I've been working on my Toshiba Libretto collection. The plan is to sell off some of my Libretto collection so I only keep *four* of them (interesting 50CT, broken 50CT, perfect 70CT and perfect 100CT). The Libretto 70CT I bought as a parts board is now working and the NiMH battery damage that stopped the RTC circuit from working at all is now fixed with a couple of trace repairs. Thankfully the two vias that were broken still showed light through and a 0.1mm wire could get through to fix them:

That's by the small resistor and then the trace going underneath the larger "1200" resistor. The most obviously broken part was the test pad on the underside of the board.

The real time clock is now working when I connect a battery to it but I wanted something that's going to last a long time without the risks of a NiMH battery while still fitting in the limited space in this computer. So I got this molex 3-pin microblade connector and put two 1n4148 diodes going [Battery] -> [diode 1 >] -> [diode 2 >] -> [laptop RTC positive] so that it can't charge it and it reduces the voltage to around 2.8v. There's a microblade 2-pin connector on there for connecting up a regular shrink-wrapped CR2032 to fit the vertical height limitation.

Gonna do this on some more librettos because it means the RTC battery can be replaced without disassembling the laptop further, which otherwise risks breaking the fairly chalky / fragile plastic tabs on the top case these days.

Overall, pretty great since this Libretto 70CT was the worse of the 2, originally I thought there was also a keyboard fault but that ended up being a fault with the keyboard membrane itself. And I just so happened to have a spare good keyboard with bad keycaps, so now there's one bad keyboard with no keycaps and one good keyboard with good keycaps 😀

The Libretto series are so heavily integrated that they fail in interesting ways compared to the Satellite series where the bigger batteries can do more damage. So far I've found that the 70CT's RTC battery functionality can be broken by battery corrosion, but the Libretto 50CT breaks in a far more troublesome way - just like the Satellite 460CDTs that failed because of trace corrosion, the Libretto 50CT's keyboard traces have test pads and those break first. But that's a pretty easy fix, just hook the keyboard connector pins up to the resistor arrays nearby.

Lastly, this Libretto 70CT was so dim. The libretto series I've always thought the display is rather dim but those are usually pretty evenly dim and usable once the CCFL has warmed up. This 2nd 70CT was so dim and unevenly lit that the screen was barely usable outside of a dimly lit room.
For reference, I have somewhere around four bad Sharp LQ61D133 screens that go in the Libretto 50CT / 70CT and wanted to try some things with them. So I went deep into a broken screen, took its backlight assembly apart from the LCD section and fitted an LED backlight in place of the original. Then took apart the good screen and put the broken screen's backlight onto that:

Honestly I wasn't that impressed overall, the colours looked okay in person but there were some reflections from the LEDs and the camera sees the LED backlight's blue as purple somehow.
Initially I was thinking of trying to retrofit the Libretto's LCD with an LED backlight but there are so many steps involved (led backlight driver needs a 5v > 12v boost converter, there needs to some circuitry to handle different brightness levels, an enable signal etc) that it just wasn't worth it.

Then I took apart the dim LCD's backlight and yeah the CCFL in that was pretty tired, it read 3000 lumens on my Samsung S8's lux meter in the AIDA64 sensors section. And the acrylic light guide had some marks / residue which I think is from the acrylic getting damaged from heat or maybe sparks? Using a magic eraser / melamine sponge to sand back the edge of the light guide that the CCFL fits onto made a huge difference, then putting the 3500 lumen CCFL from the broken LCD made it even better. Putting it all back together the Libretto 70CT with the dim screen is now just as good as the other librettos. Definitely worth doing 😎

Oh also, I think I figured out the connector that the Libretto 50CT / 70CT use for the memory expansion connector, I think it's a bergstak 0.65mm "10169698-70000RLF". Very tempted to grab one from Mouser to see if it fits...

Earlier this week I picked up a bunch of used books, including "Fractals: Endlessly Repeated Geometrical Figures" by Hans Lauwerier (https://www.amazon.com/Fractals-Endlessly-Rep … s/dp/0691024456). It was published in 1991 and contains a bunch of TurboBasic code. Today I installed TurboBasic and have started typing out the programs. I haven't touched any Basic style language in nearly 2 decades, but the programs are only a few lines each and I have gotten the first few working without problems once I figured out the SCREEN command. I might upload some pictures of the computer art later if enough of them look interesting.

Aside from installing Retro68 and completing my collection of classic mac programming tutorial materials for when I'm in the right state of restedness to learn new programming stuff, I also decided to improve the appearance of my /srv/retro by creating some icons:

At the moment, I'm just finishing up the 48x48px versions for if I set Windows-XP-pretending-to-be-98SE to use 48x48 for it. Then, I'll either start working on even higher-resolution variants for my Windows 7 "game console except not a console" or start working on a quick-and-dirty Python-script replica of https://www.iconicosx.com/ to make icons for my OSX machines without having to diagnose "Mac App Store won't load in any browser, so I can't check if this thing would support OSX 10.13".

