RIP, Don Lancaster

Heard earlier this week that Don Lancaster, best known to us retrocomputing denizens as the man who developed the TV Typewriter, died at the age of 83 on June 7. That's my copy of one of his classic books (after the TV Typewriter Cookbook) for building a TVT 6 5/8 on anything with a 6800 bus like the 6502 and, yes, the 6800. This was a CPU-driven display that uses lines on the address bus to control the image: you lost 36K out of your addressing range as any address stored to or read there would be passed to the display interface, but gained an entire viewing screen in exchange. Even a barebones 1K KIM-1 could display a 32x16 text screen at $0200 to $03ff and it could be built out of just a handful of chips:

Haven't gotten around to building one of my own but I really should; it would be a fitting bit of fun. Cheap video was hardly enough to keep him occupied; he had an almost intimidating number of links up on his home page which fortunately seems well preserved for posterity. Godspeed and rest in peace.

Making a potato livecam with the Commodore 128 VDC and ComputerEyes

If we're going to make the little old 8-bit MOS 6502 into Skynet — because we already know what the Terminator T-800 CPU is — then it's gonna need to see. How can it exterminate the last remnants of humanity without vision?

And we'll use something period-correct, too. While our favourite Cyberdyne Systems Model 101 was busy stalking Sarah Connor in 1984, the product it might have (slowly) viewed the world with was already on the market: the Digital Vision ComputerEyes. Check out the little beige camera perched on a stack of disk boxes, attentively surveilling the room at just a few, uh, seconds per frame as displayed on the monitor. Plug in a composite video source, connect it up to your Apple II, Commodore 64 or (in 1985) Atari 8-bit, and wait about six or seven seconds to identify targets — or almost fifty for the highest quality. If Skynet had chosen this option we might never have had Judgment Day.

The slow capture speed meant it was never intended as something to view live, and on the Commodore and Atari versions, DMA interference meant you could only capture with the screen off which would seem to make any live-ish feed impossible. But the Commodore 128 has a second video chip that doesn't interfere. Let's turn the Commodore 128 into a really slow potato-quality live camera you can interactively watch and freeze-frame — and then, in exchange for 11% of the screen, make it capture almost 25% faster! Time-lapse video proof at the end!

O Brother GeoBook, Let's Get Thou back on the Internet?

Last weekend was sad, so let's do something fun. I've mentioned I collect non-x86 laptops and portables (and not just PowerBooks: see my previous entries on the "MIPS ThinkPad" IBM WorkPad z50, the PA-RISC SAIC Galaxy 1100 and these Sun Ray laptops, among others) because they're always — and sometimes wildly — different than your average Best Buy special.

Every rule's got an exception, though:

I will try to pick up x86-based systems with "personality" (as I see fit). The PCjr, for example, had personality: love it or loathe it, it was definitely different. And the Brother GeoBook series of laptops were certainly different too, late 1990s appliance-style laptops sold at low-end prices intended for basic home tasks. Besides their chunky form factor, flash memory instead of a hard disk and an entire operating system in ROM, that operating system they ran was also different: PC/GEOS, the bigger spiritual sequel to the GEOS operating system for the Apple II and Commodore 64/128. Out of the box and built-in, you got a capable word processor, spreadsheet, drawing program, file manager, and basic personal information management, plus pervasive fax support for the included fax/modem. If you wanted, you could even install a basic web browser and E-mail client included on floppy disk.

And by golly, I do mean basic. But it was notable that a browser option existed at all, so we should make it live again. Let's take a tour around the unit's built-in applications and explore its guts, then get its PPP connection working again over null modem, hack the browser to understand what an HTTPS URL is and forward it to a Crypto Ancienne proxy, and get the GeoBook back on the Web and accessing current sites. Slowly — but it works! No Betteridge's law around here! (Teaser: see it load Hacker News and Lobste.rs at the end.)

But first, how on earth did GEOS get into the ROM of a chonktastic plastic laptop?

