All Questions

The question "Which endian was the Intel 4004?" generated some discussion about the distinction between the endianness of instructions versus data. In the case of the 4004, the code space ...

Back when I was a fair bit younger, my father and I upgraded our old 286/486 to a snazzy Pentium and a fresh copy of the just-released Windows 95. I seem to recall a strange easter egg on the upgrade ...

Looking for Vector-06C schematics in any form.

The original IBM PC supplied several voltages: +5 V, -5 V, +12 V, and -12 V. Which computer supplied the most DC voltages? To facilitate the comparison, let's agree on some uniform criteria for what ...

The Intel 4004 had 4-bit buses and data words, but the program counter and code address space was 12 bits. Was the 4004 little endian (like all of Intel's later microprocessors and microcontrollers) ...

I have an old laptop (Dell Inspiron 3500 running Windows 98) which had a hard drive failure. I searched for HDDs but the 5 GB ones (that was the original drive's capacity) were unreasonably priced. I ...

I have a copy of BasiliskII (I'm aware of Cockatrice, but it does not seem to be made for Linux, at least not the versions I downloaded). BasiliskII works nicely apart from networking. What I'd like ...

I'm looking to try and get a VIA sound card working in Windows 98. I have everything else running no problems, just the sound. I've tried everything I can think of including VIA’s website which lists ...

I came across an old service which listens on a range of TCP ports. Client connections are handled with this scheme: Client connects to the first port Server answers with a port number and closes the ...

I have an old Philips Videopac C52 video game console of the  Philips Odyssey 2 family like the G-7000 with 128-byte RAM: While checking its boards to compare with the schematics I got for the G-7000 ...

I have a problem with my Macintosh SE / 30. More precisely, I only see the underside on the screen, ie from the center to the bottom. The other half, the one from the center up, appears completely ...

I work as a teacher and I have a laptop model MacBook Pro. I like retro technology, so I bought an iMac G3, it works perfectly. I want to use iMac G3 like an extra screen for the laptop. I have a DVI ...

I was watching a video on Youtube of some guys exploring an abandoned nuclear power plant(I believe to be in the US or Canada) that was decommissioned around 1991, and noticed this equipment at one ...

Mapping more than 64kb of address space regarding cjs answer: How to get back from RAM1 to ROM after setting the bank bit to 1? the next instruction from the program counter would be read from RAM1 ...

I need to build a retro machine so that I can access an HDD that required manual input of BIOS parameters. (Yes, I have that information.) The only ID I can find is ES1O/4A 280695 which yields nothing ...

I have made up a DB9 connector with connections to an Arduino. I am using pins 1 to 4 on the connector. On the Arduino I have a small program which writes out a series of digital HIGH signals to the ...

I am watching a 2013 murder trial on YouTube Jodi Arias Trial : Day 23 : 1 Of 3. There is a considerable amount of evidence involving phones and computers. The following picture briefly appears on-...

At the moment all i have is some arbitrary 6502 class(no audio yet). all instructions are working properly. the nesdev wiki is confusing me way too much at this point. All i know about the ppu is that ...

I’ve got a 2005 PowerMac G5, Dual 2.3 GHz with a stock Nvidia GeForce 6600 running OSX 10.4 Tiger that I enjoy experimenting with, purely for fun and to learn writing legacy software in XCode. Would ...

The Sun Type 3 keyboard labelled its meta keys "Left" and "Right". The Type 4 changed this to a hollow diamond, or lozenge: ◇. The Type 5 and on uses a solid diamond: ◆. My ...

reading of this question brings up 3Dfx Voodoo 1 Emulator in my memories. I always wandered how did it work so good time as any to ask... My memory is hazy on the details so I might miss remember ...

In an interview with the developers of the Crazy Taxi game for the GBA, they mention that they were able to achieve 3D graphics with a pure-software 3D rendering engine that they called Rush: It is a ...

I've begun hacking on a lot of ISDN equipment that I've purchased (phones, terminal adapters, protocol analyzers, etc.) One thing that's struck me odd is that a lot of the equipment notes it ...

Billy Bob boots up Tomb Raider on his PlayStation. He loads the saved game from his memory card and it loads up the level he is on. Then Billy controls Lara in a sloppily manner, so that she dies. Now ...

The most important difference between the original 'K&R' C, and ANSI/ISO C89/90, was function prototypes. These started being supported by some compilers in the mid-eighties, were formally ...

