Glitchy Not long after getting the BBC Micro working with US power and a VGA monitor, I discovered it had an issue in modes 0 through 3 when hitting return enough times to make the screen scroll. At first the prompt would move over towards the center of the screen, and then it would start filling the screen with garbage. It sort of looked like bad RAM, but I wasn't convinced of that because I noticed that some of the garbage would actually twinkle as I typed, so it appeared more that...

With it being BBS Week over on RetroBattlestations , many people are trying to get their retro computers online so they can connect to a BBS over the Internet. One reason for wanting to connect over the internet is because phone calls cost money, and for others (like me), we don't even have a phone line to use with a modem anymore. Some of the discussion has pointed to some specialized serial to Ethernet or serial to WiFi adapters. Those boxes can be over $300 so I thought I’d put...

I remember the first time I discovered the option in a PC BIOS to boot from LAN. I was very excited because to me it meant that I could finally do something with a PC that I had been doing with NeXT computers for a long time. Of course the first time I tried it I was immediately disappointed. It turned out that the built-in BIOS on computers had no idea how to talk to a random network interface card that had been installed in a slot. I did a little research and found out that you had to install...

At work an old HP LaserJet P2035N printer just had the fuser go out. Quickest solution was to replace it with a new printer rather than hunt down repair parts and go through the trouble of swapping them in. Looking at the price of the same printer, it's currently at close to $500. However there's what seems to be the same printer for under $200, but it's a P2035. Notice the missing N in the model number? Parallel card in P2035 The P2035 printer was ordered, and when it arrived...

A computer that I remember hearing about a lot, but had never seen, was the BBC Micro. It was a near mythical computer that "people in the know" would talk about. I really didn't know much about it, but it sounded very interesting to me. I always wanted one and now I finally have one. My BBC Micro My BBC Micro model B is the real deal, not a US conversion. Of course that presents a couple of problems. The first is the power standard is different, it wants 220/240V at 50hz,...