Steve's Retro Year in Review for 2025

With 2025 coming to a close it's time to reflect back on another year in Retro Computing.  Alot of great things happened in 2025, some planned and some unexpected.  This is my seventh year being involved in Retro Computing and my interest continues, there seems to always be something new to learn and the forum members of the Vintage Computer Federation and Tinker Different continue to be a source of help and inspiration for new projects.  Also this year I authored my 100th bLog aticle here on Steve's Retro Computer bLog.

In my retrospective article from last year I mentioned that I wanted to downsize the collection.  I added fewer new computers to my collection this year and I said no to quite a few eBay and local listings that were interesting.  I added about 15 machines this year instead of the 20+ machines I'd been adding over the last couple of years and more importantly I sold quite a few of those 20+ machines from previous years as well.  Half of the computers I sold this year are ones I bought to fix up and resell since I really do enjoy the repair process.  It also helps to know ahead of time that I won't be keeping the machines, it makes it easier to sell them when the time comes.

I sell complete systems whenever possible on both Craigslist and FaceBook Market Place (FBMP).  This year I sold about two computers on FBMP for every one on Craigslist, but I will still continue to use both platforms.  I think I get alot more spam from FBMP, but I know I'm getting alot of views on that platform since they show you those statistics now.  I'm still pricing below eBay prices, and I'm seeing machines sell on average after about a 2-3 week wait.

I bought three lots of computers this year, one with seven machines (mostly compact Macs), one with three Macs, and the final lot with eight machines (mostly Apple IIs).  In each of these lots I knew there were only 1 or 2 computers I'd want to keep but having these computers on hand made it easy for me to find an interesting repair project any time.  I plan to keep doing this (assuming that I can continue to find small and medium sized lots of computers in "as is" condition).  If you know anyone that is downsizing or needs help disposing of an old computer collection, please let me know, I'd be glad to buy machines in as-is condition or just even just offer advice about selling.

As I look back at acquisitions this year I made good progress on getting early Apple II hardware.  I got an early Apple II Plus machine and then an original Apple II machine.  I also got to extend my collection of Next computers, adding another NextStation Mono Slab and and an HP PA RISC machine that runs NextStep really well.  I got a new CP/M Machine that I haven't completed repairs on yet and another early MS-DOS compatible Wang PC, so I'm continuing to learn about both of these types of machines.  I added a couple of calculators to the collection, although I do not intend to become a calculator collector, since I'm trying to stay focused in my area of interest for collecting.

I also completed a couple of Unix workstation projects that were a long time coming, first getting a Y2K Era Compaq Alpha Personal Workstation up and running after a long time waiting for parts and then getting a Sun Ultra 10 machine up and running.  The Sun project was a machine I got at VCF Midwest 2024 so that one took a while.  The Apple III Computer parts that I got in the fall of the year were totally unexpected, but alot of fun to repair and learn about.

I don't have much room to display retro computers, so none of the machines I've acquired this year are on display in my office, instead I have an Original IBM PC, a Compaq Portable I, a Macintosh Portable, an Apple Macintosh Perform 550, a Gateway 2000 Slimline 486, a PDP-11 with VT-220 Terminal, and an Apple IIe as shown here...

During 2026 I need to think about focusing my interests even more and continuing to downsize the collection.  I still have more beige box PCs that I don't want in the collection and I will also consider downsizing other categories of machines.

During 2026 I should spend more time with software setup on the machines I already have.  Alternative Operating Systems has long been an interest of mine, and many of these machines support multiple OSes.  Networking is also one of my interests so I'd also like to spend time connecting more of the machines together.

What about you?  Do you have any highlights to share about fixing or using old computers in 2025 or plans for next year that you'd like to share?  Feel free to leave a comment below, or reach out to me via email at the address shown in my Blogger Profile.

Here Comes the Sun - Sun Ultra 5 & 10 Systems

If you have learned much about the history of computing it's hard to avoid hearing about Sun Microsystems.  They dominated the personal workstation market for pretty much the entire time it existed.  They came out of Stanford and invented or popularized many technologies that ended up being widely adopted around networking and the Internet.  I've had Sun equipment on my wish list for quite a while as I never used it during the 90s.  I wanted to experience Sun hardware and software for myself.

The first Sun that I acquired was an Ultra 5 desktop.  I had been warned that it was not working and incomplete, a parts machine, but I was happy to have it anyway.  I purchased parts on eBay and tried to get it working spending many hours reading and learning and testing, but the main board on this machine ended up having a bad MMU, so I made a note on my wish list to get another machine of this type and I moved on.

