When I first saw this clip from the BBC show Tomorrow's World several months ago I was fascinated by it and was impressed that they were sending a program for two different models of computers. It was also interesting that they chose to write something for the Apple II. Since then I thought it would be neat to try loading the program simultaneously on both models of computer and I thought Cassette Week would be the perfect time to try it! Unfortunately it took much longer to get...

I thought it would be nice to make a portable PBX that could travel with me when I take some of my retro computers places to demo them. The PBX would let me demonstrate how dial-up works without needing to find an actual working land-line, and if a land line was even available, without having to make an expensive long distance call. I can't remember what keywords I was looking for but the first model I came across was a Cisco SPA122 and when I looked on eBay there was one with a...

My Plex server continues to fill up, mostly with various TV series and cartoons. I generally prefer to get my content from DVD or Blu-Ray disks because most of the time they include chapter markers. Chapter markers are fairly important to me, at least for TV series. Why? Because when you're watching a TV series it gets old having to watch the opening titles every single time, and trying to skip over them can be tricky when they aren't a nice even multiple of 30 or 60 seconds. Another...

Just as the 40th birthday of the Commodore PET rolled around I managed to get a Commodore PET 2001 with the itty bitty calculator keyboard and a built-in cassette drive. The cassette drive on my model is some off-the-shelf cassette player that Commodore hacked up with a bandsaw and mounted under the lid of the PET. Old brittle belt Of course being 40 years old the belt on the tape drive had long since become stiff and brittle and broke into pieces when I removed the tape drive from the...

After bringing home an IMSAI with a JAIR 8080 board from VCF West it didn't take long before I wanted to get it connected to something else. As always, my go-to communications program is Kermit. Since the JAIR 8080 board is a little bit different than other S100 or CP/M computers, I wasn't sure if there would be support for the serial ports in Kermit already. After trying out a generic Kermit build I discovered that it was going to require actually modifying Kermit to add support for...