retrocomputing

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I've got a couple of older Dell core2 machines with ddr2. They still have good caps in them. They're interesting to me because they have 3.5" floppy and sata cd/DVD and they can handle a newer os. Id like to keep something around that I can pop in an old cd/DVD or floppy disk or create disks from. I'm just stuck on if I should install xp, 7, 10, tiny 10, some flavor of Linux, they have vista stickers on them. They're just in a weird spot where they're not really vintage PC's and not really modern anymore either.

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Silicon Valley has the reputation of being the birthplace of our hyper-connected Internet age, the hub of companies such as Apple, Google and Facebook. However, a pioneering company here in central Ohio is responsible for developing and popularizing many of the technologies we take for granted today.

A listener submitted a question to WOSU’s Curious Cbus series wanting to know more about the legacy of CompuServe and what it meant to go online before the Internet.

That legacy was recently commemorated by the Ohio History Connection when they installed a historical marker in Upper Arlington — near the corner of Arlington Center and Henderson roads — where the company located its computer center and corporate building in 1973.

The plaque explains that CompuServe was "the first major online information service provider," and that its subscribers were among the first to have access to email, online newspapers and magazines and the ability to share and download files.

Came across an old USB floppy drive. I plugged it into my machine and it shows up, but I can't tell it it's actually working or not. When plugged in, it sounds like it's continuously reading, so I kind of want to test it. Can you even buy floppy disks any more?

That said, if I don't have any disks, I guess the question of whether or not it works is moot anyways.

I dumped the ROM out of a piece of retro-tech and have been working through the code in Ghidra. Unfortunately, I can’t exactly decompile it because I don’t think it was originally written in a higher level language.

For example, the stack is rarely used and most functions either deal entirely in global variables, or binary values are passed back using the carry or other low-level bits. Trying to turn it into C would just make spaghetti code with a different sauce.

So my current plan is to just comment every subroutine as best I can, but that still leaves a few massive lookup tables that should be dropped into a spreadsheet of some sort to add context. Not to mention schematics.

My question is what’s the best way to present all of this? I’d like to open-source the result, so a simple PDF is not ideal. I guess I should make a GitHub project? Are there any good examples or templates I can draw on?

A few days ago I posted about my old PC and there was some interest, here's an update.

tldr: the hdd saved everything! It has windows 3.1 and all the games I remember are still there.

Longer story: I bought a few adapters for PATA/IDE to USB and they didn't work. I had this weird issue where when I plugged the usb into my computer, the drive would power off. You can hear it spinning when it's on, plug in USB, drive powers off. Unplug USB, drive powers back on. So after buying 2 different adapters, I gave up on trying to read it that way.

Then, I got a floppy reader and a bunch of floppy disks. The software testdisk has a DOS version, so I copied that to a floppy and ran it on the computer. While it was analyzing the HDD it told me in an error message that the drive appeared smaller than it actually is, and I should update my bios settings.

After struggling to figure out how to get to bios (ctrl alt s, AFTER BOOTING), I googled my drive model and found the cylinders, heads, sectors information and manually typed that into the BIOS as a "user defined" hard drive, and that was all it needed to be able to read the drive.

After that it booted straight into PC DOS + Windows 3.1 and everything is there. I found recipes, games, and other programs.

I was going to try to send files over serial, but it wasn't working for me (i still haven't tried zmodem yet) but I couldn't even receive an echo to the serial port. So I've been backing things up by copying to floppy disk, then reading the disk on my laptop with a reader.