Articles tagged "Hardware"
Sun SPARCstation 1
The 1989 "Campus" that started the pizza box era, restored to a genuine SS1 board after arriving with a Purdue clone upgrade installed
Osborne 1
The 1981 luggable that fit under an airline seat — and whose dangerously unkeyed +12V floppy connector cooked multiple drives during the restoration
Sun SPARCstation 2
The early-90s Unix workhorse, here with an 80 MHz Weitek PowerUp and a rare fully-populated 64 MB DataRAM SBus card
Kaypro II
The 1982 all-aluminum CP/M luggable — too tough to yellow, needing only a fabricated keyboard cable to boot
Sun SPARCstation 5
Sun's 1994 entry-level "Aurora," topped out with a 170 MHz TurboSPARC — SPARC for the masses
Commodore SX-64
The first full-color portable, with the original Sony Trinitron CRT swapped for a modern 5.6" LCD
Sun SPARCstation 10
The first Sun desktop to fit two CPUs, with the modular MBus that made compute upgrades a slot-in affair
Compaq Portable I
The 1983 luggable that beat IBM with a clean-room BIOS — and needed every Key Tronic foam-and-foil keyboard pad replaced
Sun SPARCstation 20
The pinnacle "Kodiak" pizza box, built to take four CPUs — this one runs a 125 MHz ROSS hyperSPARC
Compaq Portable II
Compaq's 1986 286 portable, lighter than the I and hiding a mysterious dual-plunger Enter key from an abandoned firmware design
Sun Ultra 1
Sun's first 64-bit desktop — the 1995 "Electron" with hardware-accelerated UPA Creator graphics
Sun Ultra 5
Sun's budget UltraSPARC IIi desktop, whose cost-cutting IDE drives needed a ZuluSCSI workaround to behave
Compaq Portable III
Compaq's 1987 portable with a flat amber gas-plasma screen and the first genuinely good keyboard in the line
IBM 5155 Portable
IBM's rushed answer to the Compaq Portable, with its scroll-blanking CGA card swapped out for an ATI EGA Wonder running in CGA mode
Bench Tools for Vintage Computer Repair
What you actually need on the bench to bring an old computer back to life, and a rough order to acquire it in. From a soldering iron and braid through a logic analyzer and a known-good test rig.
Commodore 64 250407 Visual Parts Locator
Five labeled diagrams of the 250407 breadbin board — ports, custom chips, RAM, and glue logic — with U-numbers that line up with Ray Carlsen's symptom guide
Commodore 64 Socketing Parts
Mouser part numbers for the DIP sockets and the 2114 color SRAM I use when socketing chips on a 250407 board
Commodore 64
A 1983 breadbin, a roll of solder braid, a dead-test cartridge, and the restoration that started everything
NeXT Color Y-Cable to VGA
Wiring diagram for building a NeXTstation Color Y-cable that splits 13W3 video to VGA and DB19 keyboard/mouse to the SoundBox
NeXT Workstation Resources
Curated reference links for restoring and modifying NeXT workstations — pinouts, keyboard protocol, parts, and vendor sources
The IBM Buckling Spring Keyboard
How the famous IBM Model F and Model M keyboards produce their iconic click-clack sound, and a look at the rare Space Saving Keyboard variant
Bi-Color LED Daughter Card for ZuluSCSI
A small daughter card that repurposes the front-panel power LED on Sun workstations to also indicate drive access, using an RGB LED and an XOR gate driven by the ZuluSCSI accessory output
ZuluSCSI Overview
ZuluSCSI is a solid-state direct replacement for a physical SCSI drive, well suited to retro computers. Performance, SD card convenience, multiple SCSI targets per board, and mounting tips
Macintosh SE/30
The Macintosh SE/30 odyssey: two machines, one jig, a dead logic board, a fresh set of caps, and a brand-new power supply
Macintosh SE/30 Reimagined
A Raspberry Pi and LCD panel reborn inside an original Macintosh SE/30 case, running Mini vMac for a fast, color, and lightweight classic Mac experience
Locked Out: Clearing the Firmware Password on Vintage Sun Workstations
How to bypass and clear a firmware password on Sun SPARCstations and Ultras when the timekeeper chip has lost its memory
Burning a New SPARCstation 1 PROM
How to upgrade the OpenBoot PROM on a SPARCstation 1 using a MiniPRO TL866II Plus programmer
Fixing a Corrupted TOD Clock on SunOS 4.1.4
How to recover a SunOS 4.1.4 system that won't boot after setting a modern date corrupted the time-of-day chip
Compile Time Comparisons Across Vintage and Modern Hardware
Benchmarking C++ compile times across Sun workstations, SGI machines, Raspberry Pis, and modern desktops
Replacing a Sun IPX Power Supply with a Mini ATX
How to replace a failed Sun SPARCstation IPX power supply with an inexpensive TF400 Mini ATX supply
M48T02 Timekeeper External Battery Mod
How to add an external coin cell battery to M48T02 timekeeper chips
ZuluSCSI Disk Images
Getting started with ZuluSCSI disk images for vintage workstations
Apple IIe Platinum
The final revision of Apple's legendary 8-bit computer
Macintosh Color Classic
Apple's first color compact Macintosh
The Rise and Fall of SPARCstation Clones
When Sun had competition from its own architecture
Commodore SX-64 Schematics
Complete schematic diagrams for the Commodore SX-64 portable computer
Silicon Graphics Parts Sources
Where to find parts for SGI workstation restoration
Sun Hardware Reference Guide
Technical reference for Sun workstation hardware
NCR PC4
An award-winning 1985 all-in-one PC compatible whose keyboard fault, after an exploded motherboard cap, traced back to a single bad shift register
IBM PCjr
IBM's failed 1984 home machine, made actually usable by the jr-IDE sidecar that adds 1 MB SRAM, an RTC, and IDE storage
Retrobright: Science and Philosophy
Understanding the chemistry of yellowed plastic and the case for restoration