168 168 Never Quit

Greetings! LGR here with an LGR thing and today, I would like to put a CD-ROM connected to this Compaq Presario 425 which.. now my favorite computers. It’s an all in one design I’ve had it longer than I had any of my other PCs. And yeah, It’s very yellow but I kind of like it like that It was.. It’s just gotten yellow over time no smoking or anything. I had it for more than half its life. So, err.. yeah here’s the thing I.. erf.. it only has a 3.5 inches floppy drive right there and that the only way that you can get data onto this thing unless you connect it to a network. You need to pretty much.. get an external CD-ROM and that’s what I’ve done here with this Backpack CD-Rewriter I found this at Goodwill years ago I mean like. I don’t know men 8 or 9 years now probably. And hum, so far I don’t know...I just haven’t.. I just haven’t.. erf.. really thought about it too much until recently when I had this thing out and I’m like and I’m like Dang I still never installed that CD-ROM drive...

Well the ARM based Macs are here. And despite any concerns anyone might have had, it looks like this transition will be just as smooth as the last... two. Yes, by this point, switching architecture is like a party trick for Apple. Even Bill Gates has remarked on how well they pulled it off in the past. But speaking of Microsoft, there was one notable thing that the Mac could do during its brief stint in the Intel world that it couldn’t do before and likely won’t be able to do now: run good old Michael soft Binbows. Yeah, yeah, dogs and cats living together, mass hysteria, etc. By now, none of this is really news, and while buying a Mac to run Windows is still kind of an unusual thing to do, there were certainly some advantages to at least being able to do it. Developers could test their programs on both OSes with the same computer, my friends when I was in school often did their work on macOS and then rebooted into Windows to play games. And while people have been working valiantly on ...

 It’s time to look at another computer that I find fascinating and been wanting to talk about, and now’s the time to do so, because arbitrary reasons. This is the Hewlett-Packard J2301B Wide Area Network Internet Adviser. With an E4594A-T1 telco under cradle. What even is this? Well, It is the most complicated and bulletproof laptop I own. Although calling it a laptop is a bit misleading; It weighs 20 pounds! (9 kilograms) You do not want this thing on your lap, and there’s no practical reason to own this nowadays; it’s just enjoyable overkill. I just like having silly machines like this and as soon as I saw it on eBay some years back, I had to have one, and... well, this is the one I picked out! My machine was manufactured by HP in 1998, but the division responsible for it is now known as Key sight, which itself is a spin-off of a spin-off of HP known as Agilent. And you’ll see a lot of internet advisor machines under the Agilent brand. They did really well for themselves too! In ...

Greetings and welcome to LGR Oddware where were taking a look at hardware and software that is odd, forgotten, and obsolete! And today it is the IBM 8516 CRT touchscreen from the beginning of the 1990s. And yeah you can touch and draw and do all kinds of things that you would normally do with a mouse or light pen or whatever else -- just with your fingers! And so let’s see what this thing is and what it can do. All right so this is the IBM PS/2 Model 8516 13-inch CRT touchscreen monitor first introduced in June of 1991 for a suggested retail price of $1695 US dollars, holy crap. That would be almost $3,100 at the time of this recording, not a cheap price for a 13-inch VGA monitor back then.  It was built by IBM to be compatible with PCs running DOS, Windows 3 -- and IBM OS/2 of course, because they were still pushing it rather hard when this came out. And as advanced and awesome as it was for its time it was not the first of its kind as far as touchscreen CRTs, not by a long shot....

Greetings! Happy Wednesday, or at least it is when I’m gonna record this and stuff. Let’s open a brand-new monitor in the box!  This is a View Sonic Opt quest Q71 17 inch monitor from the year 2001...with the features that I want. 1280x1024, 87 hertz refresh rate,  .23 millimeter horizontal dot pitch. View Sonic makes pretty darn good tubes,  or at least I remember them being good.  I haven’t actually used one in a long time. But- I want to try it out! And uh, use it for various projects.  Look at all these awards that it won. Designed for Windows 2000 Professional and Windows 98. Awesome! And yeah, I bought this new because...You know, it’s such a hard thing to find  someone that’s going to ship like a CRT properly. And so, a fresh in container one goes to be packed well. I know that- and it’s one reason I am happy to pay a little bit more for this. This was $79. I think that’s too much, but I don’t really care.  Cause I’m gonna use it. Starting here,...

Greetings and welcome to an LGR thing! And today I was just thinking about modern smartphones and tablets and other such devices. They’re pretty neat and smart and things. But you know what they could really use? Floppy drives. Yes. That’s right. Floppy fringing disks and drives to go along with them. And you know what? I think we can accomplish that! So to do this all we really need is: a phone, I’m gonna be using my Note 8. It’s not sponsored, it’s just what I have. And a floppy disk drive and in particular a Three-and-a-1 / 2 inch diskette pressure that runs using USB. Implemented a wood grain coating to, thanks to direction I did! Pretty plenty any of them must paintings, it’s just a generic one I got from Goodwill. And well of course need a floppy disk to write to and read from. I have a high-density three and a half inch disk here that we can fill with all sorts of unscrupulous nonsense. And last but definitely not least is one of these USB connectors, or on-the-go cables or adap...

Greetings, and today is one of those LGR things  where we don’t ask “why,” but instead ask  “why not.” Cuz we’re gonna be loading a PC  game from quarter-inch reel to reel audio tape,  simply for fun because we can. All we’ll need  is a tape recorder, some blank tape, a suitable  audio cable, and a computer capable of playing and  recording 8-bit PCM audio in mono at 22 kilohertz .  Now, obviously there’s no practical reason  to do this, and if you’re familiar with 1980s   microcomputers then you already know they can load  programs from tape. Being a cheaper alternative  to floppy disks, dozens of classic computers  were designed to use audio cassette tapes as  their primary method of loading and saving data.  Even the original IBM PC had a cassette port,  so loading personal computer software from  cassette is nothing new. Or even vinyl, there have  been a number of flexi disc and other reco...