After bringing home an IMSAI with a JAIR 8080 board from VCF West it didn't take long before I wanted to get it connected to something else. As always, my go-to communications program is Kermit. Since the JAIR 8080 board is a little bit different than other S100 or CP/M computers, I wasn't sure if there would be support for the serial ports in Kermit already. After trying out a generic Kermit build I discovered that it was going to require actually modifying Kermit to add support for...

After CGA Weekend it became pretty obvious I needed to do something about getting some kind of permanent mass storage installed in my IBM PC. I can't simply add an IDE hard drive controller since the slots are only 8-bit and in general IDE controllers are designed for 286 computers and up which have 16-bit ISA slots. 8-bit SCSI cards are uncommon and ones that can be used to boot from even more so. I've messed around with using the XT-IDE BIOS over serial , but it was very slow. The...

During June I was bombarded by an overwhelming amount of videos and discussion of the Penultimate cartridge for the VIC-20. Unable to withstand it anymore I splurged on an untested VIC-20 on eBay that also included the original box and eight cartridges and simultaneously placed an order for the Penultimate cartridge. While I had planned on getting a VIC-20 eventually, I regarded it as sort of a clunker because of the primitive text screen and limited built-in RAM, and it had remained low on my...

Storage comparison vs 25 years ago My server has been getting rather full from all the cartoon DVDs I have been ripping so I've been saving up my money to replace the 2TB drives in it with 8TB drives. The last time I spent this amount of money on hard drives all I got was a 5.25" full-height 350MB drive. Quite a difference 25 years makes! I didn't want to build a new server or do a new install from scratch, because it's a lot of work to configure a new server and this one...

You're probably reading this because you saw the #SaturdayMorningCartoons Periscope broadcast I did and you're wondering how I did it when not only don't TV stations show cartoons anymore, how I managed to find three  TV stations showing classic cartoons! Some time ago I found an old Zenith CRT TV with knobs on it at a garage sale. There's no remote control on this kind of TV and the only inputs on it are separate VHF and UHF screw terminals. I thought having my retro...