r/retrocomputing

Dear MSN Buddies!

I have a nostalgia triggering invention, I brought those iconic MSN Winks (about 300) back to life with NETRO-G (where Neo and Retro merge into a smart Gadget)! I even transformed myself into the beloved, hated and now missed Laughing Girl! :)

Now you can live in the 2000's era again, while keeping up with the latest technology and play all your favorites on your smartphone! No apps, no extensions, your Winks are literally just a hover away! :)

Every step (searching for, rescuing, drawing, converting, printing, programming long lost winks, assembling and testing the gadget) was entirely made by me.

IMPORTANT: I am still in the market research phase, so I am posting this to ask for YOUR honest opinions, if my invention makes sense, if there is a need for it, and if I have to create more Winks (and videos) in the form of a NETRO-G gadget.

If you are interested, check out my YT channel, NETRO-G for more funny intro videos. Have a great day and thank you for your input in advance!

No One Lives Forever 2: A Spy in H.A.R.M.'s way (released in Oct 2002) -

This game still looks gorgeous and play great.. a classic for old retro rigs, though I am running it on an i5 3rd gen, with Nvidia GT 740 and offcourse on Windows XP 32 bit

Apple badly needed a hit, and another beige box with slightly better specs wasn't going to change anything.

Steve Jobs and Jony Ive took a much bigger swing. The iMac was rounded, translucent and Bondi Blue. You could recognize it from across a room, which was unusual at a time when most computers looked like office equipment.

The handle on top was especially clever. The iMac was a heavy desktop machine, so the handle was never really about portability. It made the computer feel approachable. People understood immediately where to touch it and how to engage with it.

That friendly exterior took serious work behind the scenes. Apple had to rethink plastics, colors, tooling and manufacturing. Because the case was translucent, even the internal parts had to look orderly. The design team wasn't brought in at the end to make the machine prettier. Design shaped how the entire product got built.

The choices inside were just as bold. The floppy drive was gone, familiar ports disappeared and USB became the standard. Plenty of critics predicted disaster. Instead, Apple sold around 800,000 iMacs by the end of 1998, cemented its comeback and kicked off a run of products that reshaped the company.

Anyone building a physical product can take something from this. Good design isn't a coat of paint applied at the end. It reaches into engineering, manufacturing, usability, marketing and the feeling someone gets when they pick up the finished object.

A lot of today's products are beautifully made and strangely forgettable. Phones are nearly identical glass slabs. Laptops are silver rectangles. Cars are becoming large touchscreens surrounded by bodywork. Appliances have shed their buttons, their character and in some cases their basic ease of use.

The iMac proved people will form a real attachment to a well-designed piece of technology. Nearly three decades later, physical products could use a little more of that courage and a little less gray. The hockey-puck mouse, though, can stay in 1998.

#TechHistory #ProductDesign #IndustrialDesign

On August 18, 1947, Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard incorporated the business they had started in 1938 and formalized as a partnership in 1939. Disney became their first major customer, buying eight modified Model 200B oscillators for theaters showing Fantasia. A coin toss decided the name order; the usual version says Packard won and put Hewlett first anyway.

The 1968 HP 9100A was a desktop computer sold as a “calculator” because purchasing agents could approve calculators while computers required senior management. The HP-35 arrived in 1972, sold 100,000 units in its first year and sent the slide rule into rapid decline. The LaserJet followed in 1984 and made printing a profit engine for decades.

Then it got ugly. The Compaq merger triggered a bitter proxy fight led by Walter Hewlett, Bill’s son and an HP director. In 2006, investigators searching for boardroom leaks used pretexting and surveillance against directors and journalists.

The worst came on August 18, 2011, exactly 64 years after HP incorporated. HP announced its roughly $10.3 billion bid for Autonomy, ended webOS device operations and considered separating the PC business. Fifteen months later, it recorded an $8.8 billion Autonomy impairment. The PC separation was abandoned. One day, three self-inflicted crises.

HP split in 2015. HP Inc. took PCs and printers; Hewlett Packard Enterprise took the enterprise businesses. Many saw a retreat. A decade later, it looks more like a hedge.

HPs biggest move since then was its $14 billion acquisition of Juniper Networks. The Justice Department sued to block it before settling, and the deal closed in July 2025. Juniper brought routing, security, data-center networking and Mist, its cloud-managed networking platform. Early results look promising, although the acquisition inflates recent growth comparisons.