Shortly after that I acquired a working Sun Ultra 1 machine from my friend Steve Hatle.  He worked on these machines during his career so he's had professional experience with them and he did a nice job restoring this Ultra 1.  It works great, and it's always nice to be able to start out learning about a new type of computer with one known good working machine as a baseline.

But the Sun Ultra 5 project sat for quite a while until last fall.  A generous donor, Peter Manina, gave me another working good Sun Ultra 5 during VCF Midwest 2024, thank you Peter!  He had donated another machine previously, an IBM RS/6000 Machine which I covered here.

This second Ultra 5 machine was also a bit of a project because this lot included a SunPCI card (a PC on a card made by Sun for these machines).  Peter had suggested that the PC Card runs hot, and that it would be better to run it in an Ultra 10 tower which has better cooling.  The Ultra 5 and 10 are sister machines with the same motherboard so the CPUs and peripherals are interchangeable.  I waited for a while and when an Ultra 10 parts machine came up on eBay for a reasonable price I purchased it.  At that point I had three machines. I was hoping for two working machines a 5 and a 10.

The next hurdle for these machines is getting a working NVRAM / Clock Battery.  I tried the battery replacement hack where you use a dremel tool to cut through the side and solder on a CR2032 coin cell holder, but these are not Dallas brand batteries and are much harder to modify in this way.  I tried ordering clock batteries from China, but these parts came with a dead battery, too.  I ordered another pair from an eBay seller.  The project sat for quite a while but eventually I found this video and decided that I should be able to dremel out the epoxy far enough to get to the terminals inside and solder on a battery.  The results were not pretty but I modified three chips and added an easily replaced CR2032.

The Sun Ultra 5 machine came together easily after the clock battery situation was resolved, Peter had already put a modern SSD in it with a StarTech SATA to IDE adapter that is well known in the retro community for providing good compatibility.  I was able to re-install Solaris 9 on that machine and had it back up and running in a short period of time.  It looks a bit yellowed on the front, but overall I'm quite happy with this machine...

The Ultra 10 was more of a challenge.  Peter had warned me that some of the Solaris Install Media, even though it came directly from Sun, might not work.  I had been planning to use Solaris 8 because it is compatible with the PC Compatibility card but neither of the two versions of 8 I had were working for a clean install, but then watching this video from the Phintage Collector he showed that the PC Compatibility Card could be made to work with Solaris 9.  I decided to follow the path of least resistance and go with Solaris 9 on the Ultra 10 system, too.  I setup this machine with another Star Tech IDE to SATA bridge card and a low cost SSD.  I also replaced the non-functional CD-ROM drive in the eBay machine with a working drive.  After I got the machine running with Solaris 9 I started on the SunPCI card configuration.  This article was also extremely helpful for getting the SunPCI Card to work, and here it is running Windows 98...

I'm very happy with how the machine turned out and I wish to thank Peter Manina again since his gift got me restarted on this project.

Do you have any memories of the Sun SPARC or Ultra series workstations?  Let me know in the comments or reach out to my email address shown in my profile.

Another Beige Alpha Joins the Fleet - Compaq Professional Workstation XP1000

In the middle of last year an interesting workstation computer came up for sale on Facebook Marketplace here in my area.  The Compaq Professional Workstation XP1000 is an Alpha based workstation from just after Compaq purchased Digital Equipment Corporation.  The Facebook Markeplace ad stated that it was stopping on a boot screen and that it might not be working, but the price was low enough that I thought it was worth the risk of not being able to repair it.

Once I got the system home I was able to verify that the system was in the condition described and then started to read what I could find about this computer.  I soon discovered that the motherboard had a password installed on it.  In the PC world we would call this a BIOS password, but for an Alpha machine like this, it's the SRM console password.  The SRM console uses a command line but with it locked out even the help command was generating an error "Console is secure.  Please login.".  Because PCs have a jumper to reset this I was quite hopeful that it would just be a matter of time till I figured out how to reset that password but after not finding much documentation online I decided to ask for help on the Vintage Computer Federation Forums.

