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There's one I used to use called, if I am remembering the name right, a DaynaPORT. Good luck finding an image of the driver diskette though.

I think this is one of the most impressive "Well FINE, I'll just do it myself then, O thou self-proclaimed 'suppliers' who refuse to actually supply" that I have ever seen or heard of! If I knew of a haberdasher who hadn't gone out of business 20 years ago, I'd go buy myself a hat specifically...

About 15 years ago, I drove a fellow home (my job at the time was "professional designated driver") whose company had developed a method of building lead-acid batteries which, though having completely traditional chemical composition, had greatly improved energy density by reason of using...

Unless I am misremembering, the 8100 IS one of the initial PCI Power Macs.

CC_333, I was unaware that windows with exposed heating traces were still a thing in new vehicles. I stand corrected. As to the possibility of dual-layer manufacture, you are probably right about it not being done that way; for all I know, they just stuck a layer of plastic over the traces on...

I believe the “killed 9” message would be the OS under which the util was run reporting to you that, for whatever reason, the util was halted by some other piece of software. The Unix command for sending a control message (“signal”) to another running program is called “kill” because that is its...

Says it is good up to 220 VAC on mine. Better read yours to be sure though.

Yes they still use resistive defrosters. The modern ones have the traces between the layers of glass where they can’t get damaged though. As to the repair method, by the time I was old enough to have a car with a rear defroster, it was of the newer type; I have never actually needed to carry out...

Well, I agree that the loss of “just turn it on and, presto, nostalgia!” from vintage Maccery is a bit of a downer, but I have come to see it from another perspective after giving the matter some thought over the past few years. The way I look at it, our fellow retrocomputing enthusiasts who...

While the point about the aggregate size of the software library that will run on a given machine is a good one and quite apropos—for example, if my rather unreliable memory is not playing silly tricks on me, I believe the entire corpus of software _ever_ released for the Commodore PET line...

Back in the ancient history of cars with resistive-heated electric rear-window defrosters, say the 1970s through the 1990s, you could cheaply buy little bottles of goop from any auto parts store which were basically conductive paint. In those days the heating element was just printed onto the...

In principle, hiding a more efficient, stable, reliable, and (one would hope) long-lived modern power supply in the eviscerated carcass of the original unit (i.e., reusing the case), thus both preserving appearances and protecting the delicate vintage electronics in the actual laptop, would be a...

Woohoo! I knew that functionality was too useful to not have already been implemented by someone! Having been beaten to it by fully 21 years was a bit of a surprise, but I vaguely recall that dead PRAM batteries were a familiar nuisance even that far back, so I can’t really call it THAT...

Seconded! This is absolutely fascinating to follow. I can mostly follow the theory, but nowhere near to the extent of ever being able to try this myself. Massively intriguing stuff!

To say nothing of screen parameters and network settings. Less urgently, I really like the idea of not having to reënter all of my desktop settings every danged time I boot or reboot the wretched machine. Back when System 7 was current technology, I was (for lack of a more accurate term) a...

My 2300c gradually became unusable due to coloured vertical 1-pixel stripes just like those, about 15 years ago. The really good Mac shop I took it to explained that it happens because the ribbon cable from logic board to screen passes through the hinge, and gets flexed every time the lid moves...

Wow, good to know! I want to do something about them for usability purposes, too, so I will hopefully find time to dig into that this weekend. I still haven’t gotten around to actually writing my planned Poor Man’s PRAM Substitute system extension (simple in concept; back up the PRAM to disk at...

As I understand it, the same unfortunately cannot be said of the PRAM batteries (a pair of highly inaccessible coin cells, or so I have read). I still haven’t quite been brave enough to extract the dead specimens threatening the recesses of my 540c.

When I graduated high school in 1995 (yeah, yeah, “Get off my lawn!” etc.), my parents bought me my very own computer as a reward. I chose an nth-hand SE/30 from the far side of the region… being an ignorant and overeager teen I overpaid, but not horribly so. It was awesome! It did everything I...

The way I would actually do it is just to write a quick little program or script or something. All it needs to do is take the input file, set up an array of four output files, and then loop with three simple operations until you hit the end of the input file, as follows: set the output file...