RIP Bill Atkinson

As posted by his family (Facebook link), Bill Atkinson passed away on June 5 from pancreatic cancer at the age of 74. The Macintosh would not have been the same without him (QuickDraw, MacPaint, HyperCard, and so much more). Rest in peace.

Harpoom: of course the Apple Network Server can be hacked into running Doom

Of course you can run Doom on a $10,000+ Apple server running IBM AIX. Of course you can. Well, you can now.

Now, let's go ahead and get the grumbling out of the way. No, the ANS is not running Linux or NetBSD. No, this is not a backport of NCommander's AIX Doom, because that runs on AIX 4.3. The Apple Network Server could run no version of AIX later than 4.1.5 and there are substantial technical differences. (As it happens, the very fact it won't run on an ANS was what prompted me to embark on this port in the first place.) And no, this is not merely an exercise in flogging a geriatric compiler into building Doom Generic, though we'll necessarily do that as part of the conversion. There's no AIX sound driver for ANS audio, so this port is mute, but at the end we'll have a Doom executable that runs well on the ANS console under CDE and has no other system prerequisites. We'll even test it on one of IBM's PowerPC AIX laptops as well. Because we should.

prior-art-dept.: The hierarchical hypermedia world of Hyper-G

It's time for another entry in the Prior Art Department and today we'll consider a forgotten yet still extant sidebar of the early 1990s Internet. If you had Internet access at home back then, it was almost certainly dialup modem (like I did); only the filthy rich had T1 lines or ISDN. Moreover, from a user perspective, the hosts you connected to were their own universe. You got your shell account or certain interactive services over Telnet (and, for many people including yours truly, E-mail), you got your news postings from the spool either locally or NNTP, and you got your files over FTP. It may have originated elsewhere, but everything on the host you connected to was a local copy: the mail you received, the files you could access, the posts you could read. Exceptional circumstances like NFS notwithstanding, what you could see and access was local — it didn't point somewhere else.

Around this time, however, was when sites started referencing other sites, much like the expulsion from Eden. In 1990 both HYTELNET and Archie appeared, which were early search engines for Telnet and FTP resources. Since they relied on accurate information about sites they didn't control, both of them had to regularly update their databases. Gopher, when it emerged in 1991, consciously tried to be a friendlier FTP by presenting files and resources hung from a hierarchy of menus, which could even point to menus on other hosts. That meant you didn't have to locally mirror a service to point people at it, but if the referenced menu was relocated or removed, the link to it was broken and the reference's one-way nature meant there was no automated way to trace back and fix it. And then there was that new World Wide Web thing introduced to the public in 1993: a powerful soup of media and hypertext with links that could point to nearly anything, but they were unidirectional as well, and the sheer number even in modest documents could quickly overwhelm users in a rapidly expanding environment. Not for nothing was the term "linkrot" first attested around 1996, as well as how disoriented a user might get following even perfectly valid links down a seemingly infinite rabbithole.

Of course, other technically-minded folks had long been aware of the problem, and as early as 1989 an academic team in Austria was already trying to attack the problem of "access to all kinds of information one can think of." In this world, documents and media resources could be associated together into a defined hierarchy, the relationships between them were discoverable and bidirectional, and systems were searchable by design. Links could be in anything, not just text. Clients could log into servers or be anonymous, logged-in users could post content, and in the background servers could talk to other servers to let them know what changes had occurred so they could synchronize references. Along the way, as new information resources via WAIS, Gopher and the Web started to appear, their content could also be brought into these servers to form a unified whole. This system was Hyper-G, and we'll demonstrate it — on period-correct classic RISC hardware, as we do — and provide the software so you can too.

What went wrong with wireless USB

(Hat tip to the late Bill Strauss and The Capitol Steps' Lirty Dies.)

A few moons ago I was thinking of ways to take my Palm OS Fossil Wrist PDA smartwatch mobile. It has no on-board networking libraries but can be coerced into doing PPP over its serial port (via USB) by using the libraries from my Palm m505. Of course, that then requires it be constantly connected to a USB port, which is rather inconvenient for a wristwatch.

