The Final Boss of the IBM 8525 lineage.

Released in August 1999, it pushed the aging 0.25µm Katmai core to its limits, requiring a factory voltage bump to 2.05V. The last native Slot 1 Katmai for the legendary 440BX chipset.

I recently picked up this gpu and only realized now that there appears to be this soldered-on green wire that does not appear to be on the back of other cards of the same kind. Anyone know what this is?

We (the Heinz Nixdorf Forum Computer Museum) host a talk about the history of Apple today. A few Apple products will be on display in the conference hall, among those the Lisa 1, which we had to take out of its display case. I decided to open the Lisa’s back cover, which led to me finding out what I’ll be working on tomorrow. Hopefully the board is salvageable…

all these computers are the ones I used in the past.

damn i'm old!

In addition to the diskettes, i later found a working IBM 5153 color monitor at a different estate sale. At the third estate sale i found a working IBM 5150 PC. I only purchased the book of doskettes and unfortunately let the rest fall through my fingers.

i have had this pc case restored by my uncle and ive owned it for years. all ik is that it is a goldship pc case, all other info on it are unknown. and yes it does light up.

I've been playing around with this Pentium 1/Windows 95 machine. When I start it up there's a strange whining noise that sounds like it's coming from the internal speaker just before the POST beep (happens about 10 seconds in). Thoughts? Everything seems to be working fine otherwise.

There are many images of the AX2, but none of the AX3. These are the remnants from that PC that I’ve kept in my archive.

The date is 1997 for the packaging

This is heavy as balls and the packing is comically specific and stout - from research these came out in 1992, active in SunOS stuff, which makes sense, seems like this was an engineering outfit

The "RMA" on the shipping sticker could be either a good sign or a bad sign; as the seal is broken, I suppose this is the "bad" one ;)

Anyway, gonna get a machine together with a controller and some drivers and see what's up with this stupid thing - it's like almost the size of two power supplies and weighs more

Step into the NeXT Decade with the newest creation by formerly Apple's Steve Jobs, NeXTSTEP! Using a Unix workstation has never been this fun, thanks to NeXTSTEP's innovative GUI and easy-to-use programs, that join office needs with multimedia wonders! Want to know about it? Then you're in the right place!

Cross platform compliance neat

VCF Ontario has been postponed until the summer of 2028. As a new event, we’re giving ourselves more time to plan and put together a great show for the vintage computing community. The exact dates will be announced once confirmed.

In the meantime, get your retro computing fix at VCF Montréal 2.0 on November 7–8, 2026, at Champlain College Saint-Lambert!   Come celebrate vintage computers and connect with fellow enthusiasts.

Find out more at cvcfed.org
 Purchase your tickets here: https://events.humanitix.com/vcf-montreal-2026-2-0?c=cvcfed_web

Thank you for your enthusiasm and support—keep those CRTs glowing!

#VCFOntario #VCFMontreal #RetroComputing #VintageComputers

Got this for free from an old guy clearing out the loft on his barn. Irs an AST Bravo 386/16 with 4mb of ram and 70mb quantum disk! No battery leakage amd it fired right up! Only thing was the disk was stuck.. gave it a horisontal smack while powering it up and it spun right up 🤩

So that was my stupid idea™ for the rainy fall season. Framing a bunch of RAM bricks for my home office. Nothing here is of professional quality, but it was a fun little thing to do and just the right visitors will be eyeing these a little closer. :P I hope sharing it here will make sense to some of you.

No running PCs were harmed in the making of this project.

So this is progressing far better than I expected. I've finished checking the power, and it's not getting anything at all, so I'm hoping the flex might be damaged. I'll need to wait on a few parts, but hopefully the issues should be rather simple. I've also done a short test on all of the power supply, and there are no shorts, and absolutely zero power is coming in to the board.

The giant capacitor also tested perfectly, which is a relief. Will update when I hopefully get it working. :D

I've brung this thing back to life since Mid-April of this year (It wasn't dead it was abandoned long ago). This was my dad's very old laptop. In late 2024, I tried to bring it back. When I powered it on, It showed an HDD password, which had my dad's sensitive data on it, and which my dad forgot the password a long time ago. I told my dad about it and disagreed because he could risk losing his sensitive files If I mess around with it. So I gave up reviving it and put it back in its place. I was planning on Installing Windows 7 on it once we settled with the password, but I couldn't... But somewhere in 2025, I tried again but failed miserably.

In Early 2026, I started knowing more about computer stuff like drivers, IDE/SATA ports, how BIOS and UEFI differ, RAM generation, CPU sockets and FSB, partitioning, etc... In April 11-17th, 2026, I was trying to bring it back again but decided to quit, because I thought that thing has IDE and I don't have any IDE drives. That is... until I unscrewed the drive bay, and when I saw that the port is SATA, I am overjoyed. Because it has SATA, I can take Advantage of my SATA drives. I took out my 320 GB HDD from my Samsung RC520 (It's broken), put it in, and it boots, bypassing the password completely! It has Windows 10 1511, but that's when I realized - I thought this was a Satellite A30 (LOL its not even close to looking like an A30), having 512 MB of RAM and a Pentium 4, but it turns out after I looked at the specs in the computer properties in the Control Panel, It was actually rocking a Core 2 Duo T7200 and 2 GB RAM (Normally Laptops in this Era come with 512 MB/ 1 GB and Core Duo CPUs), which is actually surprising, because having 2 GB RAM and Core 2 Duo back in 2006/2007 was a luxury. Windows 10 1511 was surprisingly usable, despite the slow HDD holding it back.

