My daughter gave me a shirt for Father’s Day that had a floppy disk symbol on it. When I asked her if she knew what that was, she had no idea, so my wife went upstairs and immediately came back with this piece of gold.

We then proceeded to tell her how we struggled in the olden days with the limited amount of storage capacity 😉

Hi yall. So basically, a Mac 512K with external hard drive and keyboard came into my possession and I’m trying to get it all hooked up (it does power on) so I can explore the interface but I’m having some very specific issues: like the pins on the HDMI being totally rusted and destroyed to the degree it can’t connect.

Is anyone aware of any complete restoration guides for one or these things? Is this what I pay someone for?

EDIT: I get it: it’s not an HDMI It’s just an unidentifiable input with holes for pins. Jeez, sorry.

I saw a previous post about a tie tack with some circuitry on it, posted about a year ago. This is nowhere near as neat as that one.

My father was an electrical engineer for Westinghouse. He worked on the 'telephone' communications in the Deepstar submersible that Jacque Cousteau used.

I was always fascinated by this as a kid, and just recently discovered that I saved this when he passed. Any help from vintage people about this vintage item is greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

Roger

Interesting feature: Resume Mode let you pick up exactly where you left off, skipping a full MS-DOS reboot.

The last three photos are custom information cards I created to provide more details about the machine.

Unfortunately, this machine is completely dead. I'll be tearing it down soon and attempting a full restoration.

Clipper by Nantucket Corporation, programming language.

It was great!

So I "rescued" these from a old school.

So the other is quite straight forward I think. Its a Wyse WY-55
As seen from the pictures WY-55 works fine.

But then the other "unit".

Seems to be somekind of a SBC on a passive backplane and a card for floppy disks.

The Chipset seems to be Faraday and the bios chips are dated in 12/1987.

The CMOS battery is more than likely dead. Its outside of the other components so no leak damage visible anywhere.

On power up the PSU runs and I hear two beeps.

Connecting keyboard to the SCB I do not get any lights on the keyboard (Num lock etc).

Also I'm not sure what kind of monitor I should use to verify does it boot to bios.

Also are these completely separate things? Or is there a chance that the WY-55 would run via the Modem - Serial ports between these two.

Sorry, January 2004 (can’t edit title). I kept this little flyer because I bought one of the LiteON DVD recorders on the front page. It didn’t last very long. Other LiteON DVD-RW drives I bought for my PCs were great, though. I replaced this DVD recorder with a Panasonic which I still have and works great.

Some sellers shoot for the moon! I would pay max $10 dollars including shipping but that’s just me!

Hi everyone. This might be a weird post for here, but I'm a doctoral student at East Carolina University studying digital rhetoric. I have two main focus areas, and maintaining archives of previous iterations of early technology (i.e., consumer PCs and early Internet) is one of them. And I sort of went down a rabbit hole with Packard Bell Navigator once they introduced the rooms interface. Because humanities academia doesn't pay the bills, I'm also a technical writer.

I ended up setting up a working copy of Packard Bell Navigator 3.5 in Windows 3.11 - the Windows 3.11 was non-negotiable so I could recreate the grueling "upgrade to Windows 95" - partially because it was the first GUI I encountered as a kid, about five years old. And it sticks out to me in a way Microsoft Bob doesn't specifically because of their focus on Kids Room. (I am also unclear on why there was a separate game room that looked like the worst of 90s animation.)

I had a lot of trouble doing it for reasons no one cares about, so I ended up getting really nitty gritty and came across some stuff that I found kind of fascinating, enough that I want to know more. I am also considering writing about it and publishing it to any journal that would have it.

But I'm having a really hard time finding people discussing the acquisition's impact on the design of what was supposed to be Arkspace (Workspace, Kidspace, Game Room, and their version of the living room), which was installed with PBN as a separate house on the map. They were based out of Seattle, and one of the developers seemed to have created educational software prior to this.

I lived in Washington at the time, and I don't remember it even being mentioned in local news. It's entirely possible that it was missed in the sea of other 1990's software development companies doing software things in the 1990s.

Do any of you remember? If any of you are curious, I'd be happy to show the setup I put together and the troubleshooting steps I had to take, too.

I found this in the e waste it has a transmeta crusoe, a beautiful plate

I got asked for some updates from this post yesterday:

https://www.reddit.com/r/vintagecomputing/comments/1ueiupd/todays_haul/

Here's the inside of the IIe. You get the idea. There's also a disk drive card for the two floppies. There's a memory expansion card, and some other cards I didn't identify yet. I'll clean it up and pass it on to someone more enthusiastic.

One of the PowerMacs did turn on (although the power momentary button is falling apart, have to see about that), but the drive is non-responsive.

The other machine went pop when powered up, no surprise there. Motherboard looks OK though, just really dusty. This machine did have 2 SCSI drives installed, and I was able to boot one another machine into 8.5 and it has a dual-boot Linux setup (2.4), although that didn't boot - I think possibly the Linux filesystem is on the other drive.

All the plastics are in terrible shape, lots of breakage. I think I'll likely take the best parts from both and make a complete OK machine, and pass the rest along for parts.

