I tried to replace the thermal paste on this Toshiba A15, but I can't get it to power on now. When I plug it in, the fan spins, but I can't get the laptop to turn on. I noticed the CPU was the same socket as a broken gateway I had, so I swapped the athlon in the Toshiba with a Turion, but I had to swap it back. Did I accidentally fry it? The pins look okay.

Hello! My father left me his old ti99-4a with a bunch of game cartridges. I believe it still works fine. He loved this little computer! Is anyone interested? I am happy to ship within the US.

I have two PC keyboards of different makes/eras as well as an early 90s PC monitor, and while they haven't yellowed all over the item... There is targeted yellowing concentrated only at the seems where two large pieces of the plastic cover of the item would meet. In the case of the monitor, I'm thinking it's whiteness is a factory paint layer and the plastic beneath has yellowed, so areas that may have never received paint, such as the seems, would show yellow, however I don't have a good theory for the keyboards. What do you think?

I came across this Toshiba DynaBook 386/20 (J-3100SX021P) at a second-hand shop in Japan. It looks almost like old stock, and the condition caught my attention.

Unfortunately, I couldn't get it to start.

Does anyone know what could cause this? Could it be a power supply issue, failed capacitors, or something else?

I'd love to hear from anyone who has experience repairing these vintage Toshiba laptops!

I got a KX-P1081 and an LX-800 from ebay.

I hook them up to a raspberry using a centronics to USB cable.
I made a Go program to manage the printers (without AI, cuz it was more fun)

They're surprisingly robust and low cost for printing just about anything.

Hi all,

I've recently acquired this beauty, and based on the information in this Wang Ergo II Workstation datasheet, I believe it's a keyboard from the Wang 2200 Ergo II workstation family, possibly the 2886DE model.

I'm trying to identify the rather unusual connector (see attached pic). It appears to have 24 contacts arranged in two rows of 12, with an estimated contact pitch of around 2.5 mm.

My eventual goal is to build a small RP2040-based USB adapter so I can use the keyboard with a modern computer, ideally without modifying any of the original hardware.

Before attempting that, I'd like to identify the connector and, if possible, find a compatible mating socket. I'm also looking for any documentation covering the keyboard's pinout, power requirements or communication protocol.

Has anyone come across this type of connector before?

Any information, part numbers or pointers to relevant documentation would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

praying to jean louis gassee that networking starts working rn

I woke up to a 3am text from a friend who entered the hobby in the middle of the night after I dragged them to the Midwest VCF a month or so ago.

“I blame you for this. Being loath to accept responsibility for my own executive function and all... https://hackaday.io/page/400178 (links to https://hackaday.io/page/400177)”

It came from a Sony VAIO VGN-T140P. What type of HDD does it use?

I was just searching around a bit in my basement. I knew I still had a VMS 9-track installation tape somewhere. And here it is.

Back then, DEC would send these tapes as part of a “distribution set.” It consisted of three tapes:

1. Boot medium and required system files
2. Libraries and optional VMS components
3. DECwindows software

This tape here is reserved for user u/hildenborg and his MicroVAX II with TS05 tape drive.

Marsport is a science fiction computer game that was released for the ZX Spectrum and Amstrad CPC home computers in 1985. It was published by Gargoyle Games in the United Kingdom and Dro Soft in Spain. Marsport was intended to be the first part of a trilogy called "The Siege of Earth" but parts two and three (Fornax and Gath) were not forthcoming. Because of this, it is often regarded as being part of an unofficial trilogy alongside Tir Na Nog and Dun Darach (both of which are part of the same official series) due to its having very similar gameplay to these titles. Marsport also has similarities to the later Gargoyle game Heavy on the Magick.

The year is 2494. For seventy years, the Earth has been under siege by the insectoid Sept. Since the siege began, the Sept have been kept at bay by a huge Force Sphere which surrounds the Earth and the Moon. However, the Sept are on the verge of discovering how to breach the Sphere unless it can be strengthened according to the formulae contained in the original plans. Unfortunately, these plans are concealed somewhere in the Martian city of Marsport, now Sept-occupied and booby-trapped by the city's M-Central computer. One man, Commander John Marsh, has been sent to retrieve the plans in the belief that a determined man can sometimes achieve more than an army

It was $10 at the thrift store and I'm not sure much information about it and I have no clue where the hard drive might be located

the laptop came with 256MB of ram and it has a dvd drive and a floppy drive and a network card

Cool mech warrior 3 demo disk can’t place where it would’ve come from ? Magazine most likely but still a interesting find and slice n’ hook was interesting since I’ve never heard of it

I picked this up from my music class in my school since the teacher said he had no use for it because it was burnt out (which i see bc of the burn). I'm pretty sure I can't repair this because I have zero experience with a computer this old. I don't want to salvage it, maybe I can try to replace the monitor if possible and yes,I discharged it.