As usual there were several people who were a big help there, including one gentleman that uploaded some documentation to the thread that I had not been able to find online anywhere else.  Sadly, though, we did NOT discover a backdoor designed by Compaq to reset the console password.  Although I could not find an explicit statement for this motherboard I did learn that were other machines designed by Compaq that did not contain a back door, if the password is lost, the main logic board containing the firmware must be replaced.  So I decided to put the project on hold and keep the machine.  I setup a saved search on eBay since you never know what will pop up there and didn't think much about this project in the second half of last year.

At the end of last year I gave quite a bit of thought to my Vintage Computing hobby.  I purged alot of my project machines, selling, donating to Free Geek, or recycling responsibly.  I also went through my wish lists and eBay saved searches and purged items that were no longer of interest and I discovered that I had setup the wrong search, adding an extra zero.  When I fixed the saved search I was shocked to learn that there was a logic board on eBay for sale!  I watched the item for a while and eventually made an offer that was accepted.

The board shipped from Israel so it took a while to get here but once it arrived I was able to pull my machine completely apart.  I used this as an opportunity to do some much needed dusting inside the case of this machine.  It was a huge relief when the system started back up after re-assembly and an even bigger relief when I was able to use the SRM console and issue commands to boot an Operating System off an Installation Disk!

Once I could start to explore, I learned that this was one of the newer XP1000 machines.  This machine can run the VMS operating systems and Unix like systems, but not Windows NT.  The older, slower machines could boot NT, but I already have one Alpha machine setup that way.  I know at least one DEC hardware enthusiast  who will be glad to see the machine running DEC software and not Microsoft software.

I had some old media for OpenVMS which I had burned while I was a part of the Community Licensing program, but that program has ended now.  I was able to install OpenVMS 8 on the hardware, but without licenses it's not very interesting or useful.  After searching on the Internet and reading for a bit, I learned that the archived version of Tru64 Unix on WinWorld has keys with the archive, so I gave that a try, and it worked well.

Configuring networking was a bit of a challenge, but I ended up getting that working with a Static IP and now the computer can read articles on FrogFind.com and 68k.news just fine.  I'm quite happy with how the machine turned out...

I was disappointed that I couldn't load older software on here.  I have been looking for some VAX hardware since that is what we used back in College, I remember the Motif Window Manager and that was such an interesting look and feel, but I didn't know that Motif was the precursor to the Common Desktop Environment (CDE).  Because of multiple vendors working together on this more open code base this Compaq (Digital Equipment) machine will join several others CDE machines that I have including IBM AIX, Sun Solaris, and SGI Irix.

My IBM RS/6000 Power PC AIX Unix Machine

As readers of my bLog will no doubt know, I'm a big fan of the Vintage Computer Federation Forums.  The community there has helped me with several projects that I would not have been able to complete on my own. I recently saw a post from a gentleman who had listed four different Unix workstations.  I reached out, and he generously agreed to pass on an IBM RS/6000 machine, a big thanks to Peter M. for this machine.

First things first, Peter let me know that there were a couple different versions of IBM AIX which were not yet archived including the first version of AIX that can run on this box, IBM AIX 4.3.3, and also IBM AIX 5L V5.1, so those are online now for anyone else who may need them.  There are earlier and later versions of AIX already archived, and there's still quite a bit of software avaliable online including a person who is building GNU tools for the OS.

This machine is a Power3 computer.  It's a single core PowerPC based processor from about year 2000.  Specifically, this is a 44P Model 170 at 333MHz, 1MB L2 Cache and with 512MB RAM.  This machine was assembled in the USA at the IBM manufacturing facility in the Rochester, MN factory.  I've been in that facility many years ago so this machine is a part of Minnesota Computer History.

It was reported that the machine had not been used for several years and so as usual I started in with a light dusting and cleaning.  I didn't have to take the machine far apart but I had been warned that the CPU daughter card would come loose and prevent the machine from starting, so I addressed that right away.  The RAM also needed to be re-seated, the battery reinstalled, and the GPU reinstalled.  Thankfully, all the hardware manuals for this machine are still online at the fantastic IBMFiles.com website, so getting through the error codes on the front panel was pretty straightforward.  If the machine stops booting it's quite easy to look up the error codes where it got hung up, much like the POST codes on a PC.

It was interesting to install the oldest version of the OS that would run on this machine, version 4.3.3, so I did that and looked around a bit at that but eventually I decided that the last version would be more useful, so I went looking for AIX version 5.3, and was able to find disk images for that online.  I burned the 8 CD set and started the install upgrading over the top of a 5.1 install.  That worked quite well and the machine is up and running with networking...