But what if the USB connection could be made wirelessly? For a few years, real honest-to-goodness wireless USB devices were actually a thing. Competing standards led to market fracture and the technologies fizzled out relatively quickly in the marketplace, but like the parallel universe of FireWire hubs there was another parallel world of wireless USB devices, at least for a few years. As it happens, we now have a couple of them here, so it's worth exploring what wireless USB was and what happened to it, how the competing standards worked (and how well), and if it would have helped.

A few retrobits updates on Floodgap

Just a brief programming note. Before this blog there was Floodgap Retrobits, and I still maintain those pages. One of the earliest was my Tomy Tutor-specific page devoted to my very first computer which we got in 1983. Relatives of the Texas Instruments home computers and closely patterned after the unreleased TI 99/8, the history of the Japanese models is relatively well-known and there are a number of Japanese enthusiasts that specialize in the Pyuuta, the Tutor's ancestor system. On the other hand, hardly anybody knows anything about the British version. That system is the Grandstand Tutor:

The only good photographs of this machine, which may never actually have been released to the public, and the only known information on its history appear in Your Computer October 1983, at that time one of the major home computer magazines in the UK. The original form of this machine was very similar to the Pyuuta, which emphasized its TMS9918A-based built-in paint program and due to its specialization on graphics only implements a very simplified animation-oriented dialect of BASIC called GBASIC. Adam Imports rebadged many Asian and some American toys and games for the UK (and, for some period of time, New Zealand) and had a particularly close relationship with Tomy. In fact, the relationship was close enough that Adam in fact rejected this initial version as uncompetitive with other home computers and sent it back to Tomy for a more upgraded BASIC. Tomy provided this by modifying TI Extended BASIC, calling it Tomy BASIC and implementing it as a second mode accessible from the system's menu-based interface. The absence of Tomy BASIC places the earliest Grandstand Tutor prior to the American Tomy Tutor, which also has the upgraded Tomy BASIC. Tomy subsequently sold this upgrade in at least two forms as an option for the Japanese machines as well.

The interesting part is that while PAL Tutors have been documented to exist (the American Tutor is obviously NTSC), no one yet has reported finding a Grandstand. It wouldn't be hard to distinguish one — the photograph has obvious Grandstand branding on its silver badge. It's possible they were never released at all because even accounting for publishing delays, the second Grandstand would have emerged late in 1983, hitting in the wake of the video game crash and against heavier hitters like the Commodore VIC-20 and Commodore 64 as well as (in the UK) the ZX Spectrum. Adam may have simply concluded it wasn't a strong enough competitor even with the upgraded BASIC to sell.

I also finally got off my pasty white tuckus and scanned and OCRed the rest of the Tomy Tutor User Group newsletters in my possession (I also redid #2 and #9 with OCR). The TTUG is a great example, in my humble opinion, of the variety and importance of computer user groups in the early home computer years. Our family got one of these flyers as a registered user; Gene Dinovo, the president of the club, sent out over two thousand of them to everyone on Tomy's mailing list. Just like any user group would have done in those days, the newsletter collected type-in programs, news, tutorials, high score tables, and software and peripherals for sale, including original software written by the user group's own members. Especially for orphaned systems, and there were a lot back then besides the Tutor, the reassurance that "you are not alone" went a long way to helping people still make the most out of an expensive purchase that would otherwise have become a gilded doorstop.

Finally, and almost anticlimatically, I've added updates to the Solbourne Solace with various details and corrections submitted by former Solbourne engineer Dworkin Müller. Solbourne Computer was a relatively early SPARC licensee and one of Sun's most important competitors in the first few years of the 1990s, possessing an initially formidable lead in the performance sector due to their special multiprocessing sauce. OS/MP, Solbourne's bug-compatible licensed version of SunOS 4, let Solbourne buyers run their SunOS-compatible software out of the box with little or no compromises, including SunView. Later their IDT workstations, though uniprocessor, competed directly with and even could squeak by contemporary SPARCstations, at least in the beginning. Solbourne eventually ran out of money when they hit engineering limits with their own CPU and could never reclaim the throughput crown, abandoning the computer hardware market in 1994. We might be adding more remembrances as other Solbourne engineers are contacted.

