Serial Port

We’ve started looking at 1980s Ethernet products recently, and Cabletron was one of the most prominent Ethernet vendors at the time. I stumbled upon this Ethernet Technology Guide published by Cabletron, and found it to be a very comprehensive of Ethernet history and how the physical LANs were built (10base5, 10base2, 10baseT) particularly the multi-port […]

Our PC’s Limited (Dell) 286 computer came with a B.G. Micro vocal synthesizer card, which lets the computer “talk” in 1980s robot style. Two tantalum capacitors had failed on the board, so all were replaced. Photos Resources Resources we found related to this card components How it Works Here’s a very rough overview of how […]

I’ve used several HP Procurve switches over the years and have found them to be great for general office use. We have been using a 1810G-24 (J9450A) switch in our lab, to keep machines online including the infamous Cobalt RaQ 3. This is a “web managed” switch, with basic VLAN support. On the plus side, […]

found some interesting materials from Dave Walden’s site Source: https://www.walden-family.com/bbn/ A great write-up of BBN history is also here, including details on their contract to provide modem dial-in service for AOL (over 400,000 modems!)

How to install FreeBSD 2.0.5 in a virtual machine

While working on the Xyplex Maxserver 1620 for our upcoming terminal server video, I wanted to try re-creating a menu I thought I had seen before from a 1990s ISP. The idea is that the user can dial in with a modem, and then get a menu to choose between several options such as telneting […]

After we completed the hardware restoration on the Sun SparcCLASSIC, my first objective was to do a network-based Solaris install. I had heard many people talk about network installs of Solaris, in particular _Jumpstart_ which is an automated install method over the network. Eventually, we got the network install of Solaris 2.6 working and showed […]

In our journey to re-live old experiences with our retro computers, part of that experience is to use dial-up modems. For example, we did a thorough factory restore to bring our Packard Bell Platinum 2220 back to life [vintage 1997] and while it would be easy to get it online by slapping in a 3com […]

After we recently added the Compaq Deskpro EN (Celeron 300A) system to our collection, I was eager to do a new OS install since the system seemed completely functional in original form. The machine came with both Windows 95 & NT badges, and we obviously decided to install NT since this was a business-class machine. […]

Ensuring that power supplies in vintage hardware are reliable and safe is extremely important. If voltage regulation in the supply were to suddenly fail, or even slowly fail over time, this can cause damage to downstream components that may be much harder to replace than the power supply itself. To that end, we’ve been working […]