All Questions

I have a Pascal program with a fair amount of inline assembly code in it which demonstrates the capabilities of «Электроника МС 7401» — символьно-графический видеотерминал (Elektronika MS 7401 - ...

I recently saw an TV old advert (1983) from an Italian company, called SAGA, that sells a so-called SAG computer. It looks like a microcomputer for SMB, with bundled software. Does anyone know what ...

I have collected the ROMs of all the games I grew up with and put them into a digital list which I can sort in various means useful to me, such as "by my personal rating". I'm able to click ...

I have a toshiba HX-10 64KB MSX1 computer (PAL video output). I recently used a new cassette cable which caused a problem with the video;I am using the AV composite audio and video; because the video ...

I was playing Remedy Entertainment's video game Control the other day. Inside the game world, I've come across several computers. (They all look extremely similar.) To me, it looks like some kind of ...

I recently saw a video made by the famous "The 8 Bit Guy" about PE6502 computer. At 19:41, he successfully sent a text file from his Windows 95 laptop to the PE6502 using only a standard ...

Why did Apple include shapes in Applesoft BASIC? There are no sprites on the Apple II, but shapes provide a simple vector drawing tool. As graphics go the shapes are kind of an odd duck, they provide ...

You'd think this would be the simplest thing in the world to find out, but Wikipedia and all other sources just mention the USA and Japan release dates -- not the European one. I have no idea why ...

I need to install Windows NT 4 on a pentium computer with Windows 98 installed on a Fat32 partition 160 GB drive. I made a 2GB Fat16 primary partition before this c partition with partition magic, ...

I have an old Macintosh IIci that worked until a few weeks ago but now doesn't turn on anymore. When I press the power button on the keyboard all the lights on the keyboard and the one on the main ...

When an IRQ occurs, the 6502 microprocessor and its derivatives in the C64 and C128 push the status register to the stack and then load the contents of a two-byte vector at memory address $FFFE/$FFFF ...

Ïn the document "Microsoft MS-DOS CD-ROM Extension 2.1" (MSCDEX) is answered positively an user's question about possible embeding of more functions in INT 10h. Did this mean that newer CD-...

So, I've got a C-128 with only 16K of VDC video RAM. I've finished my lovely high-resolution graphics routine on the RGBI display and want to exit to BASIC with a functional 80-column text screen, ...

The IBM PC included a coprocessor socket for the 8087 floating-point unit. Logical enough; some customers wanted to use the 8087 to make numeric calculations run faster. But why was the 8087 designed ...

The CDC 6600 system console was a vector drawing system with a single font that also provided a way of drawing simple graphics (Wikipedia). In simple terms how does this vector drawing system work? ...

A common technology stack for line of business applications in the sixties and seventies was IBM COBOL with the IMS database. I'm curious about how the combination handled record definitions. COBOL ...

While playing doom through zdoom screen-recorder records nothing. Only sound is audible from the recorded video. Screen recorders used: Free cam Apowersoft Bandicam I have used above screen ...

I'm failing to find a concise document that describes the formatting used by (6502) MS BASIC when converting internal FP numbers to text for display in PRINT, STR$, etc. I know it has a leading - or ...

The IBM System/38 or just S/38 was an IBM mini-computer launched in 1978. I don't know when IBM stopped marketing it but their AS/400 was released in 1988 and it was very easy to switch from the S/38 ...

A standard Amstrad 3 inch disc can be formatted to CP/M Data format on the machine: single sided, single track, 40 tracks, 9 sectors/track, 512-byte sectors, no reserved tracks, 1k blocks, 2 directory ...

I was working for a Hungarian magazine in the early 90s which had the most curious device: a laser printer which had a pass through scanner on top ie you laid down a page and it dragged it under a ...

Now of course there is a sense in which they were – some mainframe installations supported thousands of users! But there is a distinction. Consider the familiar fixture in so many 80s computer science ...

The obvious way for a database to store data is with each record in a contiguous chunk, and each field having a fixed size and offset in the record. Joel Spolsky praises that way of doing things: ...

The DEC RP06 disk drive was a remarkable piece of hardware. It seems to have been the last generation of drives that used rigid magnetic disks in removable packs, before their replacement by '...

