Earlier this summer, on a cloudy afternoon with thunderstorms coming, I was out for a quick walk around the neighborhood. The area recently had suffered from some devastating rainstorms with severe flooding, and many homes had flood-damaged furniture and other items piled up on the curbs out front. I gave most of the piles a wide berth, but one such pile immediately caught my eye. | Drew's Robots
I have ~5500 followers here on tumblr after years of activity, but I never liked the lack of interaction here. When I started the “blog” here, one of the goals was to get feedback and interesting insights from others when I was working on something retrocomputing related. This never worked. Tumblr was never really good for text interaction. This, along with a lack of time, caused me to reduce my activity here. Things got worse when many of the people I followed here moved elsewhere. Some ...| 80-90s Computing
Iomega ZIP 100 drives Thanks to friends of mine, I was able to get two working parallel-port ZIP drives from Iomega. My father used to use these during the 1990s as ZIP disks were popular in offices in Czech Republic. He later switched to an internal ZIP drive connected to IDE when his parallel-port external one died and used it for another 10 years. I have a few systems where it is not possible to add a network controller so I though that this would be a good device for faster data transfers...| 80-90s Computing
A cheap CPU in a very expensive computer In the mid-1990s, there were so many articles about how cheap all the RISC CPUs were compared to what Intel offered. You could read it in an every computer-related magazine every month. Scientist friends of mine at universities desperately wanted to have such RISC CPUs in their own personal computers. They never really liked x86 design and they were used to work on UNIX workstations, so they didn’t even need any support for running Windows. However, ...| 80-90s Computing
A vintage keyboard, a mysterious battery, and some questionable 1990s engineering choices...| www.projectgus.com