Search results for tag #retrocomputing
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Latest update to my #MSDOS #RetroCoding resource list:
Added coding videos by @root42 and @freedosproject
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We had 217 visitors and participants at ICF over the weekend! Thank you to everyone who made it a great event.
If you’d like to support this event and future events, donations are welcome at https://icm.museum
#vintagecomputing #retrocomputing #retrogaming
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ICF participants
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ICF participants
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ICF participants
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ICF participants
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Getting set up for another Interim Computer Festival! At my table I'll be taking about two C compilers for DOS - Turbo C++ 3.0 and Open Watcom 1.9. The 486 running Turbo C++ has both a VGA card and an MDA card for dual-head debugging.
#retrocomputing #dos #icf #sdf
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My table featuring two C compilers for DOS at the Interim Computer Festival.
The Interim Computer Festival FALL 2025 is this Saturday and Sunday 10am-6pm at INTRASPACE 3100 airport way s. Seattle WA 98134
A free event celebrating #vintagecomputing #retrocomputing #retrogaming #event #free #seattle
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Retro micro computers
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The interim computer festival
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A couple of PDP-8 computers
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Event exhibitor cards
The Thinking Machines CM2 debuted last night, Bruce resolved the sense amp issue in the PDP-7 and michael played ADVENT on the PDP-8/e
#retrocomputing #vintagecomputing #retrogaming
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Rick and the CM2
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A centurion CDC drive
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Michael played adventure on the PDP-8/e
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Bruce and Rick at the PDP-7
The PDP-8/e’s RK05 cleaned up and booted OS/8 just fine. Here it is loading up ADVENT for tonight’s event.
icm.museum
We’re ready for this evening!
#vintagecomputing #retrocomputing
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A thinking machines cm2
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A ka10
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The pdp12
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A cm2 processor card
The Interim Computer Festival FALL 2025 is this weekend October 4th and 5th at INTRASPACE from 10am - 6pm each day. This is a free event. Exhibitor registration will close soon.
#free #event #seattle #vintagecomputing #retrocomputing #pnw
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A flyer poster by k8e for the Interim Computer Festival FALL 2025
Saturday we got one of the Symbolics LISP Machines up and running along side the Thinking Machines Connection Machine.
would you like to help us and learn more?
#retrocomputing #vintagecomputing #ai #hpc #hypercube #lisp
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A person with a lisp machine
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A person with a lisp machine and cm2
I just published v0.98 of #jSH, a #JavaScript scripting environment for #MSDOS. This is the 'little' text-mode brother to #DOjS.
- updated curl, mbedTLS and zip
it’s getting there! help us at https://icm.museum to support the Thinking Machines Connection Machine re-animation journey!
#hypercube #supercomputer #ai #bigdata #retrocomputing #vintagecomputing #gpu
Come see us light up the Thinking Machines CM-2 on Thursday October 2nd just before the Interim Computer Festival weekend!
#supercomputing #hypercube #gpu #retrocomputing #vintagecomputing
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Thinking machines CM2
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Thinking machines CM2
boosted#EuroBSDCon #RunBSD #Retrocomputing #Fanboi #StarStruck
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Marshall Kirk McKusick, Eric Allman, a couple of (much) younger BSD developers and myself hovering over an old open-frame PC build which is busy booting NetBSD. Sponsor pull-up poster for Entersekt/Modirum (my employer) in the background.
I'm going to be talking about C compilers and DOS at my next retrocomputing event and I'm going to hand out "quick reference" style cards to anybody that passes by. Here is my first draft; what am I missing that I should include?
(I'm targeting an index card for these, so space is limited.)
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C Programming in DOS Tips quick reference card draft.
Our precursor tech room features electromechanical machines from the 1950s and 1960s
#retrocomputing #vintagecomputing #em #electromechanical
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A teletype, a card sorter and a key punch
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A teletype, a card sorter and a key punch
I'm going to be participating at the next Interim Computer Festival in Seattle in two weeks. Here is the banner for the table that I'm having printed.
