My TRS-80 Model II Last weekend one of my usual sources of inspiration, @duhproject, received a Commodore 128. A lot of people on Twitter started talking about  their  128s, so I had to get mine out too. I thought it would be interesting to try out a true 80 column terminal program under CP/M since it was something that the 128 could do that that 64 doesn’t. It didn’t take long before I decided that running CP/M from a 5.25” drive wasn’t “CP/M...

@MWTremblay on Twitter was asking me if I hung out regularly on IRC, and although I’ve written my own IRC client, that was a long time ago and don’t really use IRC much anymore. I mentioned that I use Twitter as my new IRC, and he said he was looking for something more compatible with an Atari XE. Challenge accepted! About a week later I found the time to work on that project and spent the day cobbling up a BBS door in Objective-C that would allow a user to send a tweet. Another...

While tinkering with my BBS this week I again found myself frustrated with a couple of bugs in tcpser. The first one was that it only worked with 8N1 data. A few of the comm programs on my more obscure computers have no settings to choose parity, and will insist on either doing mark parity or even parity. That meant that I couldn’t even enter the AT command to dial out.   An easy fix would have been to just strip the high bit so that tcpser would see the AT commands, but that would...

Update 2016 Jun 8: I was able to get the typewriter open and it is now working and printing A couple of weeks ago I picked up a Smith-Corona Memory Correct 400 Messenger at Goodwill. I debated getting it since I already have enough retro stuff around the house, but every single time I’m at a Goodwill I look at all the typewriters to see if they have some kind of serial or parallel port. This one has an external interface which can be connected to a computer using an external box...

Piled on the floor A couple of years ago my tiny little 9.5’ x 9.5’ guest room/craft room became overloaded when several very large printers that I had been keeping at the office got jammed in there. And with the printers in there, all of the consumables that go with them such as reams of tabloid paper, color laser cartridges, ink jet cartridges, rolls of E size paper, and many rolls of vinyl also got dumped in there, leaving no room at all.   To free up some floor space...