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Submission + - The 1984 Unix PC was a tech and design marvel. Why did it fail so hard? (youtube.com)

Submitted by Shayde
Shayde writes: I love these machines. I was super-active in the Unix-PC usenet groups back in the 90s, organizing BOF meetings at TCF and the like. We hacked the hell out of them. They were small, sexy, and... they ran unix! Unfortunately, they were a commercial failure. There were so many things wrong with them — not just stuff that broke, but the baseline configuration was nigh on worthless.

I recently was able to get another machine and got it up and running (with a few hiccups), so whipped up a video showing all the cool things it can do, but also running through what went wrong and why it ultimately failed.

Submission + - Vintage Computing Nerd looks at the 1983 movie WarGames (youtube.com)

Submitted by Shayde
Shayde writes: One of my favorite movies when I was a wee nerd was WarGames with Matthew Broderick and Ally Sheedy in 1983. For a lot of people it was the introduction to "what you can do with a computer at home, and how much trouble you can get into".

I decided to do a full dig into what's real, what's fantasy, and what's just plain wrong. For a 40+ year old movie, they didn't get much wildly wrong. There's some solid stuff in there, with only a few serious eyerolls.

Really, the most fun was trying to figure out some of the history behind equipment and tools in the movie. Some of it was made up or altered, but there was enough real life hardware and real tools it made it fun to watch and analyze, even by modern standards.

Comment Re:It had USB? I recall they did not. (Score 1) 60

Yeah I saw the USB support there, but there were no physical ports. I'm assuming if I had socketed in a USB PCMCIA card it would have worked. Someone in the comments section noted to me that there were rapid-fire versions of this laptop about the same time, and the version that didn't have USB had a very short run.

Submission + - The 1997 Powerbook G3 - Apple's hope for redemption. (youtube.com)

Submitted by Shayde
Shayde writes: A friend of mine gave me a Powerbook G3 to play around with. Turns out this was one of the first machines able to run OSX, and was built during the transition period for Apple after Steve Jobs came back in to rescue the company from bankruptcy.

Submission + - Hand-wiring an RS232 hookup to get a 30 year old clamshell computer online (youtube.com)

Submitted by Shayde
Shayde writes: I really wanted to get this HP95LX talking to the internet at large, but network stacks for DOS in 1991 were pretty limited, and this machine didn't even have the hardware for a network connection. It did have a serial port though — a flat 4 pin custom interface.

I did a bunch of research and learned how to custom built an RS232 hookup for this port, and using an external Wifi module, got it online and talking to the retrocomputing BBS.

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"A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked." -- John Gall, _Systemantics_

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