HP has a simpler problem: “AI PC” is not yet a reason to replace a working laptop. Local agents that can work across private files may change that. Revenue rose 13% in HP’s latest quarter, but units fell 7%. Printing was flat, consumer printing fell 10%, and HP plans to cut 4,000 to 6,000 positions by fiscal 2028

Two halves of one company at opposite ends of the same wave. HPE sells the infrastructure where AI runs. HP Inc. has to prove AI belongs on the desk.

Not bad for a garage.

Recently I bought this computer but when I turn it on, it only shows this on screen. What can be causing this and can it be fixed?

do ya’ll remember this game?? i loved it as a kid and wanted to play it again.

Her thinking still shows up in every serious conversation about mission critical software.

During Apollo, hardware got the glory. Software was the new kid, and plenty of people didn't consider it real engineering. Hamilton did. She led the MIT team behind Apollo's onboard flight software and designed around an uncomfortable fact: machines, interfaces and people all make mistakes.

My favorite story involves her daughter Lauren, who often came to the lab on nights and weekends. Playing astronaut, Lauren selected the prelaunch program, P01, during a simulated flight. The simulator crashed and the navigation data vanished.

Hamilton wanted the flight software to guard against that exact mistake. The answer, more or less: astronauts are too well trained to do that.

Then Jim Lovell did it. Five days into Apollo 8, he accidentally selected P01 and wiped the spacecraft's navigation data. Hamilton's team worked out how to rebuild and upload it. After that, the protection went in.

Anyone who runs complex systems knows the lesson. If your design depends on users never pressing the wrong button, you don't have a robust design. You have a future incident report.

Apollo 11 was the bigger test. During the lunar descent the guidance computer overloaded and threw the 1202 and 1201 alarms. The software didn't freeze or reboot into oblivion. Its priority based architecture shed lower value work and kept the landing functions running. The computer was tiny by today's standards, but it knew which jobs mattered.

That challenge hasn't gone anywhere.

Future lunar and Mars missions will run as one distributed system: landers, habitats, robots, satellites and commercial platforms. Comms will drop. Radiation will flip bits. Components from different suppliers will behave in ways nobody saw during the PowerPoint phase.

AI will help with anomaly detection, planning, testing and autonomous navigation. But nobody serious wants a black box model freelancing during a Mars landing. Mission software has to be deterministic where it matters, observable when it fails, and able to recover without waiting for Houston to pick up the phone.

AI can assist engineers, but requirements, evidence, human review and independent verification still count.

Hamilton understood the real job. It was never just writing code that worked. It was anticipating what could go wrong and making sure the system stayed useful when it did.

That mindset will matter far more on Mars than any flashy demo.

A while ago, I posted here about getting the first CPU-independent parts of CHARM-II, an RTOS I originally developed in 1986, running on a Raspberry Pi Pico.

Previous post:

The First Original CHARM-II Kernel Code Running on Raspberry Pi Pico
https://www.reddit.com/r/osdev/s/gthHF6vBrl

At that point, there were no timer interrupts or real context switches yet.

Now those parts are working too.

Six tasks are running with independent stacks. An RP2040 hardware timer interrupt calls the CHARM-II tick and scheduling logic, and the actual context switch is done with PendSV on the Cortex-M0+.

I also ported a six-task demo I had previously reconstructed on POSIX. Six tasks move around three tracks, with a critical zone protected by a CHARM-II queue used as a semaphore. On the Pico, the tasks are now actually being preempted by the hardware timer rather than cooperatively yielding.

So technically, this is pretty much the milestone I wanted to reach.

But getting it working gave me another question.

The original targets in the 1980s were processors such as the 68000 and 80186. With the CPU resources available at the time, an RTOS was a useful way to organize multiple concurrent real-time activities.

But what if we had had something with the performance and price of a Raspberry Pi Pico back then?

For many systems I work with today, especially UI-oriented embedded systems, if all the required processing comfortably fits within one frame, a superloop plus interrupts may actually be simpler.

Once everything becomes preemptive, I also have to start thinking about reentrancy, synchronization and shared state in existing libraries. That cost is starting to look more significant to me than it did when I started this experiment.

Yesterday I visited someone who has built a home railway simulator using real railway controls connected to a Windows PC through Pico, ESP32 and Arduino boards. We talked about this, and he said something very simple:

“If one Pico isn't fast enough, add another Pico.”

That hadn't really occurred to me.