October 4th and 5th, Seattle
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Banner for ICF - "C programming in DOS is fun. Change my mind."
Join us on ssh lcm3b2@bitzone.sdf.org in 'com' from the Vintage Computer Festival MidWest today!
#chat #vcfmw #retrocomputing #vintagecomputing #retrogaming
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a list of remote systems in an ascii menu
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a stack of remote systems
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The running remote systems at Interim Computer Museum
Here we go again, #EuroBSDCon! I may have mentioned it, but it's really happening*: I'm giving a talk again, this time titled:
Dirty Tricks: Using #nginx and #Lua to thwart bots and skript kiddies
This talk is specifically for anyone who
- has tried to host a BBS on the Internet,
- is struggling with scrapers and bots,
- lives in the #RetroComputing bubble,
- wants to see an early '90s PC on stage,
- needs a telnet captcha, or
- simply has nothing better to do.
Read more about it here, take a look at the conference schedule, and buy your ticket!
See you there!
#FreeBSD #Security #BSD #RunBSD #DOS #RunDOS #TheDraw #AnsiArt
* I didn't want to post this until I was fairly certain I could even pull this off..
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Introduction screen from my talk, presented in ANSI art. The words "nginx" and "LUA" in large ANSI fonts in the top left and bottom right corners, with some of the text from the talk description (linked in the post) in the middle.
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TL;DR: ISA Matrox cards are really, really slow in DOS.
I recently built an original Pentium 60MHz system, built on an ECS motherboard. Around the same time I received a "mystery" VGA card: A Matrox MGA Impression ISA card. And since most of my builds are "open builds" and therefore easily accessible, that machine got the pleasure of becoming the test bench for the Matrox.
As already revealed, the Matrox performs atrociously bad. So bad, in fact, that I had to test a couple other ISA cards to make sure it wasn't a system issue. I used my go-to benchmarking tool #3DBench from Phil's DOS Benchmark Pack. I really don't want to experience Doom with this card..
And without further ado, the contestants and their results in this spur-of-the-moment benchmark run:
- Baseline: A 32-bit PCI S3 Virge/DX based card with 4MB RAM: A perfectly workable 48.2
- The low-end Trident TVGA9000C with 512KB RAM (this is a real garbage card): A pretty shitty 14.2
- The mid-range Cirrus Logic CL-GD-5422 with 1MB RAM (this is a decent card, know for compatibility but not necessarily speed): A barely bearable 24.7
- And finally, the "star" of the show, the Matrox: A whopping 10.9!
I said it was atrocious, didn't I? But hey, I'm gonna use this one with #OS2 anyway, so who cares about DOS performance, right? ;)
#RetroComputing #Benchmarks #VGA #SlowVGA
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Montage: Close-up of the S3 card installed in the system, next to picture of the 3DBench result
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Montage: Picture of the Trident (a small ISA card) next to picture of the 3DBench result
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Montage: Picture of the Cirrus Logic (small ISA card) next to picture of the 3DBench result
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Montage: Picture of the Matrox (a very large full-length ISA card) next to picture of the 3DBench result
TL;DR: ISA Matrox cards are really, really slow in DOS.
I recently built an original Pentium 60MHz system, built on an ECS motherboard. Around the same time I received a "mystery" VGA card: A Matrox MGA Impression ISA card. And since most of my builds are "open builds" and therefore easily accessible, that machine got the pleasure of becoming the test bench for the Matrox.
As already revealed, the Matrox performs atrociously bad. So bad, in fact, that I had to test a couple other ISA cards to make sure it wasn't a system issue. I used my go-to benchmarking tool #3DBench from Phil's DOS Benchmark Pack. I really don't want to experience Doom with this card..
