Just a few days before the end of #MARCHintosh a call went out over Mastodon asking if anyone had an Apple IIe with an Apple Workstation Card . The hope was that someone could try to use it to join the #GlobalTalk network. While I have the hardware required, I had been reluctant to try and participate in GlobalTalk. Many posts had gone by my feed about the steps required to join and it looked like quite a bit of work. I replied that I had the hardware available but wasn't sure about being...

When I got the #ForestApples many years ago, one of them came with a 16k Language Card clone in slot zero, and another RAM card in slot one. The Language Card clone had a ribbon cable going to the RAM socket at E3 as usual. The other RAM card also had its own ribbon cable going to another RAM socket! It looked like there were two Language Cards installed, something I had never seen before. I soon discovered that the extra RAM card was a Legend Industries 64KC. It had 64k of RAM instead of a...

A little over a year since I started down this road , I've finally managed to do it. There were definitely some unexpected twists and turns along the way. But yes, that's right, it's now possible to write out Victor 9000 / Sirius 1 floppy disks without having to use an actual Victor machine. As with everything, one project leads to another. There is an annual BBS Week contest on RetroBattlestations that happens in the middle of February. With my success of getting my Victor to...

In February of 2021, with a brand new standing desk completely devoid of clutter, I polled Twitter to ask what retro computing project I should attempt . Trying to get my Victor 9000 to boot was the most popular, and so off I went to attempt it, knowing in advance that it was likely to be an extremely difficult challenge, because not only does the Victor use a rather unusual floppy encoding system, I wasn't even sure if my Victor was completely working. The Victor 9000 (renamed as the...

Something I’ve wanted to do for several years is to create a cross-platform 5.25” floppy, one that could be used on two different incompatible computer systems. Not by making a “flippy” disk with data for one system on one side and data for the other on the back, but instead with everything all on a single side. This may seem like it would be trivial, but back when the 5.25” floppy was king every computer system had its own idea of how data would be encoded at a...