Retro PC thread

Retro PC thread

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Other urls found in this thread:

bstufworldwide.blogspot.com/2011/08/
youtube.com/watch?v=qj7g4eWyEoo
youtube.com/watch?v=feH_bz-PwRA
nightfallcrew.com/09/12/2016/commodore-16-repair/
twitter.com/NSFWRedditImage

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>macshit

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based and redpilled

Mmm, reminds me of my undergrad. But only superficially.

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Sad. That's back when HP were a revered institution among the engineering and scientific communities instead of the purveyor of generic shitbox PCs they are today.

Don't you know it. I miss the HP Chipmunk. Moved from there to the Apollo Snakes, then HP bought them too...

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Touch screen and one of the earliest computers available with 3.5" floppies.

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Too bad it's hard to find 8" disks in decent and not rotting condition these days (also you'd need an old PC to write them with). Should work with a Gotek if you make a 50 -> 34 pin converter.

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the Compaq merger was a fucking mistake

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It was that or die immediately. I remember when I was in grad skool and linux was becoming usable...
"Wait... I can build a PC better than a DECStation for literally 1/10th the price and run UNIX on it? That's it, I'm doing it..."

>It was that or die immediately.
For HP? They had a pretty big share of the consumer market too...

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>I was in grad skool and linux was becoming usable
You are over 40, likely almost 50, and at Jow Forums. You are ruining our reputation as hackers on steroids, angry white teenager incels, alt-right racist 20something network and relentless cyberbullies.

>You are ruining our reputation as hackers on steroids
Elon Musk has his Ambien and acid, I have Jow Forums. You're welcome in my world, if you so choose to be, but I'll not be fucking off ayytime soon.

>For HP? They had a pretty big share of the consumer market too...
For both of them.
Stardent killed Cray. SGI killed Stardent. The PC killed SGI. Sun and IBM killed themselves.
The cycles continue always.

Not telling you to. But imagine normie witnessing that there are actual humans here instead of evil msm caricatures. So pipe it down.

Don't disagree with you on workstations, but HP had a shitload of commodity hardware too by the time the Compaq buyout rolled around and never really shunned/half-assed that part of the market like SGI or DEC did.

I definitely never saw a shortage of HP commodity hardware pre-Compaq where I live, at least. Though there's probably a little bias since HP employed a lot of people here.

I just really don't think the merger was *necessary* for the survival of either company, it doesn't even seem like HP and Compaq themselves entirely agreed on it either from what I know of it. It was definitely really the point where HP went to shit though, as they replaced pretty much all of their commodity systems with rebadged Compaqs and even their nicer non-commodity gear got infected too.

Don't mean to ramble and tl;dr here, sorry.

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I'm anything but a normal human. Age doesn't take the edge off, I kinda wish it did.

>HP had a shitload of commodity hardware too by the time the Compaq buyout rolled around and never really shunned/half-assed that part of the market like SGI or DEC did.
I kinda disagree. HP wanted to be transformative, they bet the farm on it, half-assed it, and doubled-down repeatedly. They thought being biggest of all by itself counted for something.

HP entered the consumer PC market with the introduction of the Pavilion line in 1995, this predated the Compaq merger by a good decade.

Yeah HP like IBM used to be one of the great American companies and one of the best places to work for. The corporate culture was great, everyone were bros, and you could guarantee you'd work there 40 years and retire on a nice pension.

I imagine today it's full of transient poo workers and SJWs.

HP like IBM used to be one of the great American companies and one of the best places to work for. The corporate culture was great, everyone were bros, and you could guarantee you'd work there 40 years and retire on a nice pension. Also their products were built like tanks.

I imagine today it's full of transient poo workers and SJWs and everything falls apart if you sneeze on it and it was made by chink slave labor.

So how again did Apple justify charging $1200 for an 8-bit computer as late as 1990?

Uh, the merger was in 2001, not long after Compaq swallowed DEC.