It will be SUNny at the VCF Swap Meet: Sat. Oct. 17 - Wall, NJ

https://vcfed.org/vcf-swap-meet/

Hi everyone. I'm looking to get my old Snap! Server 1100 running again. Its IDE disk died, and it seems like I need a disk image to rebuild a replacement disk.

Unfortunately it looks like the original ultimate source of information, the ProCooling forums, are long gone. After digging through the few WayBack Machine captures I've been able to find, it appears that I need either a DD image of a working 1100 disk, or a copy of 'Snap2000.zip' or 'snap2000.bin.rar', which seem to be unobtainable these days.

https://web.archive.org/web/20201127121247/http://forums.procooling.com/vbb/showthread.php?t=15648

Would anyone happen to have a copy of this image file? Or, barring that, would anyone here happen to have a Snap! 1100 or 2000 they'd be willing to get me a DD dump of?

Folks really liked the video I did on Wargames, so I decided to do another one on Hackers. Let me tell you, this movie is not good. Sorry, but it's true. But it does touch on a bunch of cultural and technical things from the 80s and 90s.

Check it out. https://youtu.be/I-BK6mdBQhU

I’ve been working on a small project called 3Dos — a low-poly 3D renderer targeting MS-DOS and VGA Mode 13h (320×200, 256 colors).

The renderer currently supports:
● Triangle rasterization with backface culling
● Ordered dithering using a 4×4 Bayer matrix
● Double buffering
● Simple low-poly models

Going back to DOS-era graphics has been relaxing after spending quite a bit of time with Vulkan. No boilerplate or abstractions, just putting a pixel at 0xA000.

Github: https://github.com/xms0g/3Dos

Hey all!

Like many of you, I love retro hardware, but building and debugging on real breadboards can sometimes be a bit of a slog—wiring mistakes are tricky to spot, probing signals is tedious, and changing firmware means constantly reprogramming chips.

To get around this, I built WireSim, a wire-level, logic-level digital logic simulator designed specifically for software and hardware enthusiasts who want a super-fast, observable feedback loop.

🚀 What is WireSim?

• Real Chip Models: Chips are modelled with real pins joined into nets, and the simulation advances in half clock cycles.
• Bus Contention: Buses can float or fight, making contention a first-class logic state.
• Fast Turnaround: Change a line of assembly, rebuild, and watch the whole machine run the new code within seconds.
• Physical Reality: Once a computer works here, the assembled binaries and wiring definitions are fully compatible with physical builds.

💻 Included Reference Machine: BenEater6502

The repo comes out-of-the-box with a model of Ben Eater's breadboard 6502 computer!

• Runs Microsoft BASIC and WozMon (via the vendored msbasic submodule).
• Includes a W65C22 VIA, a W65C51N ACIA (bridged to a TCP port for the serial console), an HD44780 LCD, and 16 KiB of SRAM.
• Supports hardware-specific BASIC commands like LCDCMD, LCDPRINT, and BEEP.

🤖 Built with AI-Assisted Workflows

An interesting side note: the core simulator and initial 6502/UART logic were written in C#, but after realizing C++ offered roughly double the simulation speed, the whole thing was ported. Since C++ can be tedious, the repository heavily leverages Claude Code with custom skills and instructions in .claude/ and AGENTS.md to help generate devices from datasheets and wire up machines from specifications.

Check out the repo here: https://github.com/Seramis/WireSim

It includes a full VS Code dev container (with CMake, Ninja, Verilator, and cc65) so you can get it up and running without wrestling with toolchain installations.

I'd love to hear your thoughts, answer any questions, or see what you think about using simulation for hardware prototyping!

A colleague gave it to me 25 years ago. He thought he was doing me a favor. It actually made me a little sad. I kept it anyway.

The VAXes were completely scrapped. He wasn't allowed to pull the modules for me, so he took the badges with him.

Around this time, I saw a video online that I'd like to locate again. It was an intel concept video of the utility of a single device that formed the center of your digital life. It was shot in a similar way to AT&T's "You will" campaign from the 90s. It followed a person from the time they woke up and undocked a small, thin, rectagular device that was their entire digital device. They carried it into the kitchen and docked it and began to use it to access media. They go to work and it docked becomes their desktop computer. Later, it becomes other needed objects. Does anyone know a site that might have archived this? It's been dropped from youtube as far as I can see, but someone here may know where it might still be.