Rubénerd!

What started as a post describing what a really ancient Compaq computer would look like spawned an entire investigation into an embarrassing aspect of my childhood, and even promoted WordPress to publish the drafts before they were finished!

That's an old computer

I have no idea how I got there, but a few days ago I stumbled across the above so-called Ancient Compaq for sale. With a title like that, who could refuse a look?!

It turns out the machine was decidedly less ancient than what I was expecting, but it turns out I had a soft spot for the Compaq Preario towers from the 1990s. These later models were less interesting, but I remember as a kid desperately wanting one of the earlier models that looked looked like a little spaceship. I'd buy one of those and fit it with a modern board quicker than you could say NOSTALGIA, if I could remember the model number.

Tracking it down

At that stage, I was ready to post this silly entry and move on. But a part of me was interested in what model of Presario I wanted as a kid. A few minutes on Google Images turned up which series it was: the Presario 5510! Relesed in 1998, the entry level Presario 5510 had these impressive specs:

• 266MHz Celeron CPU
• 64MiB of RAM
• 4GB hard drive and a
• K56Flex fax modem

The 5030, 5110 and 5520 to 5560 models had higher specs, such as 8GB drives and 350MHz Pentium IIs.

Clearly my 12 year old self had an overly active imagination, looking at that picture now it's embarrassing to think I once thought it looked like a spaceship. I suppose the curved lines resemble fins on a rocket... slightly. Maybe. Oh Ruben, you silly kid!

Still, it stuck with me in my head all this time, and now I must locate one and purchase it, if only to satify that little kid in me. If you couldn't have stuff as a kid, you can get it when you're older, right? And I could replace the internals with a modern board and use it as a file server. This is called justifying frivolousness.

As I've found with a lot of these kinds of searches, it was Japanese sites that had the most information. For detailed technical lists ranging from old computers to mountain bikes, nobody does it better than the Japanese. Their meticulous attention to detail impresses even my German genes.

I'll be mirroring local copies of these PC Watch, InverseNet.co.jp, pc-kaitori.jp pages, just because.

I'd react the same if I were given a mint Commodore 64 box! I got my 64 (and 16, and Plus 4) second hand on eBay when I was 18, and have loved them. Born too late for the home computer revolution, too early to have the internet in primary school. Never used datasettes, but had 5.25" floppies. Feeling sorry for me yet?

Found by @elkeee on The Clearly Dope. C=

Aside from the technological significance of the DEC PDP11 computers, I'm also so thoroughly in love with their design, colours, fonts and advertising material.

Quintessentially 70s. I want that chair! The carpet! The red walls! A bank of dead PDP11s for hanging my clothes in, with a Mac Mini running an emulator inside it!

Scan by PanelswitchMan on Flickr.

Going through my backups this afternoon, I stumbled upon all the photos I took with my Sony Vaio PCG-C1VM laptop. It was one of the first laptops to include a built in webcam, and took horribly bad 320x240 images! Still, at the time it was my only digital camera, so I spent ages taking shots with it like the silly nerd I was.

According to the time stamp, this photo was taken on the 11th of July 2001. I think it was on our balcony at Highpoint in Singapore. Nostalgia!

Smiling Lockheed L1011 taken in August 1974 by Piergiuliano Chesi. Clearly one doesn't need to be an anime character without pants to be an anthropomorphic aircraft, just saying ;).

In related news, the only L1011 diecast model I have had its forward landing gear and parts of the tail damaged during the latest move. I don't suppose I can get tiny 1mm wheel replacements?

CNET was one of the first websites I visited when we first got internet in the 1990s. I was horrified (mortified even) when they replaced their uniquely tech-retro typeface with a generic font a few years ago.

Needless to say, a horrendously egregious error seems to have finally been corrected! I applaud CNET for re-introducting their classic logo, and restoring a part of my childhood :). Now they just need to do something about the overwrought, ZDNet-esque site design, and degrade gracefully when people access their site without JavaScript.