...oh, I've renamed the Mac_OSX_PPC and Mac_OSX_Intel folders to OSX_PPC and OSX_x86 since I took those screenshots so I don't have to worry about any DOS SMB clients producing sub-optimal results. (UNSORTED is temporary and serials.zip is my hack so I don't need to password-protect the entire share or use two separate shares in order to protect the licenses I actually paid for from houseguests.)

...and now I've revised the Samba-side icons and added 48x48px versions.

(Screenshot using Win7 because I'm probably not going to use anything bigger than 32x32px on the older versions of Windows.)

Once I've got an iconset for my OSX 10.3/10.4/10.5 and OSX 10.6/10.13 machines, I'll come back to work on refining the OSX_PPC icons, the 48x48 DOS .ico, the Win16 icon on the classic mac side, etc.

Speaking of which, if anyone wants to play around with making icons of their own, GIMP can export .ico or PNG on a modern system and you can use IcoFX Portable on WinXP and up (made from the last freeware version of IcoFX) or the now freeware'd (existing builds) and open-sourced Iconographer 2.4 on PPC Mac OS (classic or X).

I tend to use a mix of Inkscape and GIMP to make the icons and then just use the platform-native tools for touch-ups, since I have yet to find "layers" panels IcoFX or Iconographer and I like to keep raster inputs (eg. blank platform folder icons) raster and vector inputs (eg. logos from Wikimedia Commons) vector until the last step. (I can't remember if Iconographer can import PNG. By the time I started using it for touch-ups, I'd already converted all my source icons from PNG to icon resources using the also-now-freeware'd GraphicConverter 5.x.)

...that said, bit of a shame I didn't even get a "we decided against that" response from the Microangelo people about the idea of freeware-ing a version too ancient to be useful on modern Windows like Alcohol Soft does with Alcohol 120% Retro Edition. That's a very nostalgic name.

Oh, I forgot to mention it a week ago, and I still need to make time to either upload my scans or take higher-resolution ones and try to automatically straighten that slight rotation, but another thing I got up to was opening the comb binding on a bundle of Microsoft-produced training materials for selling Windows for Workgroups that my father brought home back in the early 90s when he worked for Computerland.

Here's an example page:

(Sadly, as a kid, I read it so much that the binding on the cover page wore out and it's probably lost now. Not sure if any pages were lost off the back.)

I installed the proper ram type into my 286 and verified it's function. Finally figuring out the proper jumper settings and bios settings plus chip count for the sticks was clearing a big cloud that's been hanging for me for a while.

Theeeennn went hog wild categorizing and Xcopy'ing the overflow of games clogging up C: onto Zip 100s, since I've been lucky enough to have a working zip 100 drive and plenty of disks + the tower organizer for them. Nothing fancy really, but it feels good to move this computer out of the "project" status.

First draft of the "Macs new enough to prefer SMB over AFP" icons for my retro fileshare.

My default solution was just to manually create silhouettes in Inkscape and then feed them to folderify-v2 but Mac_PPC and Win7 had to be entirely hand-done because it doesn't let you turn off the padding, OSX_PPC required some manual tracing in Inkscape to transplant that gloss onto the silhouette from a PNG, and DOS required some trickery involving adding dots to the source image and then editing them out of the final images to circumvent folderify-v2 apparently ignoring its --no-trim option.

When I feel like it, I need to write an alternative so I can enlarge Win9x since it's perceived size isn't the same as its bounding box size, and nudge Win16 and WinXP downward since their visual center isn't at the center of their bounding boxes.

EDIT: Oh, and folderify-v2 crashes with "No such file or directory: 'iconutil' on Linux, so the next steps are to delete the @2x variants in the resulting .iconset folder, and then use png2icns to combine them into OSX icon files (png2icns doesn't like the @2x variants.) since I prefer to do as much of the process as possible on the Linux machine that hosts the share so I don't need to keep turning off read-only.

OK, that's that for today. High-res Windows-side icons now done.

I bought a Kapok 6400 the other day thinking it would be an easy fix, I have the PSU for it ready so it should be easy to get it going right?

It's a super cool (though rather noisy) pentium era laptop with a game port and built-in wavetable chip.

When I got it though, it didn't do much, my bench PSU adapter wouldn't hook up so I had to hook it directly to the original PSU. Turned it on and it doesn't do anything...
Took the lid off and uh this zener diode on this top PCB is really hot?
Oh wait that's the DC-DC power supply board and that's the 3.3v rail... I have a Kapok 6200AT (later design, supports MMX CPU voltages properly) and can check the voltages and zener diode on that. It took me a while to learn how to check the voltage limit of a zener diode, seems it was limited to 4.3v by that zener diode that burned so... it was more than 4.3v going through the CPU and anything else on the 3.3v rail...

