All Questions

For a long time now, I've been looking for disk images from an Olivetti P6060, but so far I've found none. The Olivetti P6060 was the second computer I wrote programs on, so making an emulator for it ...

Soon after learning the C language in the late 80s, before an ANSI C compiler was available on the machines I was using, it occurred to me to check if the following compiles int a, b, c; foo() { (...

Is there a documented way of performing a DNS lookup in VXD-land? Windows 98 provides TCP/IP-32 VXD that mimics the function of the Windows NT/2000 TDI, however this interface usually works with IP-...

OK so this is really old school. Back in the 1980s, as a latchkey kid, I played on the computers in the library in elementary and middle school. There was this one bizarre educational game that I'd ...

ECMA defined a filesystem for floppy disks which appears to take inspiration from the tape labels used on mainframe and minicomputer tape systems (note the use of "VOL1" and "HDR1" ...

I have a question which is similar to another question on this site: When I was a child 386 PCs came up. When buying a PC, you could read in the technical data how many 8- and 16-bit ISA slots were ...

I've been doing some research into 3D mice. Pretty much the only game in town is the space mouse from 3Dconnexion. In doing this I discovered that its original designer John Hilton left after the ...

I'm looking to identify a vertical shooter from the 80s. The setting is futuristic, with the main ship being able to get upgrades based on the floating bonus which is a letter. One of the was a ...

The core OS debug VXDs are provided in the DDK as separate VXDs, as opposed to being packed into a single VMM32.VXD file. Furthermore the readme file with the DDK indicates that copying all the ...

[copied from superuser.com] I'm duplicating an existing compact PC; I'd love to replace it with modern components, but for various reasons I can't. I'm having a tough time finding the correct 32-bit ...

CRT TVs were great, and an absolute must for all classic video games. However, it cannot be denied that it's impossible to buy a new CRT TV today, at least in any kind of normal store, and you rarely ...

Back in the days before mask ROM (when invented?) we got core rope memories, or Little Old Ladies memories, which required lots of human labor to build. Were there any kinds of ROMs which were ...

On many arcade machines when running in attract mode, they often show a demo gameplay. I wondered how they did this?I guess those are not pre-recorded movies, so I think that they probably ran the ...

I read an article that people were using various means of user input in their Amiga 500 computers as an alternative to joystick. Most notable, Sega Mega Drive, Sega Master System, CD32 / Competition ...

What kind of monitor could be used with Sun UltraSPARC 1 Creator Workstation other than the original Sun-provided monitor? Can a more modern monitor be used with this workstation?

After watching this video tutorial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AyJsOoQKRjQ I'm wondering what the whole deal was with the batteries. Apparently, you can resolder the circuit board inside the ...

Preamble As Algol-60 had no reserved words, the language keywords had to be specially marked, e.g. prefixed with an underscore with a trailing space or semicolon (_begin _integer i;i:=42_end), or ...

As mentioned on my Were there any standard tricks to fix PET upper/lower case differences? question, I'm trying to figure out what to expect when running software generically labelled as "PET&...

I have a Commodore PET 4016 like the one described here but did not grow up with any Commodore computers and I am still learning where it fits in their line-up and even how to use it. After buying a ...

Is there a particular reason RS-232 uses 12V signals (well, sort of) rather than some (any?) other value? It was formally defined in 1960, so that places it before the era of any standardized ICs like ...

First of all, I know very well that modern TVs are neither made for, nor good at, displaying old video game consoles' video signals. With that said, I'm trying to test the controllers of an N64 where ...

I've got a SCSI2SD V5.2 board connected to the internal 50-pin SCSI connection of a Mac SE/30. The Mac cannot "see" it, in any configuration I've attempted. I have tried: Using the stock ...

The DEC Type 30 was an early vector graphics display, that was used for an astonishingly wide range of applications for the 1960s. It used a 16-inch circular CRT with high persistence phosphor ...

This is a homebrew Z80 computer, using Z80, 64K RAM, EEPROM as well as SIO/0. I am trying to run BASIC, however I need to set the workspace at 0xC000 or higher. The code I am using is similar to https:...

What are the alternatives (with examples on how to implement) to Applesoft RND(1) command? I have read of people using a completely different algorithm by poking machine code stored in a DATA ...

I am trying to get a mental model of how the 6502 operates. I am going off this image: However please suggest a better one if it helps understanding . On this website it describes how a read ...

