous amount of soldering and a fantastic amount of fun.” We can imagine.

If the computer seems familiar, we covered the first and second prototypes named ENA and Fred. We’ve also seen tube-base single-board computers.

Continue reading “8-Bits And 1,120 Triodes” →

A Previously Unknown Supplier For A Classic Chip

June 27, 2024 by Jenny List 7 Comments

It’s common enough for integrated circuits to be available from a range of different suppliers, either as licensed clones, or as reverse-engineered proprietary silicon. In the case of a generic circuit such as a cheap op-amp it matters little whose logo adorns the plastic, but when the part in question is an application processor it assumes much more importance. In the era of the 486 and Pentium there were a host of well-known manufacturers producing those chips, so it’s a surprise decades later to find that there was another, previously unknown. That’s just what [Doc TB] has done though, finding a 486 microprocessor from Shenzhen State Micro. That’s not a brand we ever saw in our desktop computers back in the 1990s.

Analysis of a couple of these chips, a DX33 and a DX2-66, shows them to have very similar micro-architecture but surprisingly a lower power consumption suggesting a smaller fabrication process. There’s the fascinating possibility that these might have been manufactured to serve an ongoing demand for 486 processors in some as-yet-unknown Chinese industrial application, but before any retrocomputer enthusiasts get their hopes up, the chips can’t be found anywhere from Shenzhen State Micro’s successor company. So for now they’re a fascinating oddity for CPU collectors, but who knows, perhaps more information on these unusual chips will surface.

Meanwhile we’ve looked at the 486’s legacy in detail before, even finding there could still just be 486-compatible SoCs out there.

Paul Allen’s Living Computers Museum And Labs To Be Auctioned

June 25, 2024 by Maya Posch 20 Comments

After the Living Computers museum in Seattle closed like so many museums and businesses in 2020 with the pandemic, there were many who feared that it might not open again. Four years later this fear has become reality, as the Living Computers: Museum + Labs (LCM+L, for short) entire inventory is being auctioned off. This occurs only 12 years after the museum and associated educational facilities were opened to the public. Along with Allen’s collection at the LCM+L, other items that he had been collecting until his death in 2018 will also be auctioned at Christie’s, for a grand total of 150 items in the Gen One: Innovations from the Paul G. Allen Collection.

In 2022 Allen’s art collection had seen the auction block, but this time it would seem that the hammer has come for this museum. Unique about LCM+L was that it featured vintage computing systems that visitors could interact with and use much like they would have been used back in the day, rather than being merely static display pieces, hence the ‘living computers’ part. Although other vintage computing museums in the US and elsewhere now also allow for such interactive displays, it’s sad to see the only major vintage computing museum in Washington State vanish.

Hopefully the items being auctioned will find loving homes, ideally at other museums and with collectors who aren’t afraid to keep the educational spirit of LCM+L alive.

Thanks to [adistuder] for the tip.

Top image: A roughly 180° panorama of the “conditioned” room of the Living Computer Museum, Seattle, Washington, USA. Taken in 2014. (Credit: Joe Mabel)

The Amstrad E-m@iler, The Right Product With The Wrong Business Model

June 25, 2024 by Jenny List 29 Comments

One of the joys of the UK’s Electromagnetic Field hacker camp lies in the junk table, where trash turns to treasure in the blink of an eye. This year I returned relatively unscathed from my few days rifling through the tables,but I did snag a few pieces. One of them is a wired telephone, which would be a fairly unremarkable find were it not for its flip-up LCD screen and QWERTY keyboard.

My prize is a 2002 Amstrad E-m@iler Plus, one of a series of internet-equipped telephones from the British budget electronics company. The device itself and the story behind it make for a fascinating tale of a dotcom-era Internet flop, and a piece of hardware that could almost tempt today’s hackers.

You’ve Heard Of The Dotcom Boom, But Have You Heard Of The Hardware?

