Old Vintage Computing Research

Grateful acknowledgement made to the several former Apple employees who materially contributed to this entry. This article wouldn't have been possible without you!

Here's why I need to do inventory more often.

This is an Apple prototype ROM I am ashamed to admit I found in my own box of junk from various Apple Network Server parts someone at Apple Austin sent me in 2003. The 1996 Apple Network Server is one of Apple's more noteworthy white elephants and, to date, the last non-Macintosh computer (iOS devices notwithstanding) to come from Cupertino. Best known for being about the size of a generous dorm fridge and officially only running AIX 4.1, IBM's proprietary Unix for Power ISA, its complicated history is a microcosm of some of Apple's strangest days during the mid-1990s. At $10,000+ a pop (in 2026 dollars over $20,700), not counting the AIX license, they sold poorly and were among the first products on the chopping block when Steve Jobs returned in 1997.

stockholm, my own Apple Network Server 500, was a castoff I got in 1998 -- practically new -- when the University bookstore's vendor wouldn't support the hardware and it got surplused. It was the first Unix server I ever owned personally, over the years I ended up installing nearly every available upgrade, and it ran Floodgap.com just about nonstop until I replaced it with a POWER6 in 2012 (for which it still functions as an emergency reserve). Plus, as the University was still running RS/6000 systems back then, I had ready access to tons of AIX software which the ANS ran flawlessly. It remains one of the jewels of my collection.

So when the mythical ANS MacOS ROM finally surfaced, I was very interested. There had always been interest in getting the ANS to run MacOS back in the day (I remember wasting an afternoon trying with a Mac OS 8 CD) and it was a poorly-kept secret that at various points in its development it could, given its hardware basis as a heavily modified Power Macintosh 9500. Apple itself perceived this interest, even demonstrating it with Mac OS prior to its release, and leading then-CTO Ellen Hancock to later announce that the ANS would get ROM upgrades to allow it to run both regular Mac OS and, in a shock to the industry, Windows NT. This would have made the ANS the first and only Apple machine ever sold to support it.

Well, guess what. This is that pre-production ROM Apple originally used to demonstrate Mac OS, and another individual has stepped up with the NT ROMs which are also now in my possession. However, at that time it wasn't clear what the prototype ROM stick was -- just a whole bunch of flash chips on a Power Mac ROM DIMM which my Apple contacts tell me was used to develop many other machines at the time -- and there was no way I was sticking it into my beloved production 500. But we have a solution for that. Network Servers came in three sizes: the rackmount ANS 300 ("Deep Dish") which was never released except for a small number of prototypes, the baseline ANS 500 ("Shiner LE"), and the highest tier ANS 700 ("Shiner HE") which added more drive bays and redundant, hot-swappable power supplies.

Which brings us to this machine.

Meet holmstock, my Network Server 700, and the second ANS in my collection (the third is my non-functional Shiner ESB prototype). This was a ship of Theseus that my friend CB and I assembled out of two partially working but rather thrashed 700s we got for "come and get them" in August 2003. It served as stockholm's body double for a number of years until stockholm was retired and holmstock went into cold storage as a holding bay for spare parts. This makes it the perfect system to try a dodgy ROM in.

I'll give you a spoiler now: it turns out the NT ROM isn't enough to install Windows NT by itself, even though it has some interesting attributes. Sadly this was not unexpected. But the pre-production ROM does work to boot Mac OS, albeit with apparent bugs and an injection of extra hardware. Let's get the 700 running again (call it a Refurb Weekend) and show the process.

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Very sorry to hear about the death of Stewart Cheifet at 87, long-time host of Computer Chronicles, which for a long time was the undisputed best show on computers on American public broadcasting. I watched it on PBS TV as a kid, and candidly I didn't understand much of what was going on at the time, but I learned a lot and rewatching the episodes now really demonstrates what a treasure trove of pithy information and industry commentary they were. Gary Kildall, of Digital Research fame, was his co-host in many 1980s episodes and the most notable of an august crew that also included George Morrow and Paul Schindler, but Cheifet was the linchpin and carried the show on his formidable shoulders from its 1984 start until the final episode in 2002. The most amazing part of his work, however, is what happened after: the vast majority of the program is preserved for posterity at the Internet Archive, not just with his blessing, but with his active participation. For any computer historian and student of the early industry, the show is not to be missed. Rest in peace.

A very happy holiday season and Merry Christmas to those of you who celebrate it (timezone may vary). Also, I don't think I nearly say thanks enough to my regular patrons through Ko-fi, and I want to also thank them on behalf of the geriatric systems their generosity -- and all of you who have chipped in at one time or another -- helps keep running. I've got more projects to finish in 2026 and I hope you enjoy them.