You can see these updates at The Little Orphan Tomy Tutor as well as past Old VCR Tomy articles, and The Solbourne Solace as well as past Old VCR Solbourne-specific articles. Naturally, if you have anything to add, feel free to post in the comments or drop me E-mail at ckaiser at floodgap dawt com.

Let's give PRO/VENIX a barely adequate, pre-C89 TCP/IP stack (featuring Slirp-CK)

I had this grand idea many moons ago about writing up a TCP/IP stack for the Commodore 64, along with a lot of other people, and several of those people eventually did so before I even wrote a single opcode of 6502 assembly. For that purpose I had bought the box set of TCP/IP Illustrated (what would now be called the first edition prior to the 2011 update) for a hundred-odd bucks on sale which has now sat on my bookshelf, encased in its original shrinkwrap, for at least twenty years. It would be fun to put up the 4.4BSD data structures poster it came with but that would require opening it.

Fortunately, today we have AI we have many more excellent and comprehensive documents on the subject, and more importantly, we've recently brought back up an oddball platform that doesn't have networking either: our DEC Professional 380 running the System V-based PRO/VENIX V2.0, which you met a couple articles back. The DEC Professionals are a notoriously incompatible member of the PDP-11 family and, short of DECnet (DECNA) support in its unique Professional Operating System, there's officially no other way you can get one on a network — let alone the modern Internet. Are we going to let that stop us?

Of course not! Here's our barebones network stack for PRO/VENIX, the Pro's only official Unix option, downloading the Google home page on real hardware (internal addresses bleeped out) over SLIP and a Crypto Ancienne proxy for TLS 1.3. And, as we'll discuss, if you can get this thing on the network, you can get almost anything on the network! Easily portable and painfully verbose source code is included.

COMPUTE!'s Gazette revived for July 2025

COMPUTE!'s Gazette was for many years the leading Commodore-specific managzine. I liked Ahoy! and RUN, and I subscribed to Loadstar too, but Gazette had the most interesting type-ins and the most extensive coverage. They were also the last of COMPUTE!'s machine-specific magazines and one of the longest lived Commodore publications, period: yours truly had some articles published in COMPUTE (no exclamation point by then) Gazette as a youthful freelancer in the 1990s until General Media eventually made Gazette disk-only and then halted entirely in 1995. I remember pitching Tom Netzel on a column idea and getting a cryptic E-mail back from him saying that "things were afoot." What was afoot was General Media divesting the entire publication to Ziff-Davis, who was only interested in the mailing list, and I got a wholly inadequate subscription to PC Magazine in exchange which I mostly didn't read and eventually didn't renew.

This week I saw an announcement about a rebooted Gazette — even with a print edition, and restoring the classic ABC/Cap Cities trade dress — slated for release in July. I'm guessing that "president and founder [sic]" Edwin Nagle either bought or licensed the name from Ziff-Davis when forming the new COMPUTE! Media; the announcement also doesn't say if he only has rights to the name, or if he actually has access to the back catalogue, which I think could be more lucrative: since there appears to be print capacity, seems like there could be some money in low-run back issue reprints or even reissuing some of their disk products, assuming any residual or royalty arrangements could be dealt with. I should say for the record that I don't have anything to do with the company myself and I don't know Nagle personally.