Are you talking about just the act of buying out Compaq or just their consumer endeavors in general? I always thought the latter, even on the low-end, were pretty nice in their early iterations, though things were definitely getting fucky leading up to the Compaq merger.

Cheap design, cheap, off-the-shelf taiwanese parts, bloat, lack of some of the practically meaningless but nice details like rear plastics to completely cover the sheet metal, you know, maybe you're right that they were eventually doomed and becoming the biggest monolith in PCs was their only salvation. Though I still never found the more professional ranges like the Vectra and Kayak to be nearly as frustrating or dull as their Compaq counterparts, the HP Compaq/Workstation lines were total downgrades to me.

>Are you talking about just the act of buying out Compaq or just their consumer endeavors in general?
They decided to dominate the low-margin consumer market and failed really really badly.

Does anyone know a retuable place to find CMOS batteries.

My two daily drivers are a Pavilion g7 laptop and some older HP desktop with Windows 7, so...meh.

Hmm, I really wasn't paying much attention at the time, but I'm always digging through piles of entry-level second and third-gen Pavilions on my recycler runs, they seemed to do well enough from my perspective.

But I guess as I already said, HP employed a lot of people here so the sample is probably skewed.

I can assure you that by 1990, the only people still buying Apple IIs were brainless school administrators.

Are you sure that's even the right figure? By 1990 they had 68k systems in that price bracket. Probably the only customers buying new Apple IIs at that point were schools anyway who didn't give a fuck because they had set budgets.

Apple never cut or altered prices on the Apple II line from 1977 until its retirement in the early 90s. By the late 80s, you have to figure the things cost practically nothing to manufacture so the markup must have been immense.

Makes my head hurt just thinking about it.

>I can assure you that by 1990, the only people still buying Apple IIs were brainless school administrators.
Probably after 1983 or so, 90% of sales must have been to schools.

The OP pic shows a Platinum //e which was the final iteration of the Apple IIe, introduced in 1987 and which had an integrated numeric keypad and 32kx4 RAM chips in place of the older 64kx1 RAM, cutting the number of RAM chips down from 16 to four. They were also soldered instead of socketed for the first time.

You all heard about the school that bought an Apple II and locked the thing in a closet because it was so expensive they were afraid to let kids touch it.

mmuh Oregon Trail

>Though I still never found the more professional ranges like the Vectra and Kayak to be nearly as frustrating or dull as their Compaq counterparts
Explain.

long shotbut im having an issue with my SE, it has a 1.44 superdrive in it but its only formatting disks in 800k. The superdrive is a superdrive, its new, it has a new floppy cable, it has the right chipset...

Anyone know wtf is going on..? Also , does anyone have a link to that huge 300-600 page book of all the possible old school mac issues? I cant remember the fucking name of it.

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bstufworldwide.blogspot.com/2011/08/

The pictures of the XT are kind of cool but other than that, I'll pass. That blog has to be the most cringe-inducing Reddit garbage I've ever seen.

Neat, it's another "Oh look I'm using an 80s PC as a dumb terminal but it looks like I'm really browsing the Web with it" thing.

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I mean, he has a LOLcatz image and everything.

The bottom portion is actually only the disk drives, the computer's PCB is in the same case as the monitor.

>macshit
Found your problem.

youtube.com/watch?v=qj7g4eWyEoo

My guess is his ancient OS disk fell apart when he tried to boot it. Probably filled the inside of the drive with shed diskette coating and that would have to all be cleaned out.

I tried to respond to this but as I read through what I was typing I found it mostly subjective or just from some experiences with particular systems that didn't necessarily reflect the entire range of systems from that company. Most of my late-model Vectras and Kayak/"hp workstation" branded systems are fairly standard and aren't all that different from a typical Deskpro, and I'd hoard Professional Workstations too if I came across them more often. I think in the end I just always preferred their take on design and the historical context of HP more than anything, which I feel a lot of was lost when they started mostly just rebranding Compaq products.

Guess as I'm really starting to think about it, towards the merger date they were pretty similar in terms of their faults and their strong points, at least where it matters to me.