This is something I often notice whenever I see a first-generation Pokémon game being played on a Game Boy emulator. It might be present on real hardware as well, but I don’t have that to test. When ...

According to pdp10.nocrew.org, the JSA and JRA instructions were invented for PDP-6 Fortran. It's a strange claim; now I don't know anything about Fortran, but I find it hard to convince myself that ...

Java was released under the slogan 'write once, run anywhere'; while its adoption was probably more about 'now we have a language that provides garbage collection in a familiar workflow and with a ...

Around the year 1990, I played the game Empire on a VAX/VMS system. It was a turn-based, text-based-map wargame that later inspired Civilization and Xconq. What was particularly memorable about this ...

The Apple-1 motherboard was designed in such a way as to make it possible for the hobbyist to remove the 6502 processor and use a Motorola 6800 as the CPU instead. This was not a trivial operation, as ...

I'm trying to learn more about how the PLATO system worked with respect to communications. I've read some of the specs, but coming from a web-background I'm unfamiliar with the underlying way that the ...

It seems that the primary system call to change a new directory within an Amiga process is dos.library/CurrentDir(lock) but the documentation does not tell me how to detect if it succeeded. Quoting ...

For my new crime-novel I am in need of some more specific info on hiding digital data on analog VCR or VHS cassettes. I have already read a lot online and seen the LCR oddware video on that case (...

NexGen was best known for the unique implementation of the x86 architecture in its processors. NexGen's CPUs were designed very differently from other processors based on the x86 instruction set at ...

This question occurred to me while I was formulating this answer about arithmetic versus logical shifts. The IBM 709, and its descendant the 7090, etc., is a 36-bit mainframe with a classical single-...

The MIX was a computer design that Donald Knuth used to illustrate computer instruction sets in his magnum opus The Art of Computer Programming. MIX's model number is 1009, which was derived by ...

This answer to the question "What was the rationale behind 36 bit computer architectures?" makes the point that early computers were assembled by hand, rather than having central processing ...

This is probably a hardware-related question. I have recently bought a total of 7 (seven) different original SNES controllers from different sources, all of them being somewhat used but mostly ...

According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenix by the beginning of the nineties, SCO was selling 32-bit 386 versions of both Xenix and Unix. According to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=...

Is there a well documented or well understood explanation for what was the intended purpose for the more haphazard glyph choices in the control code range of the original IBM PC character set? Maybe a ...

I have a message: x2400\x1100\x2001\x1020\x2100\x0900\x2008\x2012\x0900\x1001\x2001\x1010\x2001\x0900\x0802\x0812\x1200\x2010\x0802\x1004\x0820\x1010\x2100\x2002\x1012 It's in IBM column binary ...

I'm confused on the behavior of setting the invert bit on the PDP-1's SKP group. The manual states: The intent of any skip instruction can be reversed by making Bit 5 (normally the Indirect Address ...

Prodigy was a big early Internet service provider, and of course by the late nineties, the most popular Internet protocol was the web; most users spent most of their Internet time in a web browser. ...

As described in these answers, the jump table offsets to functions contained in an AmigaOS library are always negative values. The reason for this is not intuitive to me, but I suspect Carl Sassenrath ...

Is there a way to write IBM SaveDskF disk images to a floppy on a modern machine? The floppy drive is connected via USB. Some comment somewhere said to use WinImage, but I tried that and it said the ...

I am in possession of a working 1986 Compaq Portable II. However, I couldn't find a 5.25" floppy with the proper version of DOS on it to actually make the computer, ya know, work. I've since ...

AOL was a big early Internet service provider, and of course by the late nineties, the most popular Internet protocol was the web; most users spent most of their Internet time in a web browser. But if ...

AOL, one of the most successful early Internet service providers, started life in 1983 as a company called Control Video Corporation selling downloadable games for the Atari 2600; this became Quantum ...

AFAIK, in Windows 3.11 it was possible to enter all kind of subnet masks, e.g. 255.255.255.1. Nowadays, the bits of the mask have to be consecutive. However, I could imagine that such a unusual subnet ...

There is a not-unheard-of technique in DOS software to detect certain keypresses (like Ctrl+Break) by intercepting the keyboard interrupt (IRQ 1) and reading the scancode directly from the keyboard ...