The Famous Computer Cafe Has Now Been Archived Online

August 23, 2024 by Lewin Day 4 Comments

You might think that TV stations or production houses would be great at archiving, but it’s not always the case. Particularly from the public access perspective. However, if you’re a fan of The Famous Computer Cafe, you’re in luck! The beloved series has now been preserved on The Internet Archive!

If you’re not familiar with the show, it was a radio program broadcast from 1983 to 1986. It was pumped out of a variety of radio stations in southern and central California in the period. The creators making sure to keep a copy of each episode in reel-to-reel tape format. For years, these tapes were tragically lost, until archivist [Kay Savetz] was able to recover some of them from a recent property sale. From there, a GoFundMe paid for digitization, and the show has been placed on The Internet Archive with the blessings of the original creators.

This is quite the cultural victory, particularly when you observe the list of guests on the show. Timothy Leary, Bill Gates, Jack Tramiel, and even Douglas Adams made appearances in the recovered recordings. Sadly, though, not all the tapes have been recovered. Episodes with Gene Roddenberry, Robert Moog, and Ray Bradbury are still lost to time.

If you fancy a listen, 53 episodes presently exist on the archive. Take a trip back in time and hear from some technological visionaries—and futurists—speaking their minds at the very beginning of the microcomputer era! If you find any particularly salient gems, don’t hesitate to drop them on the tip line.

Happy Birthday To Dad, Retrocomputer Style

August 22, 2024 by Dan Maloney 3 Comments

For those of us who lived through the early 8-bit computing revolution — the tail end, in our case — it’s hard to believe that there’s a second wave of retrocomputing nostalgia underway. But as this bit-banged TRS-80 birthday bonus pack shows, the first generation did a pretty good job passing the retro torch.

With his father’s 70th birthday coming up and full of “borrowed nostalgia” for the good old days, [Josh Sucher] scored a TRS-80 off eBay and experimented with what could be possible. After 50-odd years, the machine needed a bit of TLC, including a new power supply, some keyboard repairs, and the usual recapping. He also had to soup the machine up a bit, given that its original capabilities were so limited.

Chief among these mods was a rudimentary IP stack thanks to a TRS-IO card, which emulates a lot of functionality of the original TRS-80 Expansion Module and adds an ESP-32 for WiFi capability. This allowed [Josh] to get a neat “Dadbot” chatbot going on the machine, using years of his dad’s text messages to train the model. There’s also a game of Go, an RPG based on his parents’ lives, and a local news and weather app. Most impressive, though, is the bit-banged audio app that uses the TRS-80’s cassette interface to play a passable rendition of “Happy Birthday to You.” The video below has the full demo.

It’s clear that this lengthy project was a labor of love, and we approve of the results. It’s been a long, long time since we first caught wind of the TRS-80 through the Radio Shack catalog, and projects like this make us feel like scratching up one for ourselves to play with.

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Historical Microsoft And Apple Artifacts Among First Christie’s Auction Of Living Computers Museum

August 19, 2024 by Maya Posch 9 Comments

Recently the Christie’s auction house released the list of items that would be going up for sale as part of the first lot of Living Computer Museum items, under the banner “Gen One: Innovations from the Paul G. Allen Collection”. One auction covers many ‘firsts’ in the history of computing, including a range of computers like an Apple 1, and a PDP-10, as well as early Microsoft memos and code printouts. The other auctions include such items like a Gemini Spacesuit as worn by [Ed White] and a signed 1939 letter from [Albert Einstein] to [US President Roosevelt] on the discovery by the Germans of a fissionable form of uranium from which a nuclear weapon could be constructed.

We previously reported on this auction when it was first announced in June of this year. At the time many were saddened at seeing the only computer history and its related educational facilities vanish, and there were worries among those who had donated items to the museum what would happen to these now that the museum’s inventory was being put up for sale. As these donations tend to be unconditional, the museum is free to do with the item as they see fit, but ‘being sold at auction’ to probably a private collector was likely not on their mind when filling in the donation form.

As the first auctions kick off in a few days we will just have to wait and see where the museum’s inventory ends up at, but it seems likely that many of these items which were publicly viewable will now be scattered across the globe in private collections.

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

Rebuilding The First Digital Personal Computer

August 16, 2024 by Bryan Cockfield 15 Comments

When thinking of the first PCs, most of us might imagine something like the Apple I or the TRS-80. But even before that, there were a set of computers that often had no keyboard, or recognizable display beyond a few blinking lights. [Artem Kalinchuk] is attempting to recreate one of these very early digital computers, the Kenbak-1, using as many period-correct parts as possible.

Considered by many to be the world’s first personal computer, the Kenbak-1 was an 8-bit machine with 256 bytes of memory, using TTL integrated circuits for the logic as there was no commercially available microprocessor available at the time it was designed. For [Artem]’s build, most of these parts can still be sourced including the 7400-series chips and carbon resistors although the shift registers were a bit of a challenge to find. A custom PCB was built to replicate the original, and with all the parts in order it’s ready to be assembled and put into a case which was built using the drawings for the original unit.

