Posts tagged apple

What’s the best 8 bit computer?

18
2 years ago
by Andy in , , ,

This is a question that always gets the classic computer enthusiasts talking – what’s your best/favorite 8 bit computer? Is it because it has the best graphics, best sound, best choice of hardware, best selection of games etc?

Please leave a comment below explaining your choice!

Let the 8 bit war commence. I’ve left a ‘other’ category as i’ve bound to miss out someones favourite system.

RetroNET – The Retrocomputerist’s Internet Portal.

1
2 years ago
by Andy in

Stumbled across RetroNET today. Im going to try and connect to it from my BBC Master and Amstrad CPC6128. Maybe even from my Apple II!

RetroNET is an internet portal geared toward users of “obsolete” computer systems, especially 8-bit systems of the ’70s and ’80s. The system is designed to be easily accessible to both modern and “retro” equipment.

What services are included?

  • telnet access to the Master Control Program shell (MCP).
  • modem access to the MCP – coming soon!
  • access to the World Wide Web via the lynx browser.
  • internet email and newsgroup access with pine.
  • webmail
  • personal webspace.
  • personal gopherspace.
  • file transfers by ftp, zmodem and kermit.
  • online BASIC programming.
  • external BBS links.
  • Scrawl Wall microBBS.
  • …and games!

You can visit RetroNET by going to http://www.retro-net.org/

MITH’s Vintage Computers

1
2 years ago
by Andy in

Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH) have opened up their own Vintage Computer museum. I find it interesting that whilst we had the BBC Micro in schools in the UK, the Americans had Apple ][s etc.

This site demonstrates a description scheme and model for preservation and use of computing devices. The key features here are navigation of a computer system through hierarchical component browsing (the items listed on the right side of an item’s page) and navigation across computing devices through tag groupings (‘video card’, ‘motherboard’, etc.). Tags for an item are found near the bottom of the item’s page. Every item is accompanied with some basic descriptive and technical metadata, and these fields can be refined and expanded upon by an administrator, as use requires. Where it is possible metadata on actual manufacture dates and companies has been given, and an emphasis on connections (external and internal) and the use capacity of the device (read/write abilities, OS affordances, etc.) is attempted

Visit the museum here.

GRidPad 1910 now cataloged at Computing History.

0
3 years ago
by Andy in

Take a look at http://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/6565/GRidPad-1910/ to see it in the catalog. I think the next addition to the museum needs to be the new Apple iPad!

The Centre for Computing History visit 10/01/10

1
3 years ago
by Andy in

Here is a quick report on my visit to The Centre for Computing History on the 10th January 2010. The museum was established to create a permanent public exhibition that tells the story of the Information Age. The computer museum preserves and presents a collection of important computers and related artifacts. It spotlights the people behind the inventions and records the information necessary to inspire and enthuse future generations.

Based in Suffolk, we believe the Centre for Computing History is the only museum dedicated to computers and their social impact in the United Kingdom.

Machines donated by me

I have given the 2 machines to the museum.

  • GRiDPad 1910
  • Apple Quadra 950

Deep Blue

The museum now has a IBM Deep Blue supercomputer. You may have heard of these machines before. They are famous for playing chess against Garry Kasparov. It’s a huge machine! Its currently in the reception area of the museum. Unfortunately, we have not been able to power it on yet as we don’t have a suitable power supply for it. It’s not as simple as plugging in a 13 amp plug in a wall socket!

You can read more about this phenomenal machine at Wikipedia.

Apple Performa 475 build

When you are working on old computers, there may be a time where you need to archive disks, or write disk images onto blanks. Reading/Writing PC disks is relatively easy with no special hardware required. If you want to read/write 400k 3.5″ disks written by a Apple Macintosh 128k, it’s not so simple!

To get around this issue, I retrieved one of the many Apple Performa 475 we have from storage. I completely wiped its hard drive, replaced its PRAM battery, popped in a LAN adapter and installed System 7.5.5. I also installed Open Transport so it could access a TCP/IP based AppleTalk servers – but we had a problem! We don’t have a server that can support AppleTalk. So I had to build one. See further down this blog post for more information! We could have used FTP, but I wanted something a bit simpler!

Once the machine was built and ready to go, I installed the disk imaging software. That’s it! We can now archive 400k,800k and 1.4Mb Macintosh formatted floppy disks, Zip disks, Syquest drives and many more! Once the disks have been imaged, we copy them to one of our file servers from the AppleTalk server.

Netatalk & Avahi server

As mentioned in the Apple build above, we needed a AppleTalk/AFP file server. For the server, we used the following hardware that was just laying around doing nothing.

  • Pentium III 1Ghz
  • 640Mb RAM
  • 1 * 40Gb Hard disk (this has Windows 2000 on)
  • 1 * 60Gb Hard disk for the Linux install.
  • 100Mb LAN adapter.

I decided to install Ubuntu Server 9.10 x32 on this PC as this has the netatalk binaries in the repositories. Apart from the base install, the following addional packages were installed.

  • OpenSSH – allows us to use putty to connect to a console session and to transfer files via SFTP
  • Samba – So windows clients can access the data
  • Netatalk – The AppleTalk file server
  • Avahi-daemon (mDNS server – bit like Bonjour on Mac OS X)

For a detailed description now how to install Netatalk and Avahi, see the following blog post at Kremalicious.

 Ta da!!! – we have a AppleTalk server!

Conclusion

This is was a very successful visit to the musuem, and we got a lot done. Im planning to go to the museum again in the next few weeks. We need to prepare for a very important event happinging in April. Watch this space for more information.

I reccomend you take a look at the museums website. If you can help the museum in any way you can contact them directly using the addresses below.

General Questions & Information :
Contact : David Coxshall – Email : admin@computinghistory.org.uk
 
Press & PR
Contact : Elaine Collins – press@computinghistory.org.uk
Telephone : 01440 708494
 
Technical Queries & Vintage Computer Hire
Contact : Jason Fitzpatrick – info@computinghistory.org.uk

RCM November Open day this Sunday!

0
3 years ago
by Andy in

RCM Logo Its that time of year again – the November Retro Computer Museum open day! This is now the 3rd public event held by this museum.

I will be attenting the event again this year, and im currently planning to bring 3 systems. One is my recently obtained RM Nimbus PC-186, another is my Amstrad CPC6128 (Now with its additional 3.5″ drive) and also a Apple SE/30. The Apple may not make it to the weekend, as I think the display is about to fail. I do have a spare SE/30 but I doubt I will be able to swap componets around over the next few days. If the SE/30 doesnt go, I will take my 486 PC with a mixture of older games.

If you would like to know more about the event, please click the banner below. Hopefully I will see you there!

RCM-GE-NOV

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