That's a Minolta PCW1 Word processor of Minolta Camera Co. Ltd The "computer part" is in fact a PC with 512kBytes memory and a 80186 CPU running DOS 2.11 and proprietary word processing (or, ...

XORing a cursor into a frame buffer (which is what you seem to be calling "inverted cursor") is actually simpler than ORing it in there: when the cursor has to be removed again (to move to ...

That answer is somewhat trivial: Hard disks and optical drives are contact-less technologies - Nothing touches (or is even allowed to touch) the media while it spins. On a hard disk or CD-ROM, the ...

The main downside of "historic" CPU's (non?)-suitability for C programs is the lack of capability to form more than one register into an address without using the ALU. Most more modern CPUs can use ...

It definitely does not hurt to open the case and have a look at the PCB. When opening, be especially careful with the keyboard ribbon cables - They are apparently known to become very brittle with age ...

Back until the late 80ies, it was actually pretty commonplace to get a circuit diagram with a lot of electronics devices when you bought them - Even TVs and radio sets often came with them. In cases ...

The paper I used in my dot-matrix printers (and still buy and use today) has 60g/m2 for the cheaper green-lined type and 70g/m2 for the pure white version. There is a rough guideline in the paper ...

You should be able to use the Amiga hard drive directly on your Linux computer (provided it still has IDE support). Linux also understands AFFS (Amiga Fast File systems), at least once AFFS support ...

In general, yes, ISA cards have fixed memory and I/O addresses. ISA inherently has the card decide to what memory and I/O addresses it reacts because address decoders are located on the cards. How ...

Wikipedia says: According to Morse et al.,.[5] the designers actually contemplated using an 8-bit shift (instead of 4-bit), in order to create a 16 MB physical address space. However, as this would ...

Both the ZX80 and the ZX81 had a variable-size display file (DFILE). They didn't store the complete screen contents, but rather only the characters per line up to a terminating newline. This ...

No, they cannot. They share both the data and the address bus of the C128, so they can only run exclusively at any one point in time. The address bus is apparently directly connected, the data bus ...

The main technical parameter for a floppy disk's coating is its coercivity, i.e. the resistance of ferromagnetic matter to withstand demagnetization. Coercivity is measured in Oersted, after Hans ...

The main thing is that there is no such thing as a "quick format" - That term is entirely misleading terminology invented by Microsoft. Quick Format doesn't "format" anything. What MS calls a "Quick ...

Your code runs through the data ("Hello World" string) interpreting it as (nonsense) machine code - and very probably crashes before it even reaches the jmp instruction. You need to move the jmp ...

Interesting question. After all, it's the main job of a computer to come up with deterministic results, which is pretty much the opposite of pure randomness. In reality, coming up with a series of ...

If you look into real hardware (like a Motorola/Freescale/Rochester 68060, which is long out of mass production): Modern CPUs (mainly Intel) boosted to several GHz clock frequency have one main ...

Digital Research produced as one of their early attempts into graphical desktops (on their way to GEM) a basic portable graphics library - GSX. GSX did actually support proportional fonts, both in ...

This paragraph in Wikipedia really is no candidate for the best entry-of-the-year award. It seems to be comparing Apples with Oranges. (Or rather starts talking about CPUs, then commences on PCs vs. &...

The HALT condition does not (at least on retro CPUs) consume considerably less power than normal execution does. One very obvious use case is synchronizing program flow with external (hardware) events....

Actually, the screen stripes while loading from tape first occurred on the ZX-81 - Where they were a result of Sinclair's typical savvy nature - the display and the "EAR IN/MIC OUT" had to share a pin ...

The (plain) 68k never had anything directly comparable to the Intel x86 range's Protected Mode. When Intel introduced the Protected mode (PM) to its x86 range of CPUs, this lifted a number of ...

The address space is only one (maybe the easiest to solve) problem you'd have when extending Internet protocols beyond earth, especially with a supposed pretty low number of projected extraterrestrial ...

All of the 68k-based computers (Amiga, Atari ST and Sinclair QL, as well as the classic Macintosh) went to market in a rush. And all of them went to market before the OS (and, thus, the ROMs) were ...

The very same article you link says in German Wikipedia (rough translation): At the time of the North American crash the European market was strongly dominated by games for home computers, thus the ...

It was most probably not the first computer to support Arabic, but the Sinclair ZX Spectrum apparently was sold in an extremely rare Arabic version. That ROM is available for download and use in a ...

The 3101 was not a product that came out of thin air. According to Intel's own sources, Honeywell Inc. had anounced they would buy 64-bit memory chips from any vendor that could supply them (so even ...

The answer depends on the version. CP/M 2.2 did not support any loadable device drivers. There simply was no provisioning to do that. Originally, the in-built device drivers were limited to storage, ...

Note that beyond SD, DD, and HD formats for 3.5" disks there was ED (extra density) with double the capacity of a HD disk (2.88 MBytes formatted, 3.5MBytes raw capacity and double the data transfer ...

Your question seems to ignore the topology of a network completely: If you want to connect, say 20 computers via Thickwire or BNC, you need: A length of the chosen cabling 20 MAUs if you want ...