Notices by Tube🌞Time (tubetime@mastodon.social), page 10

at the last Electronics Flea Market (in September) i found a strange bit of electromechanical aircraft avionics. check it out! https://mastodon.social/@tubetime/111043677193721723

i spent too much money on a Pentium 90 CPU complex for my PS/2 model 95. it wasn’t working on arrival, and it turned into quite a troubleshooting effort! https://mastodon.social/@tubetime/110443440906326663

in July i bought an old Fluke benchtop multimeter. while repairing it, i discovered a bad custom chip. i made a PCB replacement for it! https://mastodon.social/@tubetime/110646271352858078

in June i picked up and restored a weird old IBM RS/6000 workstation. this is one of the first machines with a PowerPC processor. it also uses the Micro Channel bus! https://twitter.com/TubeTimeUS/status/1671654843138854912

while working on the RS/6000, i discovered that it required a special PS/2 keyboard that implemented an extra command. i made a little box that lets you use a standard PS/2 keyboard. https://mastodon.social/@tubetime/110798263588229059

in february, i reverse engineered the Game Blaster sound card, all except for the weird custom chip. https://mastodon.social/@tubetime/109841846287576462.

at the start of the year i figured out how to boot MS-DOS on my Apple II.

https://mastodon.social/@tubetime/109679227812726996

Tube Time: a 2023 retrospective! 🧵

as you may know i have been working with CuriousMarc at his YouTube channel. in March, i was able to extract data off the very first style of floppy disk, the IBM Minnow disk. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WkzPvTQSIgM

speaking of the 6502, i also repaired some SYM-1 single board computers. https://mastodon.social/@tubetime/109927905082333397

early 6502 chips were missing the ROR instruction. this isn’t a bug, and i made a YouTube video about that.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uk_QC1eU0Fg

i also got an IBM PS/2 model 25 which i coaxed into functionality. it was quite a journey–i even had to 3D print a key! https://mastodon.social/@tubetime/110081169895862662

also in march, i obtained a Sun Sparcstation 1+ and managed to get it working. https://mastodon.social/@tubetime/110040949079759243

did you know that, at one point, they made vacuum tubes that were the size of transistors? they were called Nuvistors, and here’s an epic thread about them. (and yes, i cut one in half!) https://mastodon.social/@tubetime/110154698725449539

someone nerd sniped me when they revealed that the earliest IBM Thinkpad, the 700, was actually a Micro Channel PS/2 inside! naturally, i had to get one and get it working. this turned into several large projects! https://mastodon.social/@tubetime/110046783196455905

Matt Venn interviewed me in May about the MOnSter 6502. https://chaos.social/@matthewvenn/111170293439000934

in April, my logic analyzer totally broke again, but i was able to fix it. you’ll never believe what the problem was. https://mastodon.social/@tubetime/110251165148089550

ever shelve a project for a long time and revisit it later? i built this Panaplex clock 4 years ago but didn’t finish it up and release the design until July. https://mastodon.social/@tubetime/110680469380657195

with all these workstations on my bench, i designed a video adapter to convert 13W3 connections to standard VGA. https://mastodon.social/@tubetime/110726122938943639

@foone 🤔