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Vintage computer fun

mercalia said:
Any one here have so called Pocket Pcs the ancestor to the smart phone. I still have a couple of Fujitsu-Siemens Pocket Loox N560 with their so called trans-reflective screen
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https://pinkfishmedia.net/forum/threads/vintage-computer-fun.221645/page-33#post-4952039

https://pinkfishmedia.net/forum/threads/vintage-computer-fun.221645/page-33#post-4952058

https://pinkfishmedia.net/forum/threads/vintage-computer-fun.221645/page-33#post-4952812
 

Don’t quite know where to put this, but it is incredible. The more familiar with Doom you are the more impossible this looks. I’ll go grab a copy at some point along with GZDoom which will apparently run on a Mac (this .wad file won’t run on bog standard Doom 2, which I do have running in DOSBox).
 

I’ll stick this technical analysis of how the MyHouse.pk3 Doom mod works here. Both videos I’ve linked are obviously spoilers, so don’t watch if you intend playing it properly (I’ve always been far more interested in the ideas of computer games and how they work, I’m pretty terrible at playing them!). Anyway this is fascinating, some stunningly clever stuff, both coding and conceptually, going on to create a wonderfully twisted, reality-mangled and very modern feeling game.

Doom is 30 years old this year and this is a stunning tribute. I’ve got it installed on my Mac now ready for a good wander round. I’m pleased I watched the videos as it is so recursively complex and huge with multiple endings etc no way in hell would I have figured it out even if I had the time!
 

A look at the remarkably cool System Source Museum in Maryland. Some amazing kit and they have the same attitude as TNMOC in that just about everything is restored to working condition.

PS Someone got a real bargain with that Pet, they go for about £600 to well over £1k.
 
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So this happened. It is an Osborne 1, the first “portable” computer from 1981. A Z80 machine running CPM and it turned up as a very kind donation from a pfm member. Thank you! I’m not going to do anything beyond cleaning until I’ve fully assessed the PSU and replaced a couple of Rifa caps, maybe more. It is very yellowed so a candidate for ‘retrobriting’. I’ve got it in bits now and given the case and keys a good bath and given the weather at present I’m going to try gently ‘sunbriting’ the case in a back yard for a day or too to see if that gets it a little less yellow (I’m still wary of going the full-on chemical peroxide process here). I’ll get the PSU parts ordered during the week. These are allegedly fairly easy to work on and very simple from a mainboard perspective so hopefully it should end up working. The screen is comedically tiny!

PS The Apple II is still a work in progress. I thought I had it working, I even got to the point of being able to copy a disk and then boot from that disk, though since then something has kind of faded and whilst it seems to work as a computer (e.g. I can type in and run a simple Basic prog) I can’t get it to boot from a disk anymore. I suspect some logic chip has gone somewhere, though not on the disk controller as I’ve checked all those in my chip-tester. Bit baffled to be honest.
 
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Here’s the Osborne 1 mainboard after a hopefully static-safe dusting (grounded anti-static mat, wrist-strap, ESD-safe brush etc). Looks to be in very good shape with no evidence of any rework. Quite a few tantalum caps which always come with an aspect of Russian Roulette, but they are likely fine so I’m not going to do anything unless one explodes.

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Thankfully no power-up attempt has been made on this computer for I assume decades so the three obviously badly cracked Rifa X safety caps haven’t had the opportunity to blow up releasing their magic smoke and sticky brown goo. I’ve just ordered some replacements. I can see no evidence of bulging, leaking etc in the other caps so I’ll leave them be at this stage. I tried a few in-circuit tests with my Peak ESR meter and nothing rang obvious alarm bells. If I don’t measure sensible voltages after replacing the Rifa X caps I’ll have a think, though I suspect it will be fine. I don’t think this is a heavy-use example.

Clean the disk drives next…
 
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Drives are nice and clean. I’ve not done anything more than dust and clean the heads. The belts seem in very good condition (they are the cloth type like Apple IIs, though it is a different Seimens drive mech). Everything looks good here, moves freely etc, so I’m doing nothing else unless they don’t work. Minimal intervention.

I’ve had the case sunning itself in the back yard all day which is definitely reducing the yellowing a few shades. I doubt it will ever get back to the original without chemicals, but ‘sunbriting’ does definitely help. How permanent this will be I don’t know, but I couldn’t not try it given how yellowed it was (Osbornes are notorious for this). I’ll give it a few days as the weather is nice. This isn’t a fragile case, it is really thick and designed to take a knock or too, so I don’t think it will start to crumble to dust the way of say beige PowerPC Macs.
 
That machine had had very little usage it's a MK1 Osborne and the Mk2 followed quite quickly with twice the disc storage and a better looking Grey and Blue Case. At the time I was Commercial Direcotor of ByteShopComputerland Nottingham. It languished in stock and was written off a couple of years later. By that time Osborne Computers had ceased to exist. Adam Osborne as a Journalist had made the mistake of talking about his Mk3 machine and it stopped sales of the Mk2 dead so they went bankrupt. At the same time the IBM PC had been launched and there was a sea change in the market.
I took the written off Osborne 1 home for my kids to play with and a couple of years later it was put up in the loft.
We concentrated on PC sales and shortly Compaq launched their PC Compatible luggable. That with Lotus 123 took any market the Osborne could have sold into.
 
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Osborne update: PSU Rifa caps replaced, thoroughly cleaned and ‘sunbrited’ (i.e. leaving the case outside in the bright sunlight and the key caps on a sun-drenched windowsill) and it is looking a lot better. I’ve gone as far as I’m prepared to here as I’m very reluctant to weaken the plastic with heavy UV exposure, especially given the (non-removable) black plastic clasps are bent plastic like a Rega Planar 3 lid hinge, and I really don’t want these to break. It is a lot better than it was and has gone from a really bad nicotine orange to a kind of 1980s rented flat magnolia, which still isn’t right, but is a lot closer to its original colour. I’m amazed by how well the keycaps have come up, they are back to their grey rather than the green-brown in the picture upthread.

As to working condition: it is largely alive and is aware it is an Osborne 1, though I can’t get it to boot any disk I have. It seeks, but crashes shortly after, sometimes filling the screen with junk. This is consistent between drives, i.e. just the same thing if I use shift-“ to boot from the B drive. As such I’m certainly not ruling out the floppy disks themselves being bad. Basically I need to find a known good Osborne 1 CP/M boot disk to move forward here, I’m very reluctant to blame the drives or the machine itself as everything spins, I can hear the heads seeking etc. The computer itself may well be fine. Annoyingly as I can’t get into CP/M I can’t test the keyboard either, though it is clear at least return and shift-“ work as they do exactly what they should at the pre-boot screen, so things looking good there.

This is all very positive IMO, this Osborne clearly wants to live!
 
This sounds like it was an amazing find!

"Thousands of Vintage Computers Emerge from a Storage Barn"

"The NABU Personal Computer is so obscure it doesn't have an entry at old-computers.com. 2,200 of them have been recovered from an old barn in Massachussets, in deadstock condition in their original boxes. To save the barn from collapse, they were all dumped on eBay for $60 each, where they were eventually noticed."

https://boingboing.net/2023/07/03/thousands-of-vintage-computers-emerge-from-storage-barn.html
 
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