Celebrating 30 Years Of Windows 95 At VCF

April 6, 2025 by Adam Fabio 78 Comments

It’s been 30 years since Windows 95 launched. [Ms-Dos5] and [Commodore Z] are celebrating with an epic exhibit at Vintage Computer Festival East 2025. They had no fewer than nine computers — all period-correct machines running versions of Windows 95. The pictures don’t do it justice, so if you are near Wall, NJ, on Sunday, April 5, 2025, definitely go check out this and the rest of the exhibits at VCF.

An exhibit like this isn’t thrown together overnight. [Commodore Z] and [Ms-Dos5] worked for months to assemble the right mix of desktops, laptops, and peripherals to showcase Windows 95. Many of the computers are networked as well – which was no easy task.

One particular Thinkpad 760e required pliers and force to remove a stuck PCMCIA modem card. After a struggle that was ultimately destructive to the card, the pair determined it was stuck due to a sticker that had effectively glued the card into the laptop. As the sticker finally gave up, the card popped itself out of the laptop.

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Ben Eater Vs. Microsoft BASIC

April 5, 2025 by Elliot Williams 12 Comments

[Ben Eater]’s breadboard 6502 computer is no stranger to these parts, so it was a bit of a surprise that when [Mark] wrote in asking us if we’d covered [Ben]’s getting MS BASIC running on the breadboard, that our answer was “no”. Well, that changes today!

This is a three-part video series, documenting how [Ben Eater] ports a 1977 version of MS BASIC to his 6502-based computer. The first video is all about just getting the BASIC up and working. It’s full of detail about how MS BASIC adapts to different architectures on the inside, and [Ben] essentially defines his own along the way.

Once he has BASIC working, the next two videos are about making it work not just with the serial terminal that he has attached, but also with the LCD display peripheral he has plugged into the breadboard. BASIC fans will not be surprised to see that it’s all about using POKE. But that ends up being to slow, so he extends it out with his own LCDPRINT command written in assembly.

Now that he can write a character to the LCD, he wants to be able to pass it a string: LCDPRINT “Hello world”. But that requires his command to be able to parse a string, and this has him diving down the rabbit hole into how MS BASIC parses strings, handles evals, and so on. If you want to know how MS BASIC works on the inside, this is the video for you. This video makes a lot of use of wozmon, which seems an almost ideal tool for this kind of low-level poking around.

All of this is done in [Ben]’s very well rehearsed, accessible, but pulling-no-punches style. Get ready to nerd out. All three of the videos are embedded just below the break.

While it’s not the Altair BASIC that Bill himself was writing about last week, it’s probably a direct descendent, and reading about the Altair version was what spurred [Mark Stevens] to send us the tip. Thanks!

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A Look Inside MacPaint

April 5, 2025 by Al Williams 28 Comments

Usually when we talk about retrocomputing, we want to look at — and in — some old hardware. But [Z→Z] has a different approach: dissecting MacPaint, the Apple drawing program from the 1980s.

While the program looks antiquated by today’s standards, it was pretty hot stuff back in the day. Things we take for granted today were big deals at the time. For example, being able to erase a part of something you drew prompted applause at an early public demo.

We enjoyed the way the program was tested, too. A software “monkey” was made to type keys, move things, and click menus randomly. The teardown continues with a look inside the Pascal and assembly code with interesting algorithms like how the code would fill an area with color.

The program has been called “beautifully organized,” and [Z→Z] examines that assertion. Maybe the brilliance of it has been overstated, but it did work and it did influence many computer graphics programs over the years.

We love digging through old source code. Even old games. If you do your own teardowns, be sure to send us a tip.

The Transputer In Your Browser

April 4, 2025 by Al Williams 12 Comments

We remember when the transputer first appeared. Everyone “knew” that it was going to take over everything. Of course, it didn’t. But [Oscar Toledo G.] gives us a taste of what life could have been like with a JavaScript emulator for the transputer, you can try in your browser.

If you don’t recall, the transputer was a groundbreaking CPU architecture made for parallel processing. Instead of giant, powerful CPUs, the transputer had many simple CPUs and a way to chain them all together. Sounds great, but didn’t quite make it. However, you can see the transputer’s influence on CPUs even today.

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Vintage Computer Festival East This Weekend

April 4, 2025 by Elliot Williams 6 Comments

If you’re on the US East Coast, you should head on over to Wall, NJ and check out the Vintage Computer Festival East. After all, [Brian Kernighan] is going to be there. Yes, that [Brian Kernighan].

Events are actually well underway, and you’ve already missed the first few TRS-80 Color Computer programming workshops, but rest assured that they’re going on all weekend. If you’re from the other side of the retrocomputing fence, namely the C64 side, you’ve also got a lot to look forward to, because the theme this year is “The Sounds of Retro” which means that your favorite chiptune chips will be getting a workout.

[Tom Nardi] went to VCF East last year, so if you’re on the fence, just have a look at his writeup and you’ll probably hop in your car, or like us, wish you could. If when you do end up going, let us know how it was in the comments!

A Proper OS For The Sega Genesis/Megadrive

April 3, 2025 by Jenny List 20 Comments

The console wars of the early 1990s had several players, but the battle that mattered was between Nintendo’s SNES and Sega’s Genesis, or Megadrive if you are European. They are both famous for their games, but in terms of software they can only run what’s on a cartridge. The Genesis has a Motorola 68000 on board though, which is capable of far more than just Sonic the Hedgehog. [EythorE] evidently thinks so, because here’s a port of Fusix, a UNIX-like OS, for the Sega platform.

As it stands, the OS is running on the BlastEm emulator, but given a Sega Saturn keyboard or a modified PC keyboard for the Sega, it could be run on real hardware. What you get is a basic UNIX-like OS with a working shell and the usual UNIX utilities. With 64k of memory to play with this will never be a powerhouse, but on the other hand we’d be curious to see it in a working cartridge.

Meanwhile, if the console interests you further, someone has been into its workings in great detail.

Header: Evan-Amos, CC BY-SA 3.0.

The Weird Way A DEC Alpha Boots

April 3, 2025 by Jenny List 46 Comments

We’re used to there being an array of high-end microprocessor architectures, and it’s likely that many of us will have sat in front of machines running x86, ARM, or even PowerPC processors. There are other players past and present you may be familiar with, for example SPARC, RISC-V, or MIPS. Back in the 1990s there was another, now long gone but at the time the most powerful of them all, of course we’re speaking of DEC’s Alpha architecture. [JP] has a mid-90s AlphaStation that doesn’t work, and as part of debugging it we’re treated to a description of its unusual boot procedure.

Conventionally, an x86 PC has a ROM at a particular place in its address range, and when it starts, it executes from the start of that range. The Alpha is a little different, on start-up it needs some code from a ROM which configures it and sets up its address space. This is applied as a 1-bit serial stream, and like many things DEC, it’s a little unusual. This code lives in a conventional ROM chip with 8 data lines, and each of those lines contains a separate program selectable by a jumper. It’s a handy way of providing a set of diagnostics at the lowest level, but even with that discovery the weirdness isn’t quite over. We’re treated to a run-down of DEC Alpha code encoding, and should you have one of these machines, there’s all the code you need.

The Alpha was so special in the 1990s because with 64-bit and retargetable microcode in its architecture it was significantly faster than its competitors. From memory it could be had with DEC Tru64 UNIX, Microsoft Windows NT, or VMS, and with the last of which it was the upgrade path for VAX minicomputers. It faded away in the takeover by Compaq and subsequently HP, and we are probably the poorer for it. We look forward to seeing more about this particular workstation, should it come back to life.