Apple II spotted in a landfill
Today I went to our local landfill to dispose of various items of waste, including some electrical equipment. To my great disappointment, I discovered an old Apple II at the top of the pile of electronic waste. It was probably used to control some kind of industrial machinery. How sad…
IBM ThinkPad 600 running OpenGEM under FreeDOS 1.4
I recently rediscovered an old IBM ThinkPad 600 notebook that was originally used by one of my customers. Years ago, knowing about my passion for collecting vintage computers, he generously gifted it to me.
The machine is in good overall condition, although the battery pack can no longer power it independently — you need to keep it plugged in. From what I could gather online, this particular unit was likely manufactured between mid and late 1998. It features a Pentium MMX CPU running at 233 MHz and 98304 KB of RAM, with 97728 KB usable. For storage and media, it includes an external 3.5" floppy-disk drive and an internal CD-ROM drive.
Some time ago I had the opportunity to buy an old IGEL M310C thin client for about 16 EUR. This was a thin client based on the VIA Nano U3400 CPU, clocked at 800 MHz, once sold by the German company IGEL Technology GmbH. Since 2022 that company no longer sells hardware, concentrating on its IGEL OS, which is a Linux-based operating system that allows access to virtual desktops.
IGEL M310C without the CompactFlash card
It has been a (very) long time since I last posted here, but now I’m back! This time I will write about Vivaldi, an interesting alternative to Google Chrome for privacy-aware users. Vivaldi uses the Chromium code base and features an integrated ad and tracker blocker. It is available for a variety of platforms, including Windows, macOS, Linux, Android and even iOS.
I’ve been using NewPipe, a privacy-aware YouTube client for Android, for some time now and I’m quite happy and impressed by it. So I wondered if there was a Linux desktop client that could match NewPipe’s features. The answer is yes! With FreeTube there is an Electron-based client for Windows, Mac and Linux that allows you to access YouTube more privately.
Some time ago I decided to build myself a new PC for retrocomputing and programming. For one part I wanted to be able to install the latest version of FreeDOS on modern hardware, on the other side I was very eager to install, at last, Arch Linux on a dedicated PC. As I expect this project to become a sort of exploration journey in an unknown territory, I decided to name this new PC atlantis.
After I succeeded in installing NetBSD on the HP thin client t5710, I wanted to see how well it would work under Microsoft Windows 98 Second Edition (SE).
Thin Client HP t5710 - Front view
The biggest problem you run into when trying such an installation is that, in general, you need a floppy disk to boot the Windows 98 SE setup. To perform the installation from a USB stick I followed the steps described in detail in an excellent online article by James MacKenzie. As floppy disk image I used a custom image, instead of the one recommended in the above mentioned article, because I was not able to have the internal IDE flash disk remapped to C:. By using the custom boot floppy disk, I could to use FDISK and FORMAT to partition the IDE flash disk, format it and make it bootable by specifying the /S parameter, that is: FORMAT D: /S. Then I copied the win98 folder to the newly formatted disk, rebooted and started the setup from that folder.
I recently bought several old HP thin clients t5710 on Ebay, mostly because I wanted to install FreeDOS and other DOSes on bare metal. And since each box did cost only about 17 EUR, I thought it might be a good idea to give them a try.
Thin Client HP t5710 - Front view
Thin Client HP t5710 - Rear view with the ports
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