Hi everyone. It gives me great pleasure to let you know that I had an interview with the legendary co-founder and programmer from Sierra On-Line who was responsible for such amazing titles as Leisure Suit Larry, Space Quest, Half-Life and more.
The interview will be on YouTube either tonight or tomorrow NZ time!
Hi followers, this is just for you lot. I can’t tell you who it is yet, but I will be interviewing this person on Saturday. Let’s just say, if you are a fan of retro games, you are going to love this! He is a cornerstone of early games on platforms including the Apple 2, PC, Amgia and Atari platforms amongst others. That’s all I’m going to say right now, but watch this space for more!
Patreon supporters, please look at your feeds, I’ll divulge a bit more!
I picked up this 1989 Star Micronics NX-1000 dot matrix printer from a recent computer warehouse haul in Auckland. There’s a good chance it hasn’t seen much use in 25-ish years, but I was surprised to see that it came in its original box. During the unboxing you’ll see that its manuals and cables all present and correct, so I had hopes that this epson compatible printer might work.This lovely little printer was one I was familiar with from primary school back in the day of the BBC micro, and it was a very nice machine back in its day.
Here’s another quicky video! Call me dumb but I had no idea whether an XT-clone PC XT rated at 10MHz NEC V20 CPU with an 8087 co-processor, or an XT machine with a 6MHz Intel 80286 CPU and an 80287 co-processor would be faster. Surely logic would say that because 10 is bigger than 6, that’s better? Surely an 80287 would be better than an 8087? Right??? Well, the results may surprise you. Of course, the results are all 100% scientific. Legit scienciefied. The final benchmark which concludes everything is the old ‘Which one loads up Leisure Suit Larry 3’ test. Y’all know that one, right? 😉
I went to Auckland on the 11th of July for this massive retro computer warehouse sale. I picked up a number of goodies myself, but meeting the people there and looking at all the amazing machines and memories made it super special!
Here’s the latest in my first ten years of games on the PC. Hope you enjoy!
IBM released the IBM PC 5150 in 1981. Internally, IBM went through massive hurdles to get a personal computer to the market to compete with the other microcomputers of the time. This documentary shows all of the happenings organisationally as well as the trade-offs and decisions that led up to IBM choosing the sluggish 8088 CPU.
Some of the main reference material: BYTE Magazine, September 1990: https://archive.org/stream/byte-magaz… “Bill Gates, Microsoft and the IBM Personal Computer” – Infoworld Newsweekly, August 23rd 1982: https://books.google.co.nz/books?id=V… “Microsoft Announces 8086 Basic” – The Intelligent Machines Journal, Summer 1979: https://books.google.co.nz/books?id=F… IBM Exhibits: https://www.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhib…
I recently took ownership of a banged-up old #IBM PC XT. The motherboard was toast, the case was all banged up, so I decided it wasn’t worth repairing after many hours wasted with a multimeter and desoldering.. I put a new old 10MHz Turbo XT clone board in and it complained about some boot issues. So whilst I was debugging the issue, I thought I’d put the #ST506 hard drive in from the old machine. I didn’t expect it to work, but I thought just having a controller in there might help the issue. What I didn’t expect is that the 25+ year old drive would actually work. To my amazement, it (almost) worked first time. And here’s the treasure trove on it. Always find it amazing just seeing what people leave behind on their computers. It’s like a time capsule. Apologies for the really rough video, I shot it on my phone with no mic or anything, I just recorded it live as it was happening as I didn’t know if the disk was going to crap out on me. Didn’t have time to prep
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