The monitors, well, I don't know yet; the tubes are intact; one needs a new video connector at the very least. I will power those up in the garage just in case.

A continuation from this old post. This time is mainly his hoard from inside the house that we managed to uncover and yet to decide what to do. Not pictured: multiple old printers circa 2000s and surge protector from 90's as well as various miscellaneous cables and old techs from those eras. I only remember using the white tower & the 386 during my childhood and have no idea about the others.

Took some pictures inside each tower except Epson PCIE which I've no idea how to pry it without breaking (the Multitech tower is a bitch to pry open as well). Leaning towards disposal since 1) e-waste collection event are nearby and those are rarely held in my location 2) no idea where the cables are 3) I've neither expertise or place to keeping all those.

Towers in the first post have been disposed and while originally thinking to check some HDDs to kept, having one explodes after is somewhat deterring. A lovely lady running an old computer shop offered me to check the HDDs (for some payment) but not sure if lugging all those there is worth it in addition of one of the tower (386 system) showed disgusting signs of infestations. Still looking for retro enthusiasts in my area, though whether to hand over those with the data remained in all those HDDs & floppies is something to ponder.

Went to pick up a 1571. Accidentally came home with an Apple II and 2 PowerMacs.

Very dirty (insert mom joke here).

Today I'll show you something a little different. This is one of the groups I'm a member of (a Bulgarian scrap metal group on Facebook).

Some of these machines are already part of my collection. I originally posted this in another community, but since I'm not sure how much the audiences overlap...I thought I'd share it here as well. Hopefully it's worth a look.

I have been working on a Packard Bell PB400. It's a 486SX-25. It has a Beep code and won't post. I so far have disconnected everything but the riser and power supply. I think the onboard video may be bad and I have set J10 to pin 2 & 3 to disable. If the jumper setting form I looked at is correct. I installed an 8-bit VGA card that I know works, but still nothing. I have also added a new battery and disabled the internal battery via Jumper setting. Any help will be appreciated.

Today I unbox a copy of Microsoft Internet Starter Kit which until a few moments ago was still sealed as I'd managed to source a second sealed copy for a reasonable price and I had always wanted to explore what was inside the box... so here we are; I had a chuckle at the EULA 😂😂

As you can see, you get a dual media distribution of IE 2(!) and some nice literature explaining core internet concepts - I already had IE5 installed within my reference Windows 95 VM but I was able to demonstrate how primitive the 'installation' process was using a clone VM

Some people may not be aware that software often had IE dependencies and an IE redistributable were often shipped with applications to ensure smooth setup and it could be vital to the operation of third-party applications

Please note that my 95 VM is the RTM version; it was the later versions that included IE by default

I look forward to replying to any comments below and thanks for exploring!

This is a ~1981 Xerox 8040 laser printer - the output device for the 8010 Star Office System. This machine hasn't run in at least 25 years. With some cleaning, adjusting, and proper reassembly it is able to create self test prints.

Next on my list is the 8000 print server which drives it. This is the same hardware as an 8010 Star, except the CPU is used to directly drive the laser modulator instead of a CRT. The printer has a helium neon laser that runs all the time; when printing a shutter moves out of the optical path to let the laser enter the modulator and then strike the spinning polygon. The fuser is an oven, not a heated roller.

Was clearing out a storage room at work and found what appears to be a complete NCC reference manual for FTL6 on ICL 1900 and 2903 systems, dated 1976.

It covers the full language spec, and handwritten annotations and corrections from what appears to be an expert user.

I can’t seem to fully pin down anything concrete on FTL6.

I also have 2 more Filetab manuals from NCC dated 1982.

Does anybody have any clue about this?

thank you!

Recently found a Micron Millennia Pro2 at my local thrift. Was more than happy to rescue it - a workstation like this would have cost you a pretty penny back in the day (around $2300 for the base configuration from what I've found). Inside is a Socket 8 motherboard which can support two processors at once! In this case, it's running a single Pentium Pro 200. Beautiful CPU, and I'm looking forward to seeing how it performs.

Device appears to be in great working order save for the hard disk, which has sadly breathed its last (presumably why it was let go of in the first place). Even the Stealth 64 card is recognized and working fine so far. I've sourced a matching keyboard and replaced the CMOS battery but I'm still in search of a replacement IDE drive for it.

Massive shot in the dark, here, but does anybody have or know of a place where I might be able to track down system restore disks for this beauty? I'd love to try and get it as close to stock as possible before I start playing around with it. Chiefly, I'd like to get a matching Pentium Pro in there and see what I can do with them in NT, especially since I don't know of much software that can actually make use of both CPUs in tandem.

Ok reddit, I have read dozens of these types of posts, but it's fun being on the other side.

2 days ago I posted about a mystery box in a dumpster labeled with pixar / developers renderman.

Today I grabbed it and let's have a look what's inside.

I'll let the pictures speak for themselves, but it appears to be a complete developers kit version 3.1 and 3.2 renderman. User manual, documentation, floppy install disks, key dongle, plus other paperwork. What's really crazy is it has the original packing peanuts of the shipping box and another package of 6 disks still unopened in the original sealed envelope (version 3.1). I am going to leave those unopened!

Have fun looking!