r/vintagecomputing

in the bios it supports booting from floppy and cdrom. not sure how to get cdrom support , maybe using their official ISA expansion + IO controller ?

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Mine was a Commodore 64, bought in 1993 with my very first wage. Mostly games and a bit of BASIC and I couldn't tell you the names of half of them. Finally I sold it to get my first car.

Not the family machine, not a hand-me-down from an older brother or sister. The first one that was properly yours.

What was yours, and how did you end up with it?

Here is the hardware I have gathered after several years of research.

Details of the complete setup, which I envisioned as the most powerful consumer-grade computer possible to assemble as of December 31, 2006:

Case: Thermaltake MozartTX

Power Supply: Enermax Galaxy 1000W

CPU: Core 2 Extreme QX6700

CPU Cooler: Custom full-copper waterblock by Liquid Extasy

GPU Cooler: 2x EKWB GTX 8800

Custom Water Cooling: 2x Thermaltake BigWater 745 complete kits

Motherboard: Asus P5N32-E-SLI (nForce 680i SLI)

Graphics Card: Nvidia 8800 GTX SLI (2x €650)

Memory: 4x 2GB DDR2 PC6400 Corsair HX2

OS: Windows Vista 64-bit

OS Drive: RAID 0 array of 4x Gigabyte i-RAM (16x 1GB DDR)

Storage Drive: RAID 0 array of Raptor X 150GB (WD1500AHFD)

Sound Card: Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi FPS Fatal1ty

Optical Drive: Plextor PX-130A

Optical Burner: Plextor PX-760SA

The computer is currently being assembled and will be on display at the OCC Rétro booth during Paris Games Week 2026.

Spent some time getting this old beast up and running again

Capacitor replacement here and there and it's working great!

45yo MFM HDD still seems to be up to the job too which is pretty incredible 😁

Going through a stack of floppies I've had a couple years but could never access...opening them is so fun.

Strangers' personal type-in's and finance records mostly.

It's like looking through steangers' photo albums.

You see glimpses of a life mist likely already passed.

Fascinating and a little bittersweet.

...I've already ordered more lots on ebay.

Hello new 'tism.

😆

>Hi all! I've been building HC, a free and open-source (MIT) HyperCard clone for today's Macs. Its goal is fidelity: it opens original HyperCard 2.x stacks and runs their HyperTalk scripts unchanged.
>
>The proof I'm proudest of: Apple's own HyperCard Help, HyperTalk Reference and Help Extras run in HC without a single script change.
>
>🌐 https://hc.labynet.fr · 💻 https://github.com/cleobuline/hc
>
>Not notarised yet: if macOS says it's "damaged", run xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine /Applications/HC.app once.
>
>Old stacks that won't open, or behave differently from HyperCard? I'd love to hear about them!

Universal app (Intel + Apple Silicon), macOS 10.13 and later
Paint tools, buttons, fields, backgrounds, message box
One small extension for games: polygon buttons. Here's a Tetris written in plain HyperTalk: sample tetris written in plain hypertalk

Offices of Sperry-Univac (Tennessee or North Carolina?), late 1970s.

Found a pretty neat little 5.25” bay accessory for my windows XP machine! Aluminium enclosure for an HDD with active cooling and a programmable LED info panel.

I wish 5.25” bays stuck around; it was fun seeing what kind of crazy 3rd party stuff people would have slotted in there. I’m honestly Surprised someone still had this lying around in its original packaging. I put my boot drive in there just for fun and I think I’ll keep it set up like this!

I’ve been working on an open source VGA driver for Windows 9x. It’s got full hardware 3d acceleration support for the Intel GMA950, now it has native Glide 2 support!

https://github.com/michaeldale/velocity9x/releases

For this week's article, i decided to dive into the early 2000's, and feature an amazing woman in the CyberSec space: Joanna Rutkowska
Joanna’s curiosity kicked in early... she was fascinated with the guts of operating systems before she was even out of primary school! She started learning x86 assembly on MS-DOS, (ahh, yes...the MS DOS-dayyys! ) ...later moved into Linux, and eventually focused on kernel programming, exploits, rootkits, and the sneaky ways malware can hide itself from the OS.

Then, in '06, she showed up at Black Hat with something called, "Blue Pill*.'*

The idea was reeeally nasty in a really clever way. Instead of malware simply hiding inside an operating system, Blue Pill used AMD’s new hardware virtualization technology to place a malicious hypervisor underneath it. (dang. i dunno about you, but this totally makes my skin crawl) The OScould keep running while the attacker occupied a layer below it. Rutkowska presented the research during her wonderfully titled talk, “Subverting Vista Kernel For Fun And Profit.”

Her work during this period became heavily associated with stealth malware, rootkits, virtualization attacks, and the uncomfortable question of whether a computer can ever reliably determine that it hasn’t already been compromised. Can it? ....can it tho?!

My fav part about her story, so far:

Rutkowska didn’t spend the bulk of her career only figuring out increasingly clever ways to break computers. In '07 she founded Invisible Things Lab, and a few years later she founded the project that became Qubes OS. Qubes took a very different approach to desktop security: instead of trusting one big operating-system environment with everything, split your digital life into isolated compartments. You know... Work over here. Banking over there. Random sketchy website wayyyy over thurrr. If one compartment gets compromised, the goal is to keep the attacker from automatically getting everything else.

The Qubes project dates back to '09, with its first public release arriving in April '10. More than fifteen years later, Qubes OS is still actively developed, and Rutkowska remains listed by the project as its founder and an advisor. (BTW, Ed Snowden uses AND publicly endorses Qubes OS!!!)

So, Joanna's career went thru a pretty epic arc:

Learn how operating systems work... figure out frightening new ways to compromise them..... start asking whether we should trust them so much in the first place .....build an operating system around that answer.

A massive Historic Hat Nod to Joanna Rutkowska for spending years thinking about what happens when we stop assuming the computer underneath us is trustworthy. (And for working for the good guys n gals, right? cuz....yeah. )

And also for naming a rootkit Blue Pill. (3 years after the Matrix "reloaded" and "revolutions" movies!)
Come on - that’s just excellent branding! :0)
Thanks for your eyes and time, readers... I'll see ya'll next week!