This is going to be a quick one, but I wanted to update readers who may be interested (all 3 of them) that I did become aware of a few links in my Bits and Bytes article series becoming broken. I had sourced links from 2 different YouTube accounts and one (Canadian Toast, I believe …
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Tag:Retrocomputing
Installing Mac OS Leopard On The PowerBook G4 – The Hard Way
In my last article I went into somewhat excessive detail on my recently purchased PowerBook G4. The machine was quite “used and abused” and was running an install of MacOS X 10.4 Tiger which was somewhat broken. Also broken on the machine was the Superdrive, which eliminated my ability to actually reinstall Tiger, or upgrade …
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Spending A Day With My Power Mac G5
I’ve been in the process ,over the past few weeks… er, months… of changing the front room in my house into a gaming room / office. It’s a small room, I’d say maybe 12×12, but is lined up in just the right way to lay out things the way I want to. The old entertainment …
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I Had A Better Article Planned, Then I Decided To Clean My Keyboard…
So, to give you the short version of the story, I spent about 2 or 3 hours today (mixed with a few other things) cleaning up a keyboard for one of my computers. It was a recently purchased Apple A1048 Keyboard which was purchased in a dirty state. I thought, since I had the time …
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Scouring Old Hard Drives In The Middle Of The Night
Oh, dang, I’ve got like 20 minutes to crank out an article before we hit midnight. Time for another “eh, let’s just get this out to keep up my 1 article per day challenge” entry! Right now I’m scouring through some old hard drives from various computers which I’ve gotten over the years – some …
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An Unexpected Entry Into The World Of The Macintosh – Part 4 – So, What Can I Do With The G5?
In the previous article, I went over the gist of how I fixed a small problem with my “new” PowerMac G5 – the lack of a boot chime. After a few days of really working with the machine and trying to figure out the reason, I would find out it was really something as simple …
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The Computer Chronicles – Megahertz Mania (1989)
Speed. It’s the main thing we all want in computers, be it desktop machines, smartphones, even game consoles, it all boils down to speed. In the computer world, speed equals power, or so it would seem. While the reality is far more complex and nuanced, when it’s all said and done faster components are generally …
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An Unexpected Entry Into The World Of The Macintosh – Part 3 – Repairing The Power Mac G5
At this point in our story I had a Power Mac G5, the last of the Power PC based Macintosh computers, in my possession. It worked but with a quirk in that it didn’t make the traditional “boot chime” that (until recently) all Macintosh computers had. This bugged me enough that I set out to …
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An Unexpected Entry Into The World Of The Macintosh – Part 2 – The Power Mac G5
As mentioned previously, as much as I am a Windows guy I’ve always had a fondness for the Macintosh computer family. A combination of having them in school as well as seeing the awesomeness to be found in the Power Mac G5 and the Mac Pro really made me want to get some of these …
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An American Look At The BBC Computer Literacy Project – The Battle Plan
In what can only be described as an example of insanity, I mentioned previously my intentions to cover the BBC archive of television programming from the BBC Computer Literacy Project of the early and mid 80’s, and at this stage I think I’m ready to begin tackling this mighty challenge. The BBC archive of programing …
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Coming Soon: An American Look At The BBC Computer Literacy Project
The 1980’s was an amazing time for computer technology – this was the time frame the concept of the microcomputer came into its own, bringing the ability to own a fully functional computer system into the average home. Computers however are strange machines, compared to what we normally have around our houses. Everything else we …
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Bits And Bytes – Series Review
Over the past year I took some time to cover every episode of the 1983 Canadian TV series “Bits and Bytes.” This was a television program designed to give its viewers some insight into the then-new home computer scene, covering basic principles of computing, showing some things you can do with various computers of the …
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Bits And Bytes – Program 12: What Next?
This is it – the final episode of the 1983 TV Ontario series “Bits and Bytes.” It’s been 11 episodes introducing the basic concepts of computer usage in 1983. This is an interesting one – it focuses on the future of computing, both logistically and practically. Things like people sitting for far too long at …
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Bits And Bytes – Program 11: Computers At Work
Since their inception computers have been business tools, machines designed to assist their user in efficiently doing work. It’s not a foreign concept to most of us – we all certainly use computers in some form in our day to day lives, some of us more in-depth than others. While the same was true in …
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“Useful To Boot” – The Anthem For Obsolete Technology
A few months back while browsing YouTube, I found a video of a segment from the game “Sam & Max” where the two titular characters are in a support group style meeting for obsolete electronics. The group, known as the Computer Obsolescence Prevention Society, or C.O.P.S is a quirky little group, made up of an …
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