The original DOOM and its derivatives (DOOM II, Heretic, Hexen) were early 90s 3D games released at a time when DOS PCs usually had ISA bus Super VGA graphics cards. In the following few years, PCs ...

I'm trying to find a 70s or very early 80s source code of a Pascal pretty-printing program which is more advanced than the version mentioned on the Prettyprint wiki page which is undated and somewhat ...

Just installed python 2.4 on my Amiga os3.9. sometimes when I run a script the machine restarts. Any idea why that may be? It has 030 with MMU, 64MB RAM and 1MB chip ram. All MMU libs are installed. ...

Reading over some old articles on Alpha I realized I really didn't understand PALcode. So I did a little reading on that. PALcode is stored in main memory, is written in Alpha ML, and is called by a ...

Is there a file manager for Amiga OS 3.x, something like Directory Opus but keyboard-driven, which feels more like Midnight Commander or Total Commander, where all the navigation is done by keyboard ...

I am trying to add some system interface made by myself to Linux-0.11 and using bochs to debug the interface.But I have found two strange things. Here is my code. #include <asm/segment.h> char ...

I was curious: what was the cheapest/wimpiest computer you could run PowerAnimator back in the day on? My guess would be a base model SGI Indy.

AMIGA CDTV, 68030 MMU, no FPU, KS 3.1.4, WB3.9 + BBs, MUI3.8, Required Libs. I followed all the requirements swapping guigfx with non-FPU equivalent and I'm not able to get iGame to run. When FPU is ...

Around 1987, the investment bank I worked for had a high-end graphics device, possibly from Evans & Sutherland, which produced an "animated" display not unlike the view from the front ...

Consider the following Pascal program: 1 1 PROGRAM MAIN(OUTPUT); VAR F:TEXT; I:INTEGER; 2 2 BEGIN 3 2 REWRITE(F); 4 3 FOR I := 10 TO 30 DO BEGIN 5 3 WRITELN( I, ’...

Around 1987, the investment bank I worked for had a high-end graphics device, possibly from Evans & Sutherland, which produced an "animated" display not unlike the view from the front ...

Going through schematics of several home or small office computers of the era, I was wondering why almost none of them (1) used dual-ported video RAM. I understand that those chips were initaly ...

In VB both array access and function calls are done with () which makes it difficult to differentiate between those with a quick look. It also makes more nested levels of parentheses like MyArray(...

DEMOS was a Soviet operating system derived from BSD Unix. The answer to this question shows that the familiar, English-derived BSD commands were essentially the same in DEMOS. Did DEMOS have a C ...

The 3101 SRAM was Intel's first product. At $99.50 for 64 bits, it had enough memory to store the characters expensiv. (Sorry, the final e costs extra.) Is there a record of any product using it?

CBM BASIC 2.0 has no built-in command for listing the contents of a floppy disk. Instead, the usual way is to LOAD a pseudo-file named $ from the disk into memory. The file can then be LISTed like a ...

For an assigment I have to check this schematic of an Z80 and find possible errors. The schematic looks like this: The left side of this schematic is correct, but we have to find errors in the right ...

The Bell 103 modem spec gives the following frequencies to use: Transmit Side: 1070Hz (space) and 1270Hz (mark) Receive Side: 2025Hz (space) and 2225Hz (mark) Why were these specific frequencies ...

In the early 1980's, plugs with low pin density like DB-25 were common on home computers. The industry was still relatively small, not everything in the manufacturing chain was automated. I assume a ...

For a university assignment, I have to describe and draw the command cycle of the LD (nn), dd command. To be exact, I was given this command: LD (0x1000), BC which I interpret as putting the low ...

I want to open a Basic 09 code under windows 7. I just want to read the code. I do not want to execute it. Is there a way to do that?

Although average punched cards had eighty columns, often only seventy-two were used for characters; the remaining eight were ignored by software. Hence arbitrary metadata could be included with each ...

The PDP-8 was a remarkable exercise in minimalist computer design; some of the aspects of its design are discussed in detail at PDP-8 transistor count One feature it did not have was a stack. Instead, ...

To switch from 80-column to 40-column display, what is the difference between the following two actions: lda #$11 jsr COUT ; $FDED and sta $C00C ; 80coloff switch In the first case, I do not ...