Some fascinating stories in this discussion thread. It starts with discussion about computers overheating, but about halfway through the thread, it switches to discussion of mainframe installations in ...

What sort of performance I can expect from PC Task 4.4 on Amiga 500 + 030 50MHz MMU, 64MB RAM? Would it be possible to run Windows 3.11 / 95 and have any real use from it?

In 1974, Atari released a driving game called Gran Trak 10. The development prototypes had used real car steering wheels and pedals, but it was realized these were too expensive, so they were changed ...

I mean, all other OSs that I know of use some form of slash as a path separator, so why did Apple choose the colon?

... At least, without getting sued into the ground? According to one of the answers to What was the most critical supporting software for COBOL on IBM mainframes? We installed a new HP replacing an ...

Over the past half-century, one of the largest trends in the computer industry has been the replacement of mainframes by microcomputers. Not total by any means – there are still many mainframes in ...

In general, it is possible to use inline assembler statements within C macros, for example #define toscreencode(C) (__AX__ = (C), \ asm("cmp #$60"),\ ...

Though I can identify some technologies like following, I would like to know which ones will surely fail and which ones are worth to test on my old Palm, Symbian, WindowsCE,... Web Issues with ...

I am trying to learn more about different video formats. I have a SONY PVM9044QM and want to understand the different connection options. So I understand, that Y/C equals S-Video input. But what does ...

Fresh install of dos 6.22, unfortunately there appears to be a virus in MBR, each time I get Virus:DOS/V_Sign when re-using floppy from this machine. I can't connect HDD to modern PC, any idea how I ...

There is an excellent article about VisiCalc that goes into all the details about what happened and why, highly recommended if you are interested in that part of computing history. I was reading this ...

I have the following assembly code for 8086 MOV AL, [BX] OUT DX, AL The bus clock frequency is 1MHz. Access to memory is done without WAIT, and to I/O with one WAIT tick. How I can calculate the ...

I have a question regarding the difference in common failure modes between an older motherboard such as the ABIT BP6, and a new motherboard such as what you might find in an Intel NUC. What is a ...

The Ctrl + Alt + Del key combination to reset is known to me to work on older PC/MS-DOS PCs, some versions of Atari TOS, on runlevel 3 / multiuser.tager Linuxes (it can be disabled). The older of ...

It seems that integrated circuits of the 1970s tended to have 4-digit part numbers. This includes not only the ones that came to be well-known like CPUs (Intel 4004, 8008, 8080, 8085, 8086, 8088, ...

Of course the unthinkable happened and I lost one cap key spring while cleaning the keyboard. I am still searching but assuming all things went south, what would be the best solution to replace them? ...

Back in the day, SCSI was the way to go. I remember my high school having a single 5Mb Sider hdd connected to an Apple //e - which seemed awesome after endlessly swapping floppies. Not long after, I ...

While it is not used as much nowadays, wave soldering was a big advance in the productivity of manufacturing electronics, compared to soldering all the components by hand. It consists of placing all ...

I am quite a newbie to retrocomputing, and I don't know if such a question should be asked here. But I hope maybe some of you could help me. I started reflecting on ways to send data without the ...

I am definitely at the very beginning of my refurb-journey and learning every step now on the way ... I struggle with the following: I saw a video by Noel's Retrolab where he troubleshooted a CPC. He ...

I recently got my first Amstrad CPC and started refurbishing it. Now I wonder, I saw a video, on someone using the RPM test tool for the Amstrad. I found the download online, but this question might ...

The IBM/360 Macro Assembly language was quite powerful, allowing non-trivial compile-time string manipulation. Did macro packages exist which would facilitate programming at a (slightly) higher level, ...

On the Apple II, system beeps were typically just the 'Control-G' beep noise. However, many ProDOS-based applications from Apple Computer abandoned the firmware-based beep routine and instead used a ...

I just happened upon this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6tNizdyx-DE It's a selection of Amiga music produced using a program I've never heard of before: "Symphonie Pro". Does ...

I definitely remember that sometime after OS/2 was introduced - while it was still in its very early days - after the breakup from Microsoft, long before Warp - IBM announced with great fanfare a ...

Many early computers were sold as self-assembly kits (you get a box of parts and an instruction leaflet and have to solder them together yourself). For example, the Altair was priced at $439 kit, $621 ...