Anyway, here's a gift for you which I forgot I still had kicking around. This is a raw cut from the 2007 Computer History Museum 25th anniversary symposium of the Commodore 64, with Jack Tramiel himself, plus Steve Wozniak, William Lowe and others (like Lee Felsenstein and Al Alcorn from the audience). I was fortunate enough to get into what was a sell-out standing-room only crowd with my trusty JVC DV camera and tape the whole thing, then dash back to So Cal and quickly dump and title it on the Power Mac Quad G5. Any camera glitches, plus a couple dropouts where I had to quickly change DV tapes, and bad titles are of course totally my fault. (In fact, there are indeed at least two errors. Can you find them?) This video is so old that it was actually originally uploaded to Google Video -- some of you may remember it -- and had been quietly transferred automatically to YouTube, which I had forgotten even happened. So here it is in its original strictly standard definition format. If you want to use clips from it in your own video, please give me a holler first in the comments. Enjoy.

I've mentioned on the blog several times the continuum that exists between handheld computers and pocket computers, battery powered devices in rather small form factors that are nevertheless fully-fledged general purpose computers -- arguably more so than the modern locked-down smartphone has become. Some of these diminutive systems are best considered "handhelds," with larger size, larger keyboards, more power and (often) less battery life, and some are definitely "pocket computers," with smaller size, smaller keys, less power and (usually) better battery life. For example, systems like the Tandy PC-4/Casio PB-100 or Tandy PC-3/Sharp PC-1250 would be considered "definitely a pocket computer," while the Epson HX-20 or Kyotronic 85 systems like the NEC PC-8201A or TRS-80 Model 100 would be considered "definitely a handheld computer," and you can probably think up some examples in between.

Well, here's a notable example of one single architecture that birthed both types of machine, and it came from a company not really noted for either one: Texas Instruments.

TI certainly made calculators and many of those were programmable by some means, but neither handheld computers nor pocket computers had categorically been in their repertoire to date. Nevertheless, here we have the 1983 Compact Computer 40 -- using the AA battery for scale, at that size definitely a handheld -- and above it the 1985 TI-74 BASICALC, notionally a "BASIC programmable calculator," but actually an evolved version of nearly the same hardware in less than half the size. Thanks to the ingenuity of the Hexbus interface, which due to TI's shortsightedness was never effectively exploited during that era, we can get a serial port running on both of these with hobbyist hardware. If we have a serial port, that means we can bring up a terminal program -- which we'll write from scratch in assembly language for shell and Gopherspace access.

But how would a Unix shell work on a single line screen, or for that matter, a Gopher menu? We'll explore some concepts, but before we do that, for context and understanding of their capabilities we'll start with the history of these machines -- and because their development is unavoidably tangled with TI's other consumer products and their home computer family, we'll necessarily rehash some of those highlights and nadirs as well.

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Way back (well, six months ago, anyway), when I was wiring up a Gremlin Blasto arcade board, we talked at length about this 1978 arcade game's history and its sole official home computer port by Milton Bradley to the Texas Instruments 99/4A. In the single player mode you run around in a maze and try to blow up all the mines, which can set off sometimes impressive chain reactions, all the while making sure you yourself don't go up in flames in the process. The TI-99/4A version was the Blasto I originally remember playing as I never did play Blasto in the arcades. (Also, for the record, we're not talking about Sony's unrelated Blasto for the PlayStation which, other than having the voice talents of the late and lamented Phil Hartman, was apparently a traumatic slog both for its developers and the few people who actually played it.) To the credit of its three composite authors, it is a competent and accurate conversion that also adds configurable options, colour graphics and music; in fact, TI's Blasto is probably my favourite game on the /4A, more so than any other cartridge. On the other hand, because it's an accurate conversion, it also inherits all of the original's weaknesses, which admittedly hail from the limited CPU and ROM capacity of the arcade hardware.

So, in that article, I mentioned two future Blasto projects. One is to save my pennies for a custom arcade cabinet to put the board in, though I just spent a cool grand plus on tires which used up a lot of those pennies and I've also got Christmas presents to buy. But the second was to write my own take on TI Blasto and soup it up. This project is the second one from my bucket list that I've completed. It took a couple years of work on it off and on, but it's finally done, with faster action and animation, a massive number of procedurally generated screens, and fully configurable gameplay.

I've christened it Oblast, and it's free to play on your real Commodore 64 or emulator. Let's talk about what's the same and what's different.

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"Burger Becky" did a lot of great games, first at Interplay (Bard's Tale, Wasteland), then later at Logicware, where she and others did some great Mac ports including Jazz Jackrabbit and their Half-Life MacOS port which never actually saw the light of day, the infamous 3DO port of Doom, and of course the initial work on the IIgs version of Wolfenstein 3D. Naturally these are just the highlights that come to mind of a very long tenure in the computer gaming world. She was very complimentary of TenFourFox back in the day when I was still developing that, and I'd long hoped she would release Mac Half-Life like she did 3DO Doom for the archivists to pick over. Sadly, word has come out that she has finally succumbed to some sort of aggressive form of pulmonary adenocarcinoma. It's not a good way to go, and I hope her last moments were at peace.

I try not to write anything even vaguely political on this blog because we have a variety of views on a variety of subjects and no one is here for that. We can all enjoy our geriatric little silicon artifacts together regardless of your electoral persuasion. But I was hopping mad this week, and the reason is actually on-topic, because I got hit with US Customs tariffs close to double the cost of the vintage items I was ordering and more than the items were worth. This eventually got straightened out, but it wouldn't have happened without my complaint and some time on the phone.

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