RIP, Bob Applegate

It's hard to do two memorial posts in one weekend. If you use a KIM-1 or related 6502 single-board computers, Bob Applegate's hardware (sold as Corsham Tech, though I remember when it was k2ut.org) was the best, including his virtually essential I/O card. I had made an order from him about a month ago. By then he told me the leukemia was bad and he was no longer assembling items, just selling what he already had in stock, so I bought a couple remaining boards from him to assemble myself. His family posted word this weekend that he died in his sleep on June 13 at the age of 60. It's another loss for the vintage tech community, especially for those of us who loved the great stuff he was doing with those venerable machines. His family has posted a memorial. Godspeed and rest well.

Goodbye, computer cat

I had Iris from when she was four months old — that's a grab from a video on my Palm Zire 72 from January 2006 — to yesterday, when she died peacefully resting in her box on her window ledge, two months shy of her 18th birthday. It was hard to take that on Father's Day weekend after Dad passed away from COVID in October 2021. I'll have something brighter to post here in a few days, but not today.

She always loved computers. They were warm.

New RAM card, prototype Mac Portable, demo System 7

I guess this is a review of sorts, so here's the review part: you should buy Tech by Androda's new 7MB Macintosh Portable RAM card. On my DVT prototype O.G. (non-backlit) Macintosh Portable, I get a total of 8MB of RAM as expected from 1MB on board and 7MB on the card, and System 6 works great. The card is compatible with both backlit and non-backlit machines, though on the backlit system you'll only get 5MB total without tapping one of the PDS slot addressing lines. When they're back in stock, get one, because finding RAM cards of any size (let alone maxxed out) for the Portable is difficult, and the older MacEffects 8MB upgrade — pricier but giving you up to 9MB — is no longer being made due to a lack of chip supply.

Wait, you say you want pictures of this prototype Macintosh Portable? Including its beta OS version and System 7 pre-release presentation? Oh, well, then! No, you can't escape! Sit down and watch my slide show!

Refurb weekend: Commodore 128DCR

No question: the Commodore 128D is the finest Commodore 8-bit ever made. On this I tolerate no dissent, and that's not just because I sometimes hang out with Bil Herd. It's a 128, so it's got VDC graphics, 128K and 2MHz operation, but because it's a 128 it's also a 64. It's also an upgraded 128 with the fixed ROMs, (in this North American 128DCR) 8568 VDC and 64K of VDC memory, it's got a built-in 1571 (Commodore's finest 5.25" disk drive), and it doesn't have an external power brick. Plus, even though it has the desktop footprint of a 128, the detachable keyboard means you can just put a monitor on top of it (and the steel-cased North American 128DCR handles that very well) just like you can't with a flat 128, and you either get an actual cooling fan with the plastic 128D or the solder points to put one in a steel 128DCR. My only complaint is that the consolidated DCR motherboard is nearly devoid of socketed ICs, making it a little tough to do component level repair on. I like spares, so I have four DCRs, all of which completely or mostly work (and two spare keyboards, one rather yellow but fully functional and one even more yellow and useful just for parts).

This particular 128DCR has been a constant presence on my desk since the mid-1990s when I first got it as an upgrade from my ailing flat 128. But it has one flaw: it doesn't have a working CIA Time-of-Day clock, which isn't used much by software, so I never bothered to do anything about it. This was tricky when developing TOTP-C64, since the 30 second timer between emitting TOTP codes uses the TOD clock for maximum interval accuracy (the 50/60Hz Timer A interrupt that drives the TI/TI$ jiffy clock can be stalled and lose time, whereas the TOD clock is based on the AC mains frequency and thus is as accurate as your plugged-in wall clock); one of my portable SX-64 systems, my second favourite Commodore 8-bit, handled that portion of testing instead.

Well, now that I've got a new Ultimate II+L cartridge in fire-engine red with its own real-time clock (among other great features), I'd like to update TOTP-C64 to support it and I'd rather do it on the 128DCR. That means we should fix the TOD clock. And that means ... a Refurb Weekend!