And without further ado, the contestants and their results in this spur-of-the-moment benchmark run:
- Baseline: A 32-bit PCI S3 Virge/DX based card with 4MB RAM: A perfectly workable 48.2
- The low-end Trident TVGA9000C with 512KB RAM (this is a real garbage card): A pretty shitty 14.2
- The mid-range Cirrus Logic CL-GD-5422 with 1MB RAM (this is a decent card, known for compatibility but not necessarily speed): A barely bearable 24.7
- And finally, the "star" of the show, the Matrox: A whopping 10.9!
I said it was atrocious, didn't I? But hey, I'm gonna use this one with #OS2 anyway, so who cares about DOS performance, right? ;)
#RetroComputing #Benchmarks #VGA #SlowVGA
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Montage: Close-up of the S3 card installed in the system, next to picture of the 3DBench result
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Montage: Picture of the Trident (a small ISA card) next to picture of the 3DBench result
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Montage: Picture of the Cirrus Logic (small ISA card) next to picture of the 3DBench result
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Montage: Picture of the Matrox (a very large full-length ISA card) next to picture of the 3DBench result
The contenders: QuickView Pro version (dvpro), Digital Sound System 3.1 (dss) and MPXPlay 1.67 (mpx). The file: Astral Projection's "Bizarre Contact" from the album "Ten".
Enjoy these clips :D
I mean yeah, great, I get a proper BSD-4.4, 32-bit TCP/IP stack and tools. But it's taken me half a day. Getting the installation files over involved loading packet drivers and using #mTCP in a DOS session. Which works .. surprisingly well. But still .. FixPak43, reboot. MPTS, reboot. Netscape 2.02, reboot. Java 1.18, reboot. Feature Installer plug-in (no reboot). Then, finally, TCP/IP.
All this to have a machine to play with at #Blackvalley.
#OS2 #Retrocomputing #WhyAreYouReadingThis #GoDoSomethingUseful
Turns out Netscape 2.02 is too easy, so in this picture is IBM WebExplorer v1.1h running on OS/2 Warp Connect. Using the magic "work area" feature of folders (mark a folder as a work area to have the OS manage objects within it as a kind of unit), I can open several windows at once. True multi-process browsing 😉
#retrocomputing #browsers #floppy #museum #html #BrowserWars
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OS/2 Warp Connect with four browser windows, a text mode editor editing config.sys, the parent "work area" folder and the launch pad.
Anyway, I've reduced my ambitions ever so slightly, and am now in the process of installing NetBSD (-CURRENT) on what is essentially a 386SX-class machine: 16-bit bus, 24-bit addressing, 16MB RAM, and nearly as unpleasantly slow as the 286 I had planned to use. It is however equipped with an IBM-branded 486SLC, which is from the Blue Lightning series. This one definitely has a full 486 instruction set. More hardware details will follow when I've completed the build (and installation).
Meanwhile, the obligatory screenshot from the installer. Note the ETA for simply unpacking base.tgz ..
#RunBSD #Retrocomputing #Slowcomputing
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Screenshot from installer. Shows base.txz being extracted, at a speed of 110 KB/s. ETA given is about 30 minutes, which turned out to be relatively accurate.
Now I need to get it properly configured and tested with DOS, then I can move on to the next steps - which involve the CPU upgrade, and assuming that works, creating actual, physical floppies.
(In other news, the #snac instance on this poor Pentium Pro server is sweating hard whenever I post something. So let me know at @ltning@anduin.net if you have problems receiving/reading my posts. I've made some tweaks but it will be unavoidably detained for a while following each post, my apologies for that..)
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Picture of BIOS during boot. It's a 1990 American Megatrends BIOS, for the TD60C board, BIOS version 2.42B. It shows a 20MHz CPU clock and 15872 KB RAM tested OK.
The latest mTCP for DOS is available!
This version includes some changes to improve TCP reliability on long running (but idle) connections, black & white Sixel graphics in Telnet, a Telnet emulation bug fix, and other small fixes sprinkled around.
The source code to NetDrive (network attached storage) is also published now - enjoy reading an unholy mix of x86 assembly code talking to Golang over UDP!
Spread the word! Friends don't let friends run old code ...