I'm happy to have the machine cleaned up reloaded and up and running.  This completes the first phase of work on this machine, but I look forward to spending more time getting software tools loaded onto the machine, doing some more networking with it, and learning more about this era of AIX.

If you have one of these machines, or any stories to share please feel free to comment below, or drop me an email, my email address is in my profile.

NextStation Online!

2023 is turning out to be a year where I close off loose ends with my Retro Computing hobby.  I've been acquiring hardware at a pretty good clip over the last couple of years and I've been thinking about things I could do with the equipment but just seem to never get around to.  And so far this year I am getting around to quite a few things.

Taking inspiration from both Macintosh Librarian and Sean @ Action Retro, I recently came back to my NextStation.  I've talked about acquiring that machine previously on the blog, and I've had it for over 2 years now.  Although I do keep coming back to it this computer has provided a challenge for me.

As we all probably know NextStep OS was the forerunner of our modern MacOS, but it's old enough that although it does have some familiar apps and look and feel, it's also quite different from modern MacOS.  As an additional challenge, I'm not that strong with Unix but the version of Unix that underlies NextStep OS is quite dated and so many of the commands I'd expect from Ubuntu or Raspbian  are simply not there, leaving me with alot of reading and Googling to do in order to use the system.

I decided one way to get a jump on this was to install a Next emulator on my modern PC.  That was a bit of an adventure and I found a shortcut that may be helpful to other people which I will document here.

Ctrl-Alt-Reese has documented the process of getting NextStep installed on actual hardware, but he also called out a link on WinWorld that contains a pre-setup copy of the Previous emulator, a Hard Drive image, and the required ROMS.  This version of the emulator is quite out of date so even if you are running Windows on your modern computer, I'd recommend going to the Previous hompage and getting the latest version (2.6 as of this writing).  Once you have all these components installed together it's fairly easy to configure the modern version of the emulator to point at the ROMs and the existing Hard Drive image from WinWorld.  That being said, getting the emulator running was not that big of a help to me because the biggest hurdle was getting my NextStation connected to Ethernet networking, and that's quite a bit of a different process inside of the Emulator.

So, I was back on my actual black hardware.  Following along with Sean's video above we see that we have to set a Static IP on the NextStation.  I was able to do this using some help from the manual section called "Setting Up the NEXTSTEP Computers" in this linked document.  This doesn't cover the DNS issue that Sean shows, so I also did that step.  Oddly enough, after rebooting, I was not able to ping like Sean was (I suppose it is not on the path, but I don't know what directory it should be in).  But when I went over to another computer I was able to Ping the NextStation so it was up on the network.

The FTP command did work, thankfully, and I was able to connect to my NAS where I store software for my vintage computers and grab some files and pull them over to the NextStation, uncompress them and install them.

I also figured out which folder to load software into (/LocalApps/) so that it can be easily added to the Dock and executed by normal users (not root), so now I have Mathematica, Doom, and OmniWeb installed and configured on my NextStation, and an easy workflow to add more software at any time.

I consider myself fortunate to be the current owner of this hardware and will be able to get a great deal more enjoyment from it now that I know better how to use it.

Digital Equipment Corporation - AlphaServer 300 4/266

This year I missed VCF Midwest in Chicago.  I had a really great time last year and I was disappointed to miss out.  One of the retro collectors I know from Free Geek Twin Cities was willing to set aside several of the machines that he was planning to sell there.  You'll be hearing more about these computers on my bLog as I work my way down the stack.  The first in the series is a Digital Equipment Corporation Alpha Server 300 4/266.  This line was released in 1995 and this particular machine dates from 1996 or 1997.  It's one of the lower end from the Alpha Server line, but given the desktop form factor it should perform nicely as a workstation.

I've always wanted a RISC Windows NT machine ever since they were new.  When I bought this machine I was thinking that it may have been limited to run VMS or True64 Unix, but I was willing to purchase it anyway because VMS is also quite nostalgic for me, as that was the OS that was running on our VAX cluster back in my college days at MSOE.

As usual I started my intake process with some cleaning and inspection.  I was surprised when I opened the case and found a Matrox Millennium II PCI card and a Sound Blaster 32 ISA Sound Card in the machine, I didn't know that these were supported.  The machine was really clean inside.  I was happy to find an enterprise grade SCSI HDD (hopefully less likely to die soon) and fully populated RAM slots (which ended up being 256MB of RAM).  The HDD had a sticker on it indicating that the drive had been wiped at Free Geek at some point.  The machine also needed a new clock battery, but this machine uses a standard CR2032 so that was an easy fix.  After that the machine was clean and there were no loose parts and connections, so it was ready for a first boot.  