In the 1980s, adding another CPU was a fairly serious architectural decision. With today's inexpensive MCUs, distributing the work across two or three processors can be a perfectly ordinary option.

So after spending quite a bit of effort getting a 40-year-old RTOS to perform real preemptive context switching on modern hardware, I'm becoming more interested in a different question:

Where would you draw the line today between an RTOS, a superloop/event-driven design, interrupts, and simply distributing the work across multiple cheap MCUs?

I'm also thinking that when I publish the modernized version of CHARM-II, I may deliberately keep it very small — just enough task scheduling, queues, timer ticks and context switching to run this six-task demo.

Then I can use it as one reference implementation and try implementing the same behavior without an RTOS.

Heroes of Might and Magic II was the hot-seat game for me and a few of my closest friends.

Almost every weekend, we would sit together around the same computer and take turns playing.

Now we’re all older, and it has become difficult for us to get together. Those days of being young are gone and will never come back.

Maybe in a few more years, I’ll be playing it alone.

More

… this an amd k6 v2 based desktop computer featuring ati radeon gpu bigfoot hdd with 5 GB and 56k dialup modem

Games look more beautiful than ever now, but sometimes I still miss the DOS days and Might and Magic III.

Maybe it isn’t really the game I miss. Back then, whatever we played, there were always friends around.

I have a family now, but sometimes I still feel alone. Some of those old friends have passed away.

Looking at these screenshots brought them back for a moment.

Two different liquidators on both sides of the Atlantic sold surplus IBM thermal printers, intended for the PCjr, along with interface cables or devices so they could work with other computers, such as the Commodore 64, or Sinclair and Amstrad computers. Arguably it was the cheapest printer on the market for several years. And it was a reasonable value for the money. This blog post walks through the Serial 8056 and Protecto Big Blue printers, two twins sold in the USA and UK. https://dfarq.homeip.net/ibm-pc-compact-printer-model-5181/

IBM Simon went on sale 32 years ago today, on August 16, 1994. A May launch slipped three months while engineers fixed bugs in the cellular fax integration. BellSouth Cellular sold it across its 15-state footprint, so the first smartphone rollout was a regional affair.

Pricing was $899 with a two-year contract or $1,099 without activation. BellSouth later cut the contract price to $599. Roughly 50,000 units sold in six months.

Simon ran on BellSouth's analog AMPS network. Email did not ride an always-on data connection. The device dialed a circuit-switched cellular call and pushed data through a 2,400 bps modem. Fax topped out at 9,600 bps. It skipped CDPD, the packet data technology carriers were just starting to deploy.

That gap showed up in the field. Voice worked wherever AMPS coverage existed, but data sessions choked on weak signals, interference and cell handoffs. A BYTE reviewer put the failure rate for cellular data connections at 10 to 20 percent. Every dropped session meant reconnecting, restarting the transfer and paying for more airtime.

The hardware was closer to a pocket DOS machine with a cellular radio than a phone. It weighed 18 ounces and packed a 16 MHz x86-compatible processor, ROM-DOS, 1 MB of RAM, flash storage and a PCMCIA slot. The 4.5-inch monochrome touchscreen handled calling, paging, cc:Mail, fax, contacts, calendars, notes and document annotation.

For executives, salespeople and service teams, that mix earned its keep. A user could take a page, pull up a customer record, check an appointment and fire off a fax without returning to the office. DispatchIt, one of the only third-party packages, turned Simon into a field-service work order terminal at $2,999 for the host software plus $299 per client.

The costs kept stacking. A larger battery was $78. An RJ-11 adapter for data over a phone line cost $119. PCMCIA memory cards ran $224 for 1 MB and $279 for 1.8 MB. Add cellular service, email infrastructure, support and spare batteries.

The NiCd battery gave about an hour of talking or data and 8 to 12 hours of standby. Typing on the small on-screen keyboard was slow, and using the organizer mid-call meant pulling the screen away from your head.

Simon failed for practical reasons: expensive hardware and service, limited distribution, unreliable mobile data, short battery life, a bulky design and almost no application ecosystem. Smaller, cheaper flip phones were eating the market from below.

Simon tried to cram the entire mobile office into one device. The next phase runs the other direction. Phones will keep managing identity, connectivity and security while work spreads across watches, glasses, vehicles and industrial devices. For enterprise teams, building a capable endpoint stopped being the challenge years ago. The real work is keeping applications, data and policy consistent as people move between devices and networks.