My newest Mac next to my oldest Mac I pulled out a dual floppy Mac SE for the Macintosh 30th anniversary for a spur of the moment photo. Since I had it out I thought it would be fun to have it dial in for BBS Week . But while I had a bootable external hard drive with System 7.5.5 and Crystal Quest, it had no other software on it, not even the AppleTalk drivers. Since it has been too long for me to remember which files I needed to add to get at least AppleTalk working, I decided to do a...

Glitchy Not long after getting the BBC Micro working with US power and a VGA monitor, I discovered it had an issue in modes 0 through 3 when hitting return enough times to make the screen scroll. At first the prompt would move over towards the center of the screen, and then it would start filling the screen with garbage. It sort of looked like bad RAM, but I wasn't convinced of that because I noticed that some of the garbage would actually twinkle as I typed, so it appeared more that...

With it being BBS Week over on RetroBattlestations , many people are trying to get their retro computers online so they can connect to a BBS over the Internet. One reason for wanting to connect over the internet is because phone calls cost money, and for others (like me), we don't even have a phone line to use with a modem anymore. Some of the discussion has pointed to some specialized serial to Ethernet or serial to WiFi adapters. Those boxes can be over $300 so I thought I’d put...

Some time in the early part of last year, Disney released a small papercraft R2D2 . After printing out a few in the office, I printed out a gigantic one that was life size . Once that one had been assembled I had decided that it was so cool that I was going to adapt the design and at Christmas someone was going to get a present wrapped like R2D2. In order to save time I simplified the shape of R2D2, making the body and legs simple rectangular boxes. I had to make my own boxes to get the scale...

I remember the first time I discovered the option in a PC BIOS to boot from LAN. I was very excited because to me it meant that I could finally do something with a PC that I had been doing with NeXT computers for a long time. Of course the first time I tried it I was immediately disappointed. It turned out that the built-in BIOS on computers had no idea how to talk to a random network interface card that had been installed in a slot. I did a little research and found out that you had to install...