🇺🇸 Retro tech nerd 💾 I dig up forgotten computers and make them fun again · My AI bots help. Mostly 🤖
Joined June 2017
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Hey, I'm Tommi 👋
I still love obscure retro machines, but I'm switching things up, for awhile because I love SO many things.
I'm learning AI coding and workflows "in public" as the kids say these days.
I grew up writing HTML, CSS, PHP, and Python but it's been quite a few years since I did it seriously...
But things have changed drastically, in some ways, so I'm practicing new skills here that are going to help me share the retro tech that I love better and level up my day job.
Some of it will look silly. But I like to have fun.
Here's what's on 📺 !
☀️ Sunrise: fast AI news
🥪 Lunch Bytes: your turn, questions
🍪 Snack Bytes: quick how-tos
🌙 After Dark: builds, wins and stumbles
🔍 Weekend Deep Dive: big science-y reads and retro machines
(Fine print: the above channels' content is subject to change now and then!)
Pull up a chair. What should I build first?
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Did you ever wear a calculator watch?
Radio Shack's 1990 catalog listed one for $12.95, travel alarm included.
Be honest, did you use the calculator part? (Tiny buttons. BIG confidence.)
ALT A black Casio CA-53W calculator watch (a modern reissue) on a white background. The LCD shows 17:06 and SU 18, with a grid of tiny calculator buttons below the screen.
The Commodore 1541 floppy drive gets its very own trading card.
It was a disk drive with a whole computer inside: a 6502 at 1 MHz, 2 KB of RAM, its own DOS in ROM, and a speed stat that was honestly a little EMBARRASSING.
Would y'all trade a C64 card for this one, or is that a bad deal?
#retrotech #vintagecomputing
The Commodore 64's 1541 disk drive had its own processor, so why was it SO slow?
Inside: a 6502, 2 KB of RAM and two 6522 chips.
According to the C64's designers, a shift-register bug in the 6522 killed the planned fast transfers, so the data got shuffled in software instead.
Stock speed: roughly 300 to 500 bytes per second, depending on whose numbers you trust.
Then fast loaders bypassed the drive's ROM routines and sped things up a lot.
Which fast loader did y'all swear by? I’ve heard a lot of mentions of different ones!
#retrotech #vintagecomputing
Did you ever carry a pager?
Radio Shack's 1994 catalog advertised one that stored 16 messages.
Who was paging you? (Your mom counts.)
ALT A black Motorola LX2 Plus numeric pager on a white background. It has a wide gray-green LCD screen, the Motorola logo above it, and four buttons along the bottom, one marked with a green bar.
Y'all sent me almost 600 replies about Iomega Zip drives, so I tried to write the whole story, because this kind of history is fascinating to me.
Why it had a window, what it cost in 1995, the 250 and 750, the click of death, all of the good stuff (Well, and bad stuff).
Was yours a trusty workhorse or a clicking time bomb?
xitter.twitterapi.xyz/tommithetechie/article…
What's the first thing you remember making on a computer?
A Paint drawing? A BASIC program? A birthday card in Print Shop? Your first website?
The first things that I ever made were a ton of random flyers in Print Shop!
Image By Jonathan Schilling - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, commons.wikimedia.org/w/inde…
Still not over the typical loading time from this C64's drive (mostly from that slow cable connection). Someone mentioned 40 minutes!
What's the longest y'all had to wait for a game to load?
What did you do while it was loading?
The Commodore 64's floppy drive had its OWN computer inside.
I went digging into the 1541 drive:
1. It had its own 6502 processor, running at 1 MHz.
2. It carried 2 KB of RAM and its own disk operating system in ROM.
3. And it was still famously slow. Go-make-a-sandwich slow.
Did y'all ever wait on a disk drive like that?
#retrotech #vintagecomputing
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Y'all want to know what REALLY sucks about being sick? Someone in the house is on a biologic and they've got NO immune system.
Any time that I get sick, I know that it's only a matter of time before it spreads and I hate that. Sure, I can mitigate some of the damage with some habits but it's just slowing the inevitable. Ugh
Everyone load up on Emergen-C and stay hydrated, etc, etc,!
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The Commodore 64's floppy drive had its OWN computer inside.
I went digging into the 1541 drive:
1. It had its own 6502 processor, running at 1 MHz.
2. It carried 2 KB of RAM and its own disk operating system in ROM.
3. And it was still famously slow. Go-make-a-sandwich slow.
Did y'all ever wait on a disk drive like that?
#retrotech #vintagecomputing
November 8, 2006: A big day! The GeForce 8800 GTX was released.
Did YOU get one?
ALT NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTX graphics card
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