Seasoned Apple Macintosh pros have likely experienced the joy (and sadness) of using a large AppleTalk network. You know, the kind where the Chooser suddenly shows a Zone menu at the bottom left where there used to be none? When you first see it, it’s a shock– like you’ve suddenly unlocked a secret power up that your Mac has had all along.
Alternate title: I want to print from an emulated Mac on a pocket computer to my ImageWriter II over AppleTalk.
I’ve had a PocketCHIP for several years now. I picked it up right after the Kickstarter campaign was finished sometime in 2016/2017. It’s a great little Linux-based handheld device that combines a lot in one package (touch display, keyboard, storage, battery, sound, USB port, WiFi, Bluetooth, etc.). The novelty wore off and I stowed it away in a box. The company Next Thing Co. went out of business shortly thereafter in March 2018.
Continue readingIn November 2021, I posted a short video on Twitter of my Roland DXY 1150 pen plotter drawing a generative wobbly circle design on top of a 5.25″ floppy disk. A few people responded that they would buy one of the floppies. This got me thinking about the medium of a floppy disk that I was using.
(This was originally a Twitter thread from November 6, 2017.)
November 6, 2017
A huge box has just arrived! And inside are lots and lots of packing peanuts. Wait, wait, there’s something else in here. It looks like it’s from the future.
Say 10 PRINT”HELLO WORLD” to the Commodore PET 2001 from 1977, one of the “trinity” personal computers. Big thanks to @FozzTexx!
July 31, 2022
Welcoming a new (old) printer (back) into my fleet: a LaserWriter II. It’s a workhorse of a printer from 1988 dressed in Snow White design language. #RetroComputing
(This is an experimental post to attempt to convert a Twitter thread into a WordPress post).
The Hayes Transet is a communications buffer that works with printers as a print buffer and with your modem as a mailbox. It includes sophisticated internal routing that allows data from one of it’s three ports to be sent to any other port (or all ports).
Continue readingThe Hayes InterBridge is “an inter-connecting ‘bridge’ that allows users of an AppleTalk network to tie into other AppleTalk networks.” This niche product was sold by Hayes in 1987 for $799 retail. There’s not a lot of information about this device left around so this page is an attempt to collect what I can find.
Did you recently get a new MS-DOS, KayPro IV, or Osborne 1 computer but no boot floppies?
If you have a Commodore 128 and a 1571 floppy drive, you might already know that you can read and write certain CP/M floppy formats while in CP/M mode. This is because the 1571 floppy drive can read and write two types of disk encoding schemes. GCR (Commodore, Apple, etc.) and MFM (common on CP/M and DOS platforms).
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This page is intended to collect information about the Northern Telecom Displayphone terminal. If you have any additional information about the Displayphone, please leave a comment. I’m specifically looking for later revisions of the software found in EPROM on these machines.
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Until recently, I had no idea what a Hayes Chronograph was. I didn’t even know it existed until Bill Lange (@BillLange1968) posted a picture of one on Twitter that linked to a wonderful article he wrote about them. The name Hayes was instantly recognizable though, being the inventors of the Hayes “AT” Command set that has found a way into just about every modem since. The shape was also familiar, a bigger version of the same case used in their Smartmodem 300. This was different. It had a beautiful vacuum fluorescent display (VFD) that was showing the current time and day of the week. I was hooked. I needed to buy this. What a wonderful trophy from the soon to come BBS halcyon days.
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