retrocomputing

I have a laptop that will not allow anything but UEFI and I must run FreeDOS.. (or one of many other OSes that wont boot via UEFI)

Is there a UEFI Bios shim? UEFI thinks it is an OS, but It loads the BIOS boot block and runs it?

Is that even possible?

The demoscene has become a national UNESCO-heritage in Sweden, thanks to an application that Ziphoid and me did last year. This has already happened in several European countries, as part of the international Art of Coding initiative to make the demoscene a global UNESCO heritage. I think this makes plenty of sense, since the demoscene is arguably the oldest creative digital subculture around. It has largely stuck to its own values and traditions throughout the world’s technological and economical shifts, and that sort of consistency is quite unusual in the digital world.

Most people think of machine instructions as the fundamental steps that a computer performs. However, many processors have another layer of software underneath: microcode. With microcode, instead of building the processor's control circuitry from complex logic gates, the control logic is implemented with code known as microcode, stored in the microcode ROM. To execute a machine instruction, the computer internally executes several simpler micro-instructions, specified by the microcode. In this post, I examine the microcode ROM in the original Pentium, looking at the low-level circuitry.

Archive: https://archive.is/2025.03.30-164547/https://www.seattletimes.com/business/microsoft/microsoft-turns-50-4-employees-recall-their-early-years/

Fifty years ago, two kids from Seattle flipped the tech industry on its head.

While all the big brains in personal computing were focused on machines — “microcomputer” hardware — Bill Gates and Paul Allen were thinking about the technology that made the machines go: software. That idea, planted by Allen at Gates’ Boston-area apartment, became the opening verse of Microsoft’s epic.

Gates and Allen launched “Micro-Soft” on April 4, 1975, out of a small office in a strip mall in Albuquerque, N.M., then decamped for Bellevue before landing in Redmond. Over the decades that followed, amid leadership changes, intense government scrutiny and billions upon billions of dollars in revenue, tens of thousands of employees passed through Microsoft to witness, and add to, the stuff of tech-industry legend.

People make fun of the ZX81/Time Sinclair 1000. It was a super cheap computer which had some questionable corners cut. Let's see if these three machines work, fix them if they don't and then see if these computers are worthy of praise or live up to their bad expectations.

Cambridge, UK – 28-Mar-2025 – RISC OS Open Limited (ROOL) is calling on the global technology community to support a bold new initiative to secure the long-term future of RISC OS. The company today announced the launch of its Moonshots programme – a strategic shift away from incremental development, towards large-scale engineering efforts aimed at modernising the operating system for next-generation Arm architectures.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/27380000

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/27362288

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/27263478

I love saving these old parts from the landfill, and this stylish little Amber monitor was destined to be recycled, so let's fix it.

via https://hackaday.com/2025/03/22/the-fastest-ms-dos-gaming-pc-ever/

After [Andy]’s discovery of an old ISA soundcard at his parents’ place that once was inside the family PC, the onset of a wave of nostalgia for those old-school sounds drove him off the deep end. This is how we get [Andy] building the fastest MS-DOS gaming system ever, with ISA slot and full hardware compatibility. After some digging around, the fastest CPU for an Intel platform that still retained ISA compatibility turned out to be Intel’s 4th generation Core series i7-4790K CPU, along with an H81 chipset-based MiniITX mainboard.