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Sounds like he went and consulted the Wikipedia page on the Model II family, which was mostly my handwork (I added a lot of detail to that thing).

Glad I could be so informative so this guy knew a little bit about how these things work.

your system version likely doesnt have support for it

you're a dumb terminal

Most likely. The coating on magnetic media tends to break down with time particularly depending on how it was stored.

>sold on Ebay in minutes
Well, the main portion of the computer evidently worked. The keyboard may not, but it could be the foam pads in the keys dry rotting, which is a problem with Model II/12/16 keyboards.

I liked these, they were so different from other computer cases

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youtube.com/watch?v=feH_bz-PwRA

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nightfallcrew.com/09/12/2016/commodore-16-repair/

Just a busted RAM chip. For once it wasn't the TED. That's a relief.

The Apple ][e is a nice machine, but that disk drive riser is so ugly. It's an ergonomic nightmare.

I had no idea you could get a Tandy with such a high res. Is that the CoCo (Color Computer) or am I thinking of something else?

Shall we play a game?
Seriously though, this one is all decked out. Dual 8" floppy disks and a terminal. It probably even has some kind of BIOS card stuck in there so that it boots into CP/M or a debug screen. Noice.

Same ergonomic problem as the OP's box.

This is so awesome that it brings a tear to my eye. The S-100 bus is quite a drug.

Touchscreen? Tell us more.

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>I had no idea you could get a Tandy with such a high res. Is that the CoCo (Color Computer) or am I thinking of something else?

The Model II family were professional grade computers with 80 column text and 8" floppy drives.

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Whenever I see an MSX computer, the only thing that springs to mind is: "Failed Commodore 64."

Packard Bell computers weren't good when they were new.

Meh. Generic workstation.

Meh. Generic PC.
I agree that merging HP and Compaq was a mistake though. I had great success with Compaqs before the merge. Not so much afterwards.

A cute little machine but lacks the styling of the original from '84.

As far as curiosities go, the the Lisa is definitely a strange machine. The Onion sometime in the early 2000s reported that Apple was going to refund all Lisa owners their 10K purchase price. The cost of the program could easily hit 90K dollars total. Ha ha ha.

The only thing special about these was that they could do 3D CAD in an age of underpowered machines, right?

The 8-Bit computer guy has changed my opinion on the whole C16 and the line of computers to which it belongs. It might have been successful if Commodore executed on the plan, instead of releasing an underpowered pin-incompatible lesser C64.

The Internet Archive probably has old INFO magazines, where you can read the scathing review that the either the C16 or the Commodore Plus/4 got when it was originally released.

What kind of jerkwad replies to all the posts? Oh yeah, me.

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>The Model II family were professional grade computers with 80 column text and 8" floppy drives.
Ok. The only Tandy I really remember well was with a case like this one but with a lower-res text mode and 5 1/4" floppies. It was still a nice machine.

I miss plotters. Whatever happened to them? Did they go out of style?

Replaced by inkjet printers and even those are not used that much these days since there's less and less need for paper drawings.

Magnificent to see that thing in the Science Museum in London.

Inkjet printers can't print on an infinite roll of paper.

>That's probably a Model III.
Hmm. Could be. I'm off to do a Google Image search.

>Meh. Generic workstation.
>Meh. Generic PC.
I could probably say something similar about something you enjoy, no need to be a dick about it.

That's probably a Model III. The Model 2 line were really expensive and aimed at heavy duty business use, engineering and scientific work, and controlling factory equipment--few of them were sold to private customers.

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No, seriously. Back in the 8- and 16-bit days, there was a huge variety of different computer architectures. When a new computer came out, it was most likely incompatible with everything that came before it. What was this new computer's advantages? What was its disadvantages? Should you get one? This was super exciting.

Compare that to the IBM PC. IBM made the original XT simply to round out the bottom of their lineup, not because they believed in minicomputers.

Until Windows 95 (or possibly until OS/2), IBM PCs and their clones were an uninspired platform. Sure, you could run Lotus 1-2-3 and WordPerfect on them, but that was about the limit of their goodness.

