Silicon Valley has the reputation of being the birthplace of our hyper-connected Internet age, the hub of companies such as Apple, Google and Facebook. However, a pioneering company here in central Ohio is responsible for developing and popularizing many of the technologies we take for granted today.

A listener submitted a question to WOSU’s Curious Cbus series wanting to know more about the legacy of CompuServe and what it meant to go online before the Internet.

That legacy was recently commemorated by the Ohio History Connection when they installed a historical marker in Upper Arlington — near the corner of Arlington Center and Henderson roads — where the company located its computer center and corporate building in 1973.

The plaque explains that CompuServe was "the first major online information service provider," and that its subscribers were among the first to have access to email, online newspapers and magazines and the ability to share and download files.

With Google's assault on Invidious leaving it inoperable, consider watching this video with FreeTube, a nifty open source program that lets you watch youtube videos privately!

Came across an old USB floppy drive. I plugged it into my machine and it shows up, but I can't tell it it's actually working or not. When plugged in, it sounds like it's continuously reading, so I kind of want to test it. Can you even buy floppy disks any more?

That said, if I don't have any disks, I guess the question of whether or not it works is moot anyways.

I dumped the ROM out of a piece of retro-tech and have been working through the code in Ghidra. Unfortunately, I can’t exactly decompile it because I don’t think it was originally written in a higher level language.

For example, the stack is rarely used and most functions either deal entirely in global variables, or binary values are passed back using the carry or other low-level bits. Trying to turn it into C would just make spaghetti code with a different sauce.

So my current plan is to just comment every subroutine as best I can, but that still leaves a few massive lookup tables that should be dropped into a spreadsheet of some sort to add context. Not to mention schematics.

My question is what’s the best way to present all of this? I’d like to open-source the result, so a simple PDF is not ideal. I guess I should make a GitHub project? Are there any good examples or templates I can draw on?

A few days ago I posted about my old PC and there was some interest, here's an update.

tldr: the hdd saved everything! It has windows 3.1 and all the games I remember are still there.

Longer story: I bought a few adapters for PATA/IDE to USB and they didn't work. I had this weird issue where when I plugged the usb into my computer, the drive would power off. You can hear it spinning when it's on, plug in USB, drive powers off. Unplug USB, drive powers back on. So after buying 2 different adapters, I gave up on trying to read it that way.

Then, I got a floppy reader and a bunch of floppy disks. The software testdisk has a DOS version, so I copied that to a floppy and ran it on the computer. While it was analyzing the HDD it told me in an error message that the drive appeared smaller than it actually is, and I should update my bios settings.

After struggling to figure out how to get to bios (ctrl alt s, AFTER BOOTING), I googled my drive model and found the cylinders, heads, sectors information and manually typed that into the BIOS as a "user defined" hard drive, and that was all it needed to be able to read the drive.

After that it booted straight into PC DOS + Windows 3.1 and everything is there. I found recipes, games, and other programs.

I was going to try to send files over serial, but it wasn't working for me (i still haven't tried zmodem yet) but I couldn't even receive an echo to the serial port. So I've been backing things up by copying to floppy disk, then reading the disk on my laptop with a reader.

!Image of hard drive

!Image of the computer running kings quest

!Running testdisk

I have this vintage pc that I dug up and recently powered on, the hard drive seems to be failing (sector read errors) but I have a bunch of floppy disks i tried running today and it still works as long as it's running from the floppy and doesn't need to be installed first.

If you guys are interested, I'll post it running some things tomorrow. There's a bunch of things I want to do with it like try to replace the hard drive, get it online, and get a compiler so I can port programs or write new ones for it. Maybe install linux if that's a possibility on 6MB of RAM.

!Image of BIOS

!Image of directory listing

I was recently gifted an immaculate Apple IIc, but it came without a power supply. I wasn’t able to find a replacement online, and so I am hoping someone with more knowledge than me knows where I may be able to find one?

from 1994

I have an old ThinkPad T42 coming my way. I plan to use it alongside my daily driver mainly for reading, emacs, and retro gaming. I will be dual booting a lightweight flavour of Linux (TBD) and Windows 98 on it.

However, I am a bit concerned about its ability to handle today's internet, with all of its heavy websites.

I would love to hear from those of you who are still using old ThinkPads (or other vintage laptops) in 2024. How do you make it work? Do you use lightweight browsers, specific configurations, or lightweight websites to get around the limitations of older hardware?

Are there any specific tips or tricks you can share for getting the most out of an old ThinkPad on the modern web?

Looking forward to hearing about your experiences!

I'm looking for one that is malware free

Alternative archive.today link.

Created by a company called Thinking Machines, and intended for AI applications... how far we've come 😆 .

https://automa.triapul.cz/xorgless-occ/

https://bb.deadnet.se/viewforum.php?f=20

A beautifully restored A31p

!

A fascinating look back at a time when people and businesses had to be sold on the idea of client/server paradigms.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/17127944

I've been playing with an idea that would involve running a machine over a delay-tolerant mesh network. The thing is, each packet is precious and needs to be pretty much self contained in that situation, while modern systems assume SSH-like continuous interaction with the user.

Has anyone heard of anything pre-existing that would work here? I figured if anyone would know about situations where each character is expensive, it would be you folks.

Alternative Youtube Link

Alternative Youtube Link

I recently stumbled upon a channel that definitely belongs here. A pair from Slovakia presents rare Soviet-era computers and other technology.

Alternative Youtube Link

So I'm cleaning out a house and found a brand new Gateway2k Pentium 4 computer. Someone opened the boxes but never took the computer out, its all still in the plastic and I don't want to ruin the unboxing for someone that is into this. The computer is free to a good home in the Boston metro area to make your retro gaming dreams come true! Shoot me a message, first come, first served.

P4 Computer - Gateway 2000 model 510 - part number 2800434

17" TFT Monitor - Gateway FPD1730

Speakers - Boston Acoustics BA745

Edit: Found a taker, hopefully it goes to it's forever home on Saturday!

Edit edit: its gone!