Submission + - Running CP/M and Turbo Pascal on a 40 year old Apple II Clone (youtube.com)

Submitted by Shayde on Monday April 01, 2024 @10:21PM

Shayde writes: In 1984, Apple II's were at the top of their game in the 8 bit market. A company in New Jersey decided to get in on the action and built an exact clone of the Apple. The Franklin Ace was chip and rom compatible with the Apple II, and that led to it's downfall. In this video we resurrect and old Franklin Ace and not only boot ProDOS, but also get the Z80 coprocessor up and running, and relive what coding in Turbo Pascal in the 80s was like.

Submission + - Restoring a 1986 DEC PDP/11 Minicomputer - Will it boot?? (youtube.com) 1

Submitted by Shayde on Wednesday December 06, 2023 @07:52PM

Shayde writes: I've been working on a PDP/11 I basically got as a 'barn find' from an estate sale a year ago. The project has absolutely had it's ups and downs, as the knowledgebase for these machines is aging quickly. I'm hoping to restore my own expertise with this build, but it's been challenging finding parts, technical details, and just plain information.

I leaned pretty heavily on the folks at the Vintage Computing Federation (vcfed.org), as well as connections I've made in the industry — and made some great progress.

The latest chapter in how it's going was just posted, check it out if you're keen on retrocomputing and old minicomputers and DEC gear.

Comment Overeducated. (Score 1) 178

by apc on Monday November 26, 2012 @08:32PM (#42100349) Attached to: Compared to my siblings ...

What's substantially more or less?

I have a BA, a law degree (JD), and a master's degree (LLM).
My sister has a BA, two master's degrees (MA and M.Ed.) and a PhD.
So I have ~4.5 years of post-BA, and my sister has 6-7. Is that substantially more? We both have more education than about 95% of the public....

DragonFly BSD 3.0 Released 102

Posted by timothy on Sunday February 26, 2012 @07:28AM from the it's-full-of-bug dept.

An anonymous reader writes with word of the release earlier this week, after eight months of development, of DragonFly BSD 3.0. The release includes improved scalability through finer-grained locking, improvements to the HAMMER file system in low-memory configurations, and a TrueCrypt-compatible disk encryption system. DragonFly is an installable system, but it can also be run live from CD, DVD, or USB key.

Comment So long and thanks for all the csh :-( (Score 1) 725

by sczimme on Thursday October 13, 2011 @08:23AM (#37700124) Attached to: Dennis Ritchie, Creator of C Programming Language, Passed Away

It's a little unnerving to think about how long Unix has been part of my career. Thanks, dmr.

Comment Where is... (Score 1) 264

by apc on Wednesday March 30, 2011 @07:56PM (#35672952) Attached to: My in-use, non-TV displays add up to (diag.):

"I'm still on a teletype, you insensitive clod!"

ITC Investigates Xbox 360 After Motorola Complaint 71

Posted by Soulskill on Wednesday December 22, 2010 @04:32AM from the papers-please dept.

FlorianMueller writes "The US International Trade Commission, which is increasingly popular as a patent enforcement agency, voted to investigate a complaint filed by Motorola against Microsoft last month. Motorola claims that the Xbox infringes five of its patents. In October, Microsoft complained against Motorola, alleging patent infringement by its Android-based smartphones. Apple, Nokia and HTC are also involved with ITC investigations as complainants and respondents. A new one-page overview document shows the ongoing ITC investigations related to smartphones and the products that the complainants would like to have banned from entry into the US market. The good news is that any import bans won't be ordered until long after Christmas. The ITC is faster than courts, but not that fast."

Comment Hopefully they'll be there... (Score 4, Interesting) 610

by marcsiry on Tuesday December 07, 2010 @03:45PM (#34478134) Attached to: Corporations Hiring Hooky Hunters

...on the Sunday morning when I'm on an eight hour outage call starting at 4AM...

or the Monday night when I stay at the office until 10 working on a time sensitive launch...

do they turn the "hooky" clock backwards in that case?

Debt Collectors Using Facebook To Embarrass Those Who Owe 266

Posted by samzenpus on Wednesday November 17, 2010 @12:40PM from the pay-up-or-be-unfriended dept.