I was born too late to be a part of the Fortran generation, but upon discussing the language with my sister this evening I received the following in response:

You mean 4chan?

As I said on The Twitters, I think a part of my brain just melted.

In other news, I need that font. Retro futuristic is one of the single greatest design methodologies of all time. I also need their slogan printed on a shirt.

The least you need to know: if you receive the above error when extracting Windows NT 3.51 Service Pack 5, use the /b flag while extracting.

More detail

For those of you running Windows NT 3.51 (the last version of Windows that separated the kernel and UI subsystems), running the self-extracting SP5_351I.EXE file in a temporary directory from the likes of File Manager will result in the following error:

PKSFX: (W18) Warning! OEMNADAP.INF already exists. Overwrite (y/n)?

Typing Y here will extract the rest of the files, though when you run UPDATE.EXE you'll be given the following error.

The solution is to use the /b flag, which extracts files into a tree of directories, rather than just putting them all into one place:

SP5_351I.EXE /b

Why Microsoft decided to use software that doesn't extract in this fashion by default for archives that clearly have files with the same name in different places is nothing short of baffling.

Microsoft identified this bug in their Knowledge Base article 149306.

If you've installed Windows 3.x in IBM PC DOS 7.0/2000 and it reports insufficient conventional memory, you may be running the wrong version of SmartDrive.

Insufficient memory or address space to initialize Windows in 386 enhanced mode. Quit one or more memory-resident programs or remove unnecessary utilities from your CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT files and restart your computer.

Potential fix

If you've installed Windows 3.x in IBM PC DOS 7.0/2000 (wait, didn't I already say that?) and received the above error message regardless of the amount of conventional memory you've painstakingly freed by loading everything into UMBs like a good DOS memory managing guru, chances are you're attempting to use the PC DOS version of SMARTDRV.EXE instead of the one provided by Windows.

While the PC DOS version uses less memory (ironically), I've never been able to get it to work with Windows 3.x. The only workable solution I've found is to go into your AUTOEXEC.EXE and CONFIG.SYS files and replace:

C:\DOS\SMARTDRV.EXE [/FLAGS]

with:

C:\WINDOWS\SMARTDRV.EXE [/FLAGS]

The DOS version of EMM386.EXE works however, and is newer than the one offered with Windows 3.x.

Given my Snow Leopard Mac Pro doesn't have a SCSI card, I dusted off my old Iomega SCSI to USB bridge cable to extract my old data from disks. Turns out System Profiler.app sees the cable, but not the Jaz drive or the disks!

System Profiler.app

SCSI-to-USB Cable:

Product ID:             0x0040
Vendor ID:              0x059b  (Iomega Corporation)
Version:                1.00
Serial Number:          04
Speed:                  Up to 12 Mb/sec
Manufacturer:           Iomega
Location ID:            0x00100000
Current Available (mA): 500
Current Required (mA):  2

Rambling commentary

Iomega's support article 18731 from 2007 suggests that IomegaWare is no longer nessisary with Mac OS X 10.3 and up, though I assume that's while using a SCSI cable and not a bridge. A dedicated SCSI card might work, and would no doubt be faster than using a USB 1.0 bridge cable, but that obviously would cost far more. Perhaps I'll need to fire up my Windows 2000 VMware Fusion VM and install IomegaWare into that to get my data.

I grew up in primary school using Zip disks and in high school with Jaz disks, and am eager to retrieve my data from them before they start to decay or get damaged. A few of my Zip disks are unsalvageable, but from experience Jaz disks were much faster and more reliable than Zip disks so I'm hoping time is more on my side. Insert commentary about the Click of Death here!

I also just learned my old man has a disk of financial data he needs read. There's something about storing a couple of 300KiB spreadsheet files on a 1GB Jaz disk that is just too hilarious for words!

As for Yuki, for some reason I just started taking pictures of computer hardware with her in them, and I've kept the tradition alive :). Given her character in the Haruhi series, it made sense. ^_^