iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Alex @devopslimeyninja.bsky.social · 06/06/2026

You know when you buy a DECwriter online, and the seller neglects to tell you that it was a mouse house for years? New twist -- I noticed the logic board had a 6502A backwards in the socket. Before turning it the right way, I looked at the schematic and found that there should be an 8085A-2 there.

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Alex @devopslimeyninja.bsky.social · 26/04/2026

How did I do with this bit of my estate sale haul today?

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Alex @devopslimeyninja.bsky.social · 09/01/2026

Ok. Now I’m stuck and a little scared. I need to work on the voyager’s LCD panel and have connectors to remove. Do I need to release the snaps at the end, or rotate the far side of the connector out? Get it wrong, and it’s broken 😬 Help!

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Alex @devopslimeyninja.bsky.social · 09/01/2026

This week's side quest is checking to see if this Sun-branded Sony monitor that I just bought on eBay still works. So I need a Sun workstation. I haven't turned on the SPARCstation Voyager for about five years, and anyway need to replace the NVRAM chip.

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Benj Edwards @benjedwards.com · 06/01/2026

With Claude Code, I created a text-based mouse GUI that simulates a 1984 Macintosh Drag-drop icons, scrollbars, resizable windows, menus Five working apps: MacWrite, MacPaint, Terminal, Calculator, and Puzzle! Telnet to port 1984 or use the web terminal link below: www.vintagecomputing.com/1984/

Screenshot of Benj's Text-based 1984 Mac simulation

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Charlie Stross @cstross.bsky.social · 28/11/2025

The horror, the horror …!

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Alex @devopslimeyninja.bsky.social · 08/11/2025

My life seems like a world of nested side quests. My new printer arrived last Saturday, and so now of course I’m building a stand that won’t collapse at any minute.

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Kevin Edwards ( Retro game developer ) @kevedwardsretro.bsky.social · 03/11/2025

In Blake 7, the flight computer of the Scorpio was in fact powered by an Acorn System 1. 6502 rules the universe!

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Alex @devopslimeyninja.bsky.social · 01/11/2025

I'm at my local. One of the guys asked if I'm trick or treating later. I said that I'm a grown up. What would I trick or treat for? Whisky? He has a radio show. I think I may have just started something.

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Alex @devopslimeyninja.bsky.social · 24/10/2025

The anode lead on the fly back transformer is not in good shape 😭 The cracks and the chip in the wire are going to cause problems, assuming they didn’t already when the seller turned it on. I have some special conformal coating on the way. It comes in pints.

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Alex @devopslimeyninja.bsky.social · 24/10/2025

The ribbon cable to the power supply is delaminating and corroding. Added a low profile socket to the power supply, and waiting for a replacement to arrive.

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Alex @devopslimeyninja.bsky.social · 22/10/2025

The SMK replacements arrived for the superbrain. Small snag in that the stems were wrong, but swapped out perfectly! So that’s the keyboard repair complete.

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Alex @devopslimeyninja.bsky.social · 22/10/2025

The next project arrived already. Was not counting on this DECwriter to previously be a mousey house.

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Thomas Cherryhomes @tschak909.bsky.social · 18/10/2025

I keep trying to tell people about #FujiNet. That it is a WiFi adapter for your favorite #Atari8bit, #Apple2, #ColecoAdam, #TRS80CoCo, #Commodore, #Atari2600, #AtariLynx, and #MSDOS machines, with more to come. But word isn't getting out. Can u help? fujinet.online

fujinet.online

FujiNet - The Future of Retro Computing

The Future of Retro Computing

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Alex @devopslimeyninja.bsky.social · 16/10/2025

Looking at the PCB, the brown goop has leaked across all he circuit board across two tracks - one goes via the main Z80, the other through a bunch of logic ICs and resistor packs. On the face of it, it doesn’t look too bad?

Brown goop leaking across the PCB from top to bottom.

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Alex @devopslimeyninja.bsky.social · 11/10/2025

Fellow vintage computing enthusiasts, I’d like to introduce you to the CRT adhesive saw. It went through several iterations as I was perfecting the design. It requires patience, care, and safety glasses. But it’s possible to accomplish the separation of tube and safety lens without any heat.

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Alex @devopslimeyninja.bsky.social · 11/10/2025

The summers in New Mexico are great for a gradual pre-heat to soften the adhesive, but we are no longer in summer. I don’t want to rush or try and find another safe way to separate the two parts. It’s a slow process, but there’s another way of accomplishing this without heat.

Glue between the tube and the safety lens removed from one corner.

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Alex @devopslimeyninja.bsky.social · 11/10/2025

I bought a Superbrain to restore a few weeks ago. This is how it looked when I unpacked it.