The machine booted for me, and just as I had been told it was coming up to a prompt:
>>>>
After some reading I learned that this is the Alpha's ROM prompt. 

I started googling around and reading about this machine.  As you may know Alpha was a short lived platform and it was sold off (killed) after Compaq acquired DEC.  The main software architect of Windows NT, Dave Cutler, was previously a Digital employee who was a member of the Vax / VMS software team.  I think there's a pretty convincing argument to be made that Alpha was the primary target platform for Windows NT during it's early development at Microsoft with x86 being a runner up.  It's interesting to think about how things might have turned out differently if Digital would have been able to reinvent itself.

But back to this machine.  One of the first items I encountered was this document, a procedure for installing Windows NT.  I was anxious to try it out since I didn't know if this would work or not.  I found a Windows NT 4.0 disk image on WinWorld and got to work.  In hindsight, if you are doing this, you will want to also download the full ISO CD version of Service Pack 6.  It has additional files that are not available in the self extracting EXE version of the last Service Pack and it's helpful when looking for drivers to be able to have both the entire Windows NT installer and the entire uncompressed SP6 on the local hard drive.

I struggled getting a driver installed for the Matrox Millennium graphics card.  After reading a bit on the forums, I planed another trip to Free Geek.  My contact at Free Geek set me up with an S3 video card from 1995.  I was concerned that this was not "specialized' hardware, but in hindsight this machine does not require specialized hardware, as it came right up at boot time.  Windows NT Plug and Play recognized the S3 video card on boot and I had 256 colors for the first time since working on the machine!

Getting Audio working was also a bit of a pain with lots of trial and error, but I think having both the NT installer files and the SP6 files on the hard drive would have avoided most of the difficulty.  The key enabler for getting this card to work was that ISA cards don't have Plug and Play out of the box.  On the NT install CD ROM Extras there is an installer for ISA PnP. After installing this and restarting the machine the ISA sound card is found at startup.  I ended up having to move the card to the bottom ISA slot and to manually assign resources (Default Resources 0000) too the card, but after a couple of restarts the sound card is working in Windows NT!

So, in hindsight, I think the trick is to use only hardware that is on the Windows NT 4.0 Hardware Compatibility List.  I had trouble finding a readable version of this document on the web, so I'm including a link here to an Archive.  Perhaps it's good that I didn't find this doucment till later as the AlphaServer 300 is not on the HCL.  Still, after many hours of runtime the machine is stable and running well with zero hangs or bluescreens.

I'm quite pleased with how this machine turned out paired with a large CRT monitor.  Being that these machines were so expensive at the time and were often used for art or engineering they were often paired with larger CRTs...

The entire appeal of these machines at the time was that they were faster than the x86 machines of the time.  How much faster is I suppose a matter of debate but loading this up with period correct software like MS Office, VB 6.0, Visual C++ 4.0, and other tools, it does seem quite a bit faster than Pentium PCs of the era, although I'm sure a good part of that is the benefit of a fast wide SCSI bus vs. IDE.

My Favorite Find at VCF Midwest 2021

My best find at VCF Midwest this year was a NeXTStation Mono Slab with matching Monitor, Keyboard and mouse.  I understand that out of the three different variations of the NeXT computers, this one is the least desirable, but that also makes it the most affordable, so I'm quite pleased with the purchase.  I've heard the claim that there may have only been about 50,000 NeXT computers made in total, so I feel fortunate to be the NeXT owner of this NeXT.

The previous owner has handed off some media to me, and he's also shipping manuals.  I'm pretty excited about having those original materials.  I've never been hands on with the NeXT before, but I remember reading about the company back in the day when Steve Jobs returned to Apple and Mac OS X was in its infancy, those were exciting times in computer history.

This particular computer was made in 1991 and has the base Motorola 68040 processor at 25 Mhz, maxed out at 128MB RAM, and has an upgraded HDD, a Connor 1 GB SCSI drive.  I'm a bit worried about the longevity of this SCSI drive, I think it's from 1995, but it isn't making bad sounds, and this systems has only a base install on it without much else, so I'm not in a big rush to get a SCSI2SD installed.