By and large I naturally think this is a good thing, and I'll probably try to get a copy, though the stated aim of the magazine is more COMPUTE! and less Gazette since it intends to cover the entire retro community. Doing so may be the only way to ensure an adequate amount of content at a monthly cadence, so I get the reasoning, but it necessarily won't be the Gazette you remember. Also, since most retro enthusiasts have some means to push downloaded data to their machines, the type-in features which were the predominant number of pages in the 1980s will almost certainly be diminished or absent. I suspect you'll see something more like the General Media incarnation, which was a few type-ins slotted between various regular columns, reviews and feature articles. The print rate strikes me as very reasonable at $9.95/mo for a low-volume rag and I hope they can keep that up, though they would need to be finishing the content for layout fairly soon and the only proferred sample articles seem to be on their blog. I'm at most cautiously optimistic right now, but the fact they're starting up at all is nice to see, and I hope it goes somewhere.

MacLynx beta 6: back to the Power Mac

Time for another MacLynx save point in its slow, measured evolution to become your best choice within the remarkably narrow niche of "classic MacOS text browsers." Refer to prior articles for more of the history, but MacLynx is a throwback port of the venerable Lynx 2.7.1 to the classic Mac OS last updated in 1997 which I picked up again in 2020. Rather than try to replicate its patches against a more current Lynx which may not even build, I've been improving its interface and Mac integration along with the browser core, incorporating later code and patching the old stuff.

The biggest change in beta 6 is bringing it back to the Power Macintosh with a native PowerPC build, shown here running on my 1.8GHz Power Mac G4 MDD. This is built with a much later version of CodeWarrior (Pro 7.1), the same release used for Classilla and generating better optimized code than the older fat binary, and was an opportunity to simultaneously wring out various incompatibilities. Before the 68000 users howl, the 68K build is still supported!

The April Fools joke that might have got me fired

Everyone should pull one great practical joke in their lifetimes. This one was mine, and I think it's past the statute of limitations. The story is true. Only the names are redacted to protect the guilty.

My first job out of college was a database programmer, even though my undergraduate degree had nothing to do with computers and my current profession still mostly doesn't. The reason was that the University I worked for couldn't afford competitive wages, but they did offer various fringe benefits, and they were willing to train someone who at least had decent working knowledge. I, as a newly minted graduate of the august University of California system, had decent working knowledge at least of BSD/386 and SunOS, but more importantly also had the glowing recommendation of my predecessor who was being promoted into a new position. I was hired, which was their first mistake.

More pro for the DEC Professional 380 (featuring PRO/VENIX)

In computing the DEC PDP-11 is something of a geologic feature. Plus, as most systems in the family were minicomputers, they had the whole monolith thing going for them too (minus murderous apes and sucking astronauts into hyperspace). Its fame is even more notable given that Digital Equipment Corporation was among the last major computer companies to introduce a 16-bit mini architecture, beaten by the IBM 1130 (1965), HP 2116A (1966), TI-960 (1969) and Data General Nova (1969) — itself a renegade offshoot of the "PDP-X" project which DEC president Ken Olsen didn't support and even cancelled in 1968 — leaving DEC to bring up the rear with the PDP-11/20 in 1970.

So it shouldn't be a surprise that DEC, admittedly like many fellow mini makers, was similarly retrograde when it officially entered the personal computer market in 1982. At least on paper the DEC Rainbow was reasonable enough: CP/M was still a thing and MS-DOS was just newly a thing, so Digital put an 8088 and a Z80 inside so it could run both. On the other hand, the DECmate II, ostensibly part of the venerable PDP-8 family, was mostly treated as a word processor and office machine; its operating system was somewhat crippled and various bugs hampered compatibility with earlier software. You could put a Z80 or an 8086 in it and run CP/M and MS-DOS (more or less), but it wasn't a PC, and its practical utility as a micro-PDP didn't fully match the promise.

However, what DEC did to the PDP-11 was odder still. The 1982 DEC Professional 350 had the same F-11 ("Fonz") CPU as the bigger PDP-11/23, though that's where the similarity ends, as it implemented a new bus with completely different option cards and an incompatible interrupt system making it all but impossible to run unmodified PDP-11 programs. It had really nice graphics for 1982, but instead of the usual choices its intended system software was the laughably named Professional Operating System, or P/OS — execrated for its sluggish menus and limited feature set, of which people were only too quick to make the obvious joke. You could get CPU option cards like the DECmate II's to also make it into a weak PC or a weak CP/M machine, but they ran through P/OS too, and they weren't cheap. At the same time, however, in order to be the most inexpensive PDP-11 system ever, the low-binned DEC Professional 325 didn't even have a hard disk.