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KiCad EDA @kicad.org · 21/02/2025

So, now that v9 is out, you're going to want to learn how to use all the awesome new features, right? Have we got a place for you! kicon.kicad.org KiCon Returns to North America, May 28-30th, San Diego, CA. Pre-sale discount tickets are available now!

kicon.kicad.org

KiCon - cross platform and open source Electronics Design Automation suite

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Quantum Magazine @quantum-magazine.bsky.social · 21/02/2025

While everyone’s focused on Trump, Microsoft created a new state of matter. It's going to change everything. Here's what you need to know about Microsoft's Majorana 1 Quantum Chip:🧵

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Isaac Rowlett @isaacrowlett.bsky.social · 16/02/2025

from “Parable of the Talents” by Octavia Butler

From EARTHSEED: THE BOOKS OF THE LIVING
Choose your leaders with wisdom and forethought.
To be led by a coward is to be controlled
by all that the coward fears.
To be led by a fool is to be led
by the opportunists who control the fool.
To be led by a thief is to offer up your most precious treasures to be stolen.
To be led by a liar is to ask to be told lies.
To be led by a tyrant is to sell yourself and those you love into slavery.

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Retro Computers @retrocomps.bsky.social · 06/02/2025

The BBC Micro was a multi-core computer. They just didn't tell anyone! A test mode accidentally triggered in 2020 revealed the existance of this second core, with its own instruction set and ROM, the ability to bypass the firmware, and may have revealed some 50-year-old corporate espionage...

scarybeastsecurity.blogspot.com

Reverse engineering a forgotten 1970s Intel dual core beast: 8271, a new ISA

Scary Beast Security

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Forrest Brazeal @forrestbrazeal.bsky.social · 13/01/2025

You know Sheryl Sandberg’s famous line: “If you’re offered a seat on a rocket ship, don’t ask which seat, just get on”? Do you know who originally said that? It was CHRISTA MCAULIFFE. Who died in the Challenger explosion. In case you’re wondering whether to trust rhetoric that comes out of Meta.

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Alex @devopslimeyninja.bsky.social · 26/01/2025

I'm troubleshooting my Apple Lisa, and needed to defeat the safety switch so I can operate without the back panel in place. It's here, just in case you need something similar. www.thingiverse.com/thing:6926140

3D printed component in place in the power supply at the back of an Apple Lisa.

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Alex @devopslimeyninja.bsky.social · 26/01/2025

The Apple Lisa I'm restoring didn't come with any front feet. I just created these to stop the wobble. www.thingiverse.com/thing:6926128

Apple Lisa resting on its side, sporting some new fancy yellow front feet.

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Alex @devopslimeyninja.bsky.social · 24/01/2025

Does the sun3 boot yet? Still no. I'd forgotten to copy vmunix over to the root directory to be mounted. Still now a bit closer, but the boot hangs. Wireshark says that there are more bootparams calls, but this time the destination broadcast address is 192.168.1.0.

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Alex @devopslimeyninja.bsky.social · 24/01/2025

So now the workstation calls out, gets its IP address, collects and runs a boot program... and then fails because I forgot about configuring NFS.

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Alex @devopslimeyninja.bsky.social · 18/01/2025

Bootparams is the thing that caused me a ton of grief, and I spent days trying to figure it out. It's why I'm writing this series. Packets from the workstation will arrive at the server just file, but they will never reach rpc.bootparamd. It was super frustrating. The fix, it turned out, was easy.

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Alex @devopslimeyninja.bsky.social · 18/01/2025

TFTP is a little bit more intricate. The default location for the tftp root directory on modern distros has changed. Because I'm running in a lab, I decided to change it to /tftpboot. You'll need to make a configuration change like this if that's your jam.

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Alex @devopslimeyninja.bsky.social · 18/01/2025

RARPD is straight-forward: create an /etc/ethers file with info on the workstation, and make sure there's a corresponding entry in /etc/hosts. While you're in /etc/hosts, make sure that there's an entry for the static configuration for eth0.

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Alex @devopslimeyninja.bsky.social · 17/01/2025

OK, so now with the process in hand, here are notes on booting a diskless #sunmicrosystems 3/50 from a raspberry pi running Debian Bookworm. There were a few hiccups along the way.

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Alex @devopslimeyninja.bsky.social · 15/01/2025

The challenge usually with vintage computer restoration is in getting the machine to the point where it's running, or maybe just looking as beautiful as the day it was made. Because technology moves on, diskless booting a #sunmicrosystems 3/50 in 2025 is different.

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Quazar @samcoupe.com · 07/01/2025

Sad to hear that the fantastic Retro Computer Museum in Leicester has been damaged by flooding. More info on their site: www.retrocomputermuseum.co.uk If your able to support, here's their fundraiser: www.peoplesfundraising.com/donation/retro-computer-museum #retrocomputing #retrogaming

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Alex @devopslimeyninja.bsky.social · 31/12/2024

This is the inside of an old Sun 3 “shoebox” disk pack. I replaced the missing internal SCSI cable, replaced the missing buffer chip on the controller, replaced the high side capacitors in the power supply, cleaned up everything. I’d forgotten how noisy these things are!

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Alex @devopslimeyninja.bsky.social · 21/12/2024

I found this #atari part at a surplus store today. Any ideas what it is?

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Alex @devopslimeyninja.bsky.social · 20/12/2024

@mos8502.studio8502.ca I’ve never really thought about DTL as a thing until now, and then I find this in the local surplus store. Look at those date codes!

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Alex @devopslimeyninja.bsky.social · 07/10/2024

When using retrobrite to restore old computer cases, soak any accidentally exposed skin areas with vinegar to reduce burns. Don’t ask me how I know this.

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Alex @devopslimeyninja.bsky.social · 05/10/2024

WOOO COMING HOME TO ENGLAND ON MONDAY

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