Not even the tranquility of FarmVille can save you from the long arm of debt collectors. Melanie Beacham says that a collector from MarkOne Financial contacted her relatives about her past due car note via Facebook. She is filing suit alleging that the company is harassing her family. Tampa based consumer attorney Billy Howard of Morgan & Morgan says, "Now Facebook does a debt collectors work for them. Now it's not only family members, it's all of your associates. It's a very powerful tool for debt collectors to use."

Early Kinect Games Kill Buyers' Access To Xbox Live 111

Posted by Soulskill on Friday October 29, 2010 @07:57PM from the enjoy-those-support-calls dept.

Stoobalou writes "Microsoft's Kinect motion controller isn't due to ship until November 4th, but one retailer has jumped the gun, leaving a number of gamers with a bit of a quandary. The un-named distributor has sent what Microsoft describes as 'a very small number' of Kinect systems to lucky buyers who might not consider themselves quite so lucky if they try to use the device and its bundled games. Installing the games will require a firmware upgrade, which is nothing out of the ordinary, but in this case the upgrade hasn't yet been released. Attempting to install the non-existent update seems to fool the console into thinking you are trying to play a pirated game and locks the user out of Microsoft's Xbox Live on-line service."

1928 Time Traveler Caught On Film? 685

Posted by samzenpus on Thursday October 28, 2010 @02:17PM from the I-hate-time-travel-stories dept.

Many of you have submitted a story about Irish filmmaker George Clarke, who claims to have found a person using a cellphone in the "unused footage" section of the DVD The Circus, a Charlie Chaplin movie filmed in 1928. To me the bigger mystery is how someone who appears to be the offspring of Ram-Man and The Penguin got into a movie in the first place, especially if they were talking to a little metal box on set. Watch the video and decide for yourself.

Comment Life imitates art (Score 1) 306

by marcsiry on Monday September 27, 2010 @03:38PM (#33715492) Attached to: United Nations Names Ambassador To Aliens

In the movie "Men In Black," Tommy Lee Jones' character makes an offhand remark to the effect of, "The aliens didn't make contact until we indicated serious interest in making contact by setting up the Men In Black program."

I wonder at what threshold the aliens browse /.?

Fine-Structure Constant Maybe Not So Constant 105

Posted by samzenpus on Sunday September 05, 2010 @06:49PM from the variety-is-the-spice-of-life dept.

Kilrah_il writes "The fine-structure constant, a coupling constant characterizing the strength of the electromagnetic interaction, has been measured lately by scientists from the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia and has been found to change slightly in light sent from quasars in galaxies as far back as 12 billion years ago. Although the results look promising, caution is advised: 'This would be sensational if it were real, but I'm still not completely convinced that it's not simply systematic errors' in the data, comments cosmologist Max Tegmark of MIT. Craig Hogan of the University of Chicago and the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Ill., acknowledges that 'it's a competent team and a thorough analysis.' But because the work has such profound implications for physics and requires such a high level of precision measurements, 'it needs more proof before we'll believe it.'"

How Death Rally Got Ported 89

Posted by Soulskill on Tuesday August 10, 2010 @10:30PM from the not-the-opposite-of-starboarded dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Last year, I got the opportunity to port Remedy Entertainment's Death Rally to modern platforms off its original MS-DOS sources. I wrote an article about the porting process for Game Developer magazine, and now I've posted the text of the article for general consumption. 'The source software platform was DOS, Watcom C, and some Dos4GW-style DOS extender. The extender basically meant you could use more than 640k of memory, and would not need any weird code for data larger than 64k. The game displayed in VESA 640x480 and MCGA 320x200 graphics modes, all with 8-bit palettes; there was no true color anywhere. There were also some per-frame palette change tricks that emulators have trouble with. The source code was mostly pure C with a couple dozen inline assembly functions. There were a few missing subsystems, specifically audio and networking, which would have to be replaced completely anyway, as well as one file for which the source code was lost and only a compiled object was available.'"

Should the Gov't Pay For Injured Man's Wii? 222

Posted by kdawson on Monday May 03, 2010 @06:38AM from the if-the-wii-fits dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Politicians in the Australian state of Victoria are currently locked in a debate about whether an injured man should be able to claim the cost of a Nintendo Wii for rehabilitation purposes under worker's compensation. The man's doctor apparently recommended he use the Wii Fit exercise device, but both insurance companies and the government itself have blocked the payment and have now ridiculed the idea as paying for video games. But with the Wii Fit increasingly being used for rehabilitation purposes internationally, does the man have a fair case?"