Although [Artem] plans to build a period-correct linear power supply for this computer, right now he’s using a modern switching power supply for testing. The only other major components that are different are the status lamps, in this case switched to LEDs because he wasn’t able to source incandescent bulbs that drew low enough current, and the switches which he’s replaced with MX-style keys. We’ll stay tuned as he builds and tests this over the course of several videos, but in the meantime if you’re curious how this early computer actually worked we featured an emulator for it a while back.

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A black device with a monochrome LCD sits on a wooden table. It's keyboard extends below the frame. On the screen is the "Level 29" BBS service login.

Internet Appliance To Portable Terminal

August 8, 2024 by Navarre Bartz 4 Comments

Few processors have found themselves in so many different devices as the venerable Z80. While it isn’t powerful by modern standards, you can still use devices like this Cidco MailStation as a terminal.

The MailStation was originally designed as an email machine for people who weren’t onboard with this whole computer fad, keeping things simple with just an adjustable monchrome LCD, a keyboard, and a few basic applications. [Joshua Stein] developed a terminal application, msTERM, for the MailStation thanks to work previously done on decoding this device and the wealth of documentation for Z80 assembly.

While [Stein] designed his program to access BBSes, we wonder if it might be a good way to do some distraction-free writing. If that wasn’t enough, he also designed the WiFiStation dongle which lets you communicate over a network without all that tedious mucking about with parallel ports.

If you’d like something designed specifically for writing, how about an AlphaSmart? Wanting to build your own Z80-based project? Why not start with an Altoids-sized Z80 SBC, but don’t wait forever since Z80 production finally ended in June.

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An odd looking apparatus for cleaning floppy disks. A neon green disk tray is suspended on metal linear rails in a vertical orientation. It can move back and forth through a set of cleaning heads and a set of drying fans. There are some control buttons on the font as well as a string of addressable LEDs and two speakers.

Rube Goldberg Floppy Disk Cleaner

August 2, 2024 by Navarre Bartz 5 Comments

Floppies were once the standard method of information exchange, but decades of storage can render them unreadable, especially if mold sets in. [Rob Smith] wanted to clean some floppies in style and made a Disco Rube Goldberg-Style device for the job.

Starting with a disk caddy on linear rails, [Smith] has a track for the floppy to follow. First it goes through a set of pads with cleaning solution on them, and is then dried off with heating elements. To make it more fun, the device has LEDs and a set of speakers at the bottom to treat the disk to a more complete car wash-esque experience.

Cotton swabs and a cleaning solution are all you really need to do the job by hand, but if you have a lot of floppies, that can get tedious quickly. [Smith] compares his machine’s performance to doing it by hand with both IPA and a dish soap solution showing that his machine does indeed clean the disks and usually makes them more readable than they were before. He cautions that it might be best to make multiple copies of the disk during the cleaning process as it isn’t always constructive though.

Thinking about archiving that stack of floppies under your workbench? While Linux doesn’t support the drives anymore, we’ve covered a couple different methods in the past and the importance of reading the flux.

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Tiny Tapeout 4: A PWM Clone Of Covox Speech Thing

June 21, 2024 by Dave Rowntree 4 Comments

Tiny Tapout is an interesting project, leveraging the power of cloud computing and collaborative purchasing to make the mysterious art of IC design more accessible for hardware hackers. [Yeo Kheng Meng] is one such hacker, and they have produced their very first custom IC for use with their retrocomputing efforts. As they lament, they left it a little late for the shuttle run submission deadline, so they came up with a very simple project with the equivalent behaviour of the Covox Speech Thing, which is just a basic R-2R ladder DAC hanging from a PC parallel port.

The computed gate-level routing of the ASIC layout

The plan was to capture an 8-bit input bus and compare it against a free-running counter. If the input value is larger than the counter, the output goes high; otherwise, it goes low. This produces a PWM waveform representing the input value. Following the digital output with an RC low-pass filter will generate an analogue representation. It’s all very simple stuff. A few details to contend with are specific to Tiny Tapout, such as taking note of the enable and global resets. These are passed down from the chip-level wrapper to indicate when your design has control of the physical IOs and is selected for operation. [Yeo] noticed that the GitHub post-synthesis simulation failed due to not taking note of the reset condition and initialising those pesky flip-flops.

After throwing the design down onto a Mimas A7 Artix 7 FPGA board for a quick test, data sent from a parallel port-connected PC popped out as a PWM waveform as expected, and some test audio could be played. Whilst it may be true that you don’t have to prototype on an FPGA, and some would argue that it’s a lot of extra effort for many cases, without a good quality graphical simulation and robust testbench, you’re practically working blind. And that’s not how working chips get made.

If you want to read into Tiny Tapeout some more, then we’ve a quick guide for that. Or, perhaps hear it direct from the team instead?

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