All of these systems were originally meant as commodity machines for office work, yet more or less with the exception of the Rainbow, they couldn't run much that office professionals actually wanted to run and little that existing PDP users did. Still, despite questionable technical choices, these machines (the Pros in particular) are some of the most well-built computers of the era. Indeed, they must have sold in some quantity to justify the Pro getting another shot as a high end system. Here's the apex of the line, the 1984 DEC Professional 380.

The Pro 380 upgraded to the beefier J-11 ("Jaws") CPU from the PDP-11/73, running two to three times faster than the 325 and 350. It had faster RAM and came with more of it, and boasted quicker graphics with double the vertical resolution built right into the logic board. The 380 still has its faults, notably being two-thirds the speed of the 11/73 and having no cache, plus all of the 325/350's incompatibilities. Taken on its merits, though, it's a tank of a machine, a reasonably powerful workstation, and the most practical PDP-adjacent thing you can actually slap on a (large) desk.

This particular unit is one of the few artifacts I have left from a massive DEC haul almost twelve years ago. It runs PRO/VENIX, the only official DEC Unix option for the Pros, but in its less common final release (we'll talk about versions of Venix). I don't trust the clanky ST-506 hard drive anymore, so today we'll convert it to solid state and double its base RAM to make it even more professional, and then play around in VENIX some for a taste of old-school classic Unix — after, of course, some history.

The "35-cent" Commodore 64 softmodem

Rockwell famously used 6502-based cores in modems for many years, but that doesn't mean other 6502s couldn't be used. If only there were a way to connect a Commodore 64's audio output directly to an RJ-11 plug ...

Of the many interesting posts from Usenet's more golden days, one of my favourites was John Iannetta's "35-cent modem," where the SID chip provides one-way data modulation to a receiving modem connected via the C64's sound output. While I remember him posting it back in 1998, I never actually tried it at the time.

Wouldn't you know it, but it came to mind the other day when I was looking at a recent haul of Convergent WorkSlate stuff I've got to catalogue. Officially the WorkSlate's only means of telecommunications is its 300 baud internal modem. While we have a 9600bps way of wiring up a Workslate to a modern computer, it's always nice to have a simpler alternative, and I figured this would be a great challenge to see if John's old program could let my Commodore SX-64 talk to my WorkSlate. Spoiler alert: it works!

Refurb weekend: Atari Stacy

Ask any Atari Stacy owner how to open an Atari Stacy and the answer is always "never, if you can avoid it." So I'll just lead with this spoiler image after the refurb to prove this particular escapade didn't completely end in tragedy:

Stacys are horrible machines to work on. Nobody likes being inside of one. The daughterboards don't have keyed connectors (including the power supply!) and are constantly attempting to come free, the display "cable" is actually a Medusa's wig of wires that like to short (!), the top case is a huge bulky sheet of increasingly fragile plastic that somehow has to fit around the floppy drive yet down on the keyboard simultaneously, and the entire laptop is an uneasy sandwich held together by a small set of screws in plastic races that strip and fracture with little provocation. So why do we tolerate this very bad, bad, bad, bad girl? Because most of us will never see the much lighter and streamlined STBook in the flesh, let alone own one. If you really want a portable all-in-one Atari ST system, the Stacy is likely the best you're gonna do.

And we're going to make it worse, because this is the lowest-binned Stacy with the base 1MB of memory. I want to put the full 4MB the hardware supports in it to expand its operating system choices. It turns out that's much harder to do than I ever expected, making repairing its bad left mouse button while we're in there almost incidental — let's just say the process eventually involved cutting sheet metal. I'm not entirely happy with the end result but it's got 4MB, it's back together and it boots. Grit your teeth while we do a post-mortem on this really rough Refurb Weekend.