Hackaday Retro Edition: Pen Computing

January 17, 2015 by Brian Benchoff 20 Comments

Although we’re well past the heyday of ‘pen computing’, and seemingly into a retro revival with laptops and tablets that come with Wacom styluses and digitizers, this doesn’t mean the pen computers of old weren’t useful. While they were mostly used for industrial applications, they were useful and some of the first practical applications of touch screen displays.

[Jason] got his hand on one of these ruggedized handheld PCs – specifically, an Itronix T5200. This three-pound mini notebook runs Windows CE Handheld PC Edition 3.01. The specs include a 74MHz RISC processor, 16 MB of RAM, 16MB of Flash, and a 7.3 inch monochrome touch screen with 640×240 resolution. It’s odd and old: when closed, it’s over two inches thick. You’ll be hard pressed to find a modern laptop that thick. [Jason]’s hardware is a pre-production version.

Unlike a lot of retro submissions that have somehow managed to pull up the Hackaday Retro Edition on old hardware, this machine actually has a browser. It’s old, it’s clunky, but it works. There are three options for getting this old computer up on the Internet – either IrDA, an RJ11 modem port, or RS232. [Jason] didn’t tell us which port he used to load up the retro edition, but he did send in a few pictures. You can check those out below.

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Hackaday Retro Edition: A 286 On The Internet

October 23, 2014 by Brian Benchoff 72 Comments

While not an issue now with our 64 bit (more accurately 48- or 52-bit) processors, there was a time when 32 bits of addressing space was impossibly large. For several decades, 4 Gigabytes of memory would be the absolute ceiling, and something only madmen or the protagonist of Pi would have to deal with. This convention began, at least for the Intel/PC world, with the 386. Earlier processors like the 8086 and the 286 were quite capable for their time, but doing anything modern with them, especially getting on the Internet, is a quixotic endeavor beyond comparison.

[Caulser] over on the Vintage Computer Forums has done just that. He recently acquired a Zenith Data Systems 286 system and loaded up what is quickly becoming the litmus test for old computers on the Internet: the Hackaday retro edition

When he first received the system, it was loaded up with a rather generous (for the time) 4MB of RAM. The 20MB hard drive was dead, but with a little fiddling about with the BIOS, [Caulser] was able to get the system working with an old Quantum IDE hard drive.

There’s no Windows or even Linux for this machine, so the system is just running MS DOS 5a, mTCP, Arachne, and the relevant drivers for the NIC (that has RJ45 and BNC connectors). After upgrading the RAM to 8MB, the box performs reasonably well without any pesky ads, and given the websites he visited, he’s not dealing with any overwrought Javascript or CSS, either.

Pics of the system below.

If you have an old computer sitting around, try to load our retro site with it. Take a few pictures, and we’ll put it up in one of our Retro Roundups

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The ESP8266 Becomes A Terrible Browser

October 4, 2014 by Brian Benchoff 11 Comments

The ESP8266 are making their way over from China and onto the benches of tinkerers around the world for astonishing web-enabled blinking LED projects and the like. [TM] thought he could do something cooler with his WiFi to UART module and decided to turn one into a web browser.

There’s no new code running on the ESP8266 – all the HTML is being pushed through an Arduino Mega, requesting data from a server (in this case our fabulous retro edition), and sending the data to the Arduino serial console. The connection is first initiated with a few AT commands to the ESP module, then connecting to the retro server and finally dumping everything received to the console.

It’s not much – HTML tags are still displayed, and images are of course out of the question. The result, however, isn’t that much different from what you would get from Lynx, meaning now the challenge is open for an Arduino port of this ancient browser.

Hackaday Retro Edition: 386 Compaqs

September 1, 2014 by Brian Benchoff 28 Comments

[Antoine] recently learned of a little challenge we have in the hinterlands of the Hackaday webosphere – what’s the oldest, or lowest spec hardware you have that can load this our retro edition? He has a pile of old PCs at his work, and with a lot of idle time at work because of summer, he decided to dig into that pile and get a really old computer up on the Internet.

While the pile of PCs didn’t have anything as old as he was expecting, [Antoine] did find an old Compaq from 1992. It has a 386DX running at 25MHz, 4MB of RAM, a 300 MB hard drive, VGA, and an Ethernet NIC. Gathering the requisite CRT monitor, PS/2 keyboard, and an AUI to a more modern Ethernet connector.

When getting these ancient computer on the Internet, the secret sauce is in the software configuration. [Antoine]’s box is running DOS 6.2, but was previously configured to connect to a Microsoft filesystem server on boot. This server was probably somewhere at the bottom of the same pile the Compaq was salvaged from, so rolling his own modern networking stack was the way to go. A driver for the NIC was downloaded on another computer and transferred via floppy, as was mTCP, the key to getting a lot of old PCs on the Internet. The browser is Arachne, and with the right configurations, everything worked perfectly.

[Antoine]’s efforts resulted in a computer that can easily handle the stripped down Hackaday retro edition, and can handle light browsing on Wikipedia. The effective download rate is something like a 33k modem; even with a fast (10M!) Ethernet connection, processing all the packets is taxing for this old machine.

Hackaday Retro Edition: Browser Wars On Solaris

August 23, 2014 by Brian Benchoff 21 Comments

sunn After seeing an earlier Hackaday post on old, old Unix systems loading up our retro edition, [Eugenio] decided he would play out the late 90s browser wars on a few machines of his own. Yes, it’s Internet Explorer vs. Netscape in a fight to the death. No <blink> or <marquee> tags were involved, but a Sun Ultra 5 was. We’re looking at the peak of the workstation world circa 1999 here, and only one browser would emerge victorious (it’s neither IE nor Netscape, btw).

The Solaris 9 system [Eugenio] has supports both Internet Explorer 5 and shipped with Netscape 4. Compared to the functionality of modern browsers, both IE5 and Netscape 4 are ancient and terrible. Remember kids, even the scroll wheel on a mouse is a relatively new invention.

Our retro edition doesn’t have any CSS, Javascript, or any of the new Web weirdness, so everything loaded as it should. One interesting problem [Eugenio] encountered was an inverse color desktop when the IE5 window was in focus. Bringing another window into focus returned the desktop to the right color. I guess Netscape wins the Solaris browser war.

[Eugenio] also dug out an old VT320 terminal and connected it to a Vaio x505 (the same approximate vintage as the Sun Ultra 5). This worked beautifully in both 80 and 132 column mode.

We’re always looking for new submissions of old computers loading up our retro site. We haven’t had many minicomputers loading the site, so dig out those Vaxxen and send something in.

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