They can, it's called roll to roll printing.

The one in this pic is actually inkjet.

I'm really just kind of confused by this response considering I posted a PA-RISC system and a Windows 95 system...

>They can, it's called roll to roll printing.
>The one in this pic is actually inkjet.
Holy crap. I stand corrected. I never saw an inkjet variant of these roll printers. I assumed that all roll printers had one or more little markers in them busily scribbling on the paper.

My cousin worked at a Radio Shack back then. He said they only sold like 3-4 Model IIs/16s ever and all of them were to enterprise customers.

Hmm. I missed the PA-RISCiness of your workstation.
I guess you could legitimately get excited about a Windows 95 box if it is the first PC you had ever seen. The whole long pathetic history of the Wintel architecture made the Win95 boxes "too little, too late" in my mind.

It's just kind of silly to dismiss anything, really. It all has history and some kind of value worth appreciating if you dig deep enough and have the right attitude towards it, though of course we all still have preferences and focuses.

I honestly find a lot of 8/16-bit systems as "generic" as you'd find most PCs or workstations, but I think you'd obviously disagree with that and probably for good reason.

I lucked out and found a local seller with one of those. Still has the box and styrofoam, too. I'm thinking I'll use it for translated/optimized MSX games, homebrew, and shitposting via intermediary BBS software if I can build/find the right components to do a Hayes modem adapter.

But you get my point, right? A clone is a clone is a clone. There's not unique or remarkable about it at all. Some don't mangle data. Some do. Some are fast. Some are slow. But they all run Windows on x86 and suck in the same fundamental way.

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>So how again did Apple justify charging $1200 for an 8-bit computer as late as 1990?
A support structure and volume discounts for education.

>A clone is a clone is a clone. There's not unique or remarkable about it at all.
What's "unique" or "remarkable" about any of the 8-bits posted ITT or in any other retro thread that are either just running CP/M or a BASIC interpreter? Some edge-case language extensions? The fact that a program written for one won't run on another? Some arcane hardware hack that you'd never notice or appreciate if someone hadn't told you about it? Architecture definitely can add to excitement, but there's so much more to what makes something like this interesting. I never really understood why people are so rabid about such ultimately trivial architectural features to the point that they dismiss/shit on anything else over what is 99% of the time just a sentence on a magazine ad or a sticker on the plastic.

You can call just about any obtainable system "boring" or "generic" in some way if you've got a shitty enough attitude about it.

Real computers.

Consumer level toys for running children's games.

Do you ever give up, dude?

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I unironically wish computer hardware hit a wall somewhere in the early 90's. For all the shit that they had to deal with it doesn't seem even half as petty and frustrating as what we have now. Also it was majority reasonably intelligent white people.

...

>if you don't like retards, poos, and niggers getting involved in computing then leave!
No upvotes for you here.

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These used Tandon double sided 8" drives (Tandon TM-848-2)

With 5.25" disks, it was pretty irrelevant whether the media was labeled as single or double sided, but with 8" it did matter because 8" double sided media had the index hole in a different location than on single sided media. This meant that if you had a single sided drive like the Shugart SA-800, then you could _not_ use DS disks because it won't see the index hole. DS drives however had two index sensors, so you could read either disk type in them.

However, those Tandon 8" drives like the TRS-80 Model 12/16 used had both sensors in both the single and double sided versions (probably to save some money by using only one frame assembly). So Tandon drives could use double sided 8" media when most other drives couldn't.

It gets even sillier. If you put a double sided disk in a TM-848-1, it would detect the second index hole and record to only side 1 of the disk, but using the second index hole, which meant that you ended up with a disk that was not readable in most other disk drive brands.

And on single sided media, it was also fairly common to punch a second write protect notch and index hole to use the other side of the disk, especially in the 70s when floppy disks were expensive and sometimes hard to come by.

90s macintosh gaming was in the state linux gaming is today. All you had were shitty clones of PC games like this doom ripoff called marathon. And the sequel ripped off quake.

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