In the late 1990s, everything was about the Internet, but seemingly few outside the kind of people who read Hackaday really understood what it was really about. I’ve written before on these page about how hype blinded the CD-ROM industry to the shortcomings of its technology, but while that had in reality only gripped the publishing business, the Internet hype which followed had everyone in its thrall. You’re probably familiar with the story of the dotcom boom and crash as startup companies raised millions on shaky foundations before folding when they couldn’t deliver, but in parallel with that there was also a parallel world for hardware. The future was going to be connected, but on what and whose hardware would that connection happen? Continue reading “The Amstrad E-m@iler, The Right Product With The Wrong Business Model” →

How The CD-ROM Lost The Multimedia Dream To The Internet

June 24, 2024 by Maya Posch 77 Comments

High-tech movie guides on CD-ROM; clearly the future had arrived in 1994.

In the innocent days of the early 90s the future of personal computing still seemed to be wide open, with pundits making various statements regarding tis potential trajectories. To many, the internet and especially the World Wide Web didn’t seem to be of any major significance, as it didn’t have the reach or bandwidth for the Hot New Thing^tm in the world of PCs: multimedia. Enter the CD-ROM, which since its introduction in 1985 had brought the tantalizing feature of seemingly near-infinite storage within reach, and became cheap enough for many in the early 90s. In a recent article by [Harry McCracken] he reflects on this era, and how before long it became clear that it was merely a bubble.

Of course, there was a lot of good in CD-ROMs, especially when considering having access to something like Encarta before Wikipedia and broadband internet was a thing. It also enabled software titles to be distributed without the restrictions of floppy disks. We fondly remember installing Windows 95 (without Internet Explorer) off 13 1.44 MB floppies, followed by a few buckets of Microsoft Office floppies. All pray to the computer gods for no sudden unreadable floppy.

Inevitably, there was a lot of shovelware on CD-ROMs, and after the usefulness of getting free AOL floppies (which you could rewrite), the read-only CD-ROMs you got in every magazine and spam mailing were a big disappointment. Although CD-ROMs and DVDs still serve a purpose today, it’s clear that along with the collapse of the Internet Bubble of the late 90s, early 2000s, optical media has found a much happier place. It’s still hard to beat the sheer value of using CD-R(W)s and DVD-/+R(W)s (and BD-Rs) for offline backups, even if for games and multimedia they do not appear to be relevant any more.

If you’re interested in another depiction of this period, it’s somewhere we’ve been before.

Kernel Hack Brings Windows XP To The 486

June 23, 2024 by Alexander Rowsell 20 Comments

The venerable Intel 486 was released in 1989 as the successor to the extremely popular Intel 386. It was the minimum recommended processor for Windows 98. (Surprisingly, the Windows 95 minimum was a 386!) But by the time XP rolled around, you needed at least a 233 MHz Pentium to install. Or at least that was the case until recently when an extremely dedicated user on MSFN named [Dietmar] showed how he hacked the XP kernel so it could run on the classic chip!

The biggest issue preventing XP from working on earlier processors is an instruction introduced on the Pentium: CMPXCHG8B. This instruction compares two 8-byte values and takes different actions depending on an equality test. It either copies the 8 bytes to a destination address or loads it into a 64-bit register. Essentially, it does what it says on the tin: it CoMPares and eXCHanGes some values. If you want to dig into the nitty-gritty details, you can check out this info on the instruction taken from the x86 datasheet.

Without getting too technical, know that this instruction is vital for performance when working with large data structures. This is because one instruction moves 8 bytes at a time, unlike the older CMPXCHG instruction, which only moves a single byte. Essentially, [Dietmar] had to find every usage of CMPXCHG8B and replace it with an equivalent series of CMPXCHG instructions.

On a side note, the once well-known and devastating Pentium F00F bug was caused by a faulty encoding of the CMPXCHG8B instruction. This allowed any user, even unprivileged users, to completely lock up a system, requiring a full reset cycle!

So [Dietmar] was successful, and now you can run the German version of Windows XP on either a real 486 or an emulated one. The installer is available on the Internet Archive and there’s a detailed video below demonstrating installing it on the 86Box virtual machine host.

Continue reading “Kernel Hack Brings Windows XP To The 486” →