In April 19th, 2026, I took a 500 GB SSD from my Mom's old ASUS EEE PC 1025C (which is broken due to fan issues) and decided to Install Windows XP on it, but decided to go for Vista instead because I thought the Windows XP Reinstallation CD from Dell won't work (It actually does LOL, later in the story). After Installing Vista, the experience was actually good. I installed Supermium, VLC, LibreOffice 5.4.7.2, etc... and made Windows Vista usable. However, while I was browsing the web in Supermium, Windows says that Supermium isn't responding even though it works properly, It's probably because I only have 2 GB of RAM, and in April 25th, I got a BSOD which says: "A clock interrupt was not received on a secondary processor within the allocated time interval". The next day (April 26th), I did an In-place upgrade to Windows 7, and the installation went smoothly with no issues. Every program works properly, no "Not responding" warnings from supermium, and I have access to more programs and games. In May 1st, I decided to Install XP on my 320 GB HDD on a random partition my dad made years ago (which had no files anyway), and Installed it there. The eXPerience was good, but I had trouble installing the display driver (I actually installed it later on).

In late May, I tested Windows 8.1, it ran very well with no issues and even used it because of flashpoint (Flashpoint requires Windows 8.1 and above.). However, just as I was about to format the other partition to test out Windows 10, I couldn't. I knew that the Partition that I installed 8.1 on it previously had Windows 7 Home Basic, which failed to boot because of mismatched hardware. I realized that I now have to reinstall Windows 7 on the Main partition and do the In-place upgrade to Windows 10 in the secondary partition (where I mained win7 before). I tried Stock Windows 10 22H2, It ran Okay-ish but still pretty sluggish. (The rest of the Story will continue in Part 2)

This Laptop was given to my dad by a company. However, the same company that gave my dad a laptop had shut down, leaving the laptop in my dad's property, making me able to use it as a usable retro machine today.

This floppy drive from a Dell 486 laptop isn't working. At first it sounded like it was spinning out of control as soon as I placed a diskette in it. The reason for that was pretty clear when I opened it up and saw the decayed belt.

However, using a replacement belt it still isn't reading disks. There's one that seems to start but falls right after, most diskettes don't seem to read at all.

Tried clearing the heads but to no avail. But, I just noticed the big wheel isn't rotating freely. There's a few points where it drags.

I guess some sewing machine oil could work here? But how to apply? Any ideas on how to go about this?

Local thrift find! Never heard of it before

I tried removing the Keyboard to take out the CMOS but the screw is stripped

This machine has been in my storage in the box for 20+ years, I had forgotten about it, just pulled it out and it powered right on and works perfectly. It is from 1983 and was made in Japan.

Hello.

I own a couple vintage computers including Commodore PC-10 III. As you probably know IBM XT and its clones came from the times before everything was standardised.

Case of my PC-10 is bent in multiple places and everything barely fits. Keyboard connector (on the right side) is partially blocked by top cover which makes connecting a keyboard difficult or impossible without unscrewing top cover first. Plastic front panel is cracked in multiple places. I tried to restore this case as much as I could. Sadly I got this computer in this state and it was damaged by previous owners.

Power supply is another problem. Original PSU was faulty and because it was hidden in its own custom case I had to improvise by installing a new modern MeanWell PSU. It has its issues. It gets really toasty with higher current consumption when I run heavy applications, there is no space for a fan inside, and it doesn't have "power ok" line, so the computer crashes every time on cold boot before voltages stabilise forcing me to press a reset button. I know there are ways to generate "power ok" with voltage comparators or even simulate it with attiny.

At this moment I got an idea to buy and modify one of those modern retro PC cases. I could install a proper ATX power supply, add more ports and maybe connect LCD with frequency counter to CPU clock signal.

Silverstone FLP02 looks fantastic, but the price is outrageous for a project that could fail. FLP01 is fine and it is also a horizontal case. Thermaltake Retro 360 is a bit too modern. What could you suggest?

Any S100 fans out there?

Earlier this year I posted about a 1998/99 Packard Bell desktop I bought, with the intention of adding some period appropriate bits to it to make it an authentic (if modest!) gaming machine of its day.

An I-O Data Voodoo Banshee came up for sale in Japan complete with box, driver floppies and demo disks and after some finagling (i.e. learning I had to switch a jumper on the motherboard to disable the onboard VGA) I finally got it working.

As expected it doesn’t run things very smoothly by modern standards, probably around 30 fps with some stutter and drops when the action heats up, but I think someone would have been pretty chuffed by the upgrade back in the day.

Have also included a picture of the sound card I put in - I fancied something with EAX support, maybe I’ll check how well Thief: The Dark Project runs one of these days!