We take so much for granted now. In 1982, you would have to fork over the cost of a new Nissan Sentra just to type the same letters you can type now with any e-waste dumpster laptop made in the last 20 years, a $50 inkjet printer, and an office suite you can download for free. But would you look as cool doing it? I would definitely love that #trs80 and the #dotmatrix printer for my collection. #retrocomputers #retrocomputing #radioshack #8bit #z80 #tandy #scripsit

And one of the most interesting things about the PA-RISC based HP-9000 712 series is its Color Recovery system (allowing approximated 24-bit color from an 8-bit framebuffer -- which is effective and fascinating) and also, for me, the fact that it runs NEXTSTEP.

It's my fastest NEXTSTEP machine.

#HP #HPUX #UNIX #NEXTSTEP #NeXT #workstaiton #vintagecomputing #retrocomputing #retrocomputers #CPU #computing #blog

https://mastodon.social/@OpenPA/114991772837281984

Happy Birthday to the venerable MOS 6502

https://hackaday.com/2025/08/04/happy-birthday-6502/ #6502

At one time it was state of the art, and they kept using it. I wonder if some of these are still in use in some silo in North Dakota?
#RetroComputers

Oh no, not another #retrocomputers post!

I've managed to load a game onto the Ministrel Forth. Without using a tape recorder. I'm so proud I figured it out...

What do they say?

"Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall."

Interesting stuff at

https://github.com/markgbeckett/jupiter_ace/

But beware the converted *.wav files didn't work for me. I had to rebuild them from *.tap files with castool.

I've put a gallery of photos I took during the INIT HELLO Apple II conference at the System Source Computer Museum this past weekend online for anyone who might like a look at some of the festivities.

What a wonderful time it was! Can't wait for next year!

https://www.flickr.com/photos/blakespot/albums/72177720328016203/

Spotted at the System Source Computer Museum: Missile Command 3.0 running on a Xerox Alto.

How many people wrote games for the Alto?! I wonder if this guy went on to bigger things?

DecentCart2350, new upcoming open source #Atari8bit computers multicart with a nice screen (and many other useful features - see video). Entry for ABBUC Hardware Contest 2025. https://youtu.be/o-sEndb4mEI #atari #retrocomputers

Picked up my first ever amber monitor at the INIT HELLO vendor/swap room on day one. Adjusted a little and it looks great!

More INIT HELLO fun at the System Source Computer Museum today!

This place cray!

Hitting the road shortly for INIT HELLO, the new Apple II conference at the System Source Computer Museum in Baltimore. Fun, retro weekend ahead!

https://init-hello.org

This is fascinating, the Computer Devices' DOT, the a portable that was the first computer to ship with Sony 3.5-inch disk drives and it had a *widescreen* CRT display (which supported 132x25 textmode!).

And the video ... has some surprises...

Well worth a watch.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AR5i9BnJqlA

So if you ever wondered how OpenBSD 7.7 (most recent one at the time of writing) works on 23-year old PC, I have recorded a boot process.
CPU: AMD Athlon XP 2000+ (single-core 1.6 Ghz) from 2002. i386, of course
RAM: 512 Mb DDR2
HDD: Some Western Digital 80Gb hard drive from ~2004
Fresh OpenBSD installation without any tweaks and tuning boots in 88 seconds.
There's definitely a room for improvement such as turning off libraries reordering (we should't worry about security too much on such machine). Less then a minute is easily possible.
But still, results are amazing, I think. It's a 23-year old PC! And it runs the most recent OS without any trouble. Try to do that with Windows 11 or any mainstream Linux distro.
Also, #FVWM is pretty snappy and works just fine.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jrCtwh8yqU8