I happened to have a spare kapok 6200/6400 motherboard without the VRM board and plugged the VRM from the burned board into the spare board. Ah, that burned the zener too... ok let's take a look. Found the power input, ground and output of the removable DC-DC VRM module. Probing around the LTC1435 switching regulator and the SI4410 n-channel mosfets, those are all working. The frequency reading on my multimeter is reading 16khz+ on the gate of both mosfets and the DC-DC board is running cool so no failed parts that are obvious.
It had a foam pad over some of the board though and checking deeper the foam pad was covering two resistors - those resistors just so happen to be the voltage divider resistors that the VRM controller chip uses to determine the output voltage and this module should be outputting 3.3v.
Checking it though, I put in 5v and it outputs 5v - so has the regulator failed??? Well, then I used the soldering iron to move those voltage divider resistors off from the circuit so I could measure them. One of them reads at the value the datasheet specifies, but the other reads infinite. That's BAD. I think the foam pad adhesive may have corroded the resistor perhaps, or it happened before this laptop was put away in storage...
If the voltage divider resistor that hooks to VCC is measuring as infinite, that means the regulation voltage that the VRM is aiming for is not right. So when it should be giving 3.3v, it's instead gonna give as much as the input voltage, which is 18 volts!!

See the discolouration on the pins around that upside-down pentium CPU? That's the original CPU which has VCC and GND shorted so it won't do anything good now.

That does explain why on the thermal camera, one of the cache chips was getting up to 170C. And one of the nearby chips which I think is the keyboard / embedded controller, has a hole in the middle.

Fixing that broken voltage divider resistor puts this melted board to much more normal temperatures though I haven't replaced the zener diode of the DC/DC board yet. I really really hope it didn't nuke the chips on the spare board but who knows...
The wavetable chips were safe so at least I can do something cool with the broken mainboards.

I've begun to clean up the classic Mac OS side of my icon set. (As evidenced by the DOS icon having non-autoscaled 16px variants, the OSX_PPC having better contrast, and some of the icons having 1-bit icons that aren't just auto-dithered.)

...though I still need to figure out how to convert between PNG or .ico and icon resources in Netatalk resource forks directly on Linux so I can have a nice, streamlined workflow for editing classic Mac icons in GIMP. Iconographer doesn't have layers, support for select-by-color, or support for custom thresholds in its magic wand select as far as I can tell, and lack of the latter two makes cleaning up lower-bit-depth variants laborious, while the lack of the former really impairs the ability to hand-draw lower-bit-depth versions by tracing over a higher-bit-depth one.

(The current Mac_PPC really shows that shortcoming off. OSX_PPC and OSX_x86 look as good as they do because the 1-bit versions aren't using the same source... they're using the 1-bit apple menu icon from Mac OS 9's system resources bundle on the Power Mac G4 I use to edit them.)

The tool in the screenshot is a piece of shareware named Icon Archiver, in "Large Family" view mode, if anyone wants it.

EDIT: In case anyone's wondering, a Mac_68k icon is planned... it's just very low priority when I don't own a 68k mac yet and, even if I did right now, it wouldn't work until I decided whether to downgrade to Netatalk 2.x and take a hit in functionality or wait for the completion of the in-progress effort to reintroduce AppleTalk-over-Ethernet support into the 3.x branch.

...that's basically the defining factor. What platforms do I have that can see /srv/retro over the network via something like Samba or Netatalk rather than requiring their own special solution? Even if something doesn't load icons from remote folders (eg. DOS), it's still going to get icons for the benefit of the platforms that do once it actually has a folder in /srv/retro to need one.

BBSing with Windows 98se & Qmodem Pro 2.1 for Windows.

ssokolow wrote on 2024-08-07, 02:53:

First draft of the "Macs new enough to prefer SMB over AFP" icons for my retro fileshare. […]
Show full quote

First draft of the "Macs new enough to prefer SMB over AFP" icons for my retro fileshare.

The attachment Screen Shot 2024-08-06 at 10.21.33 PM.png is no longer available

My default solution was just to manually create silhouettes in Inkscape and then feed them to folderify-v2 but Mac_PPC and Win7 had to be entirely hand-done because it doesn't let you turn off the padding, OSX_PPC required some manual tracing in Inkscape to transplant that gloss onto the silhouette from a PNG, and DOS required some trickery involving adding dots to the source image and then editing them out of the final images to circumvent folderify-v2 apparently ignoring its --no-trim option.

When I feel like it, I need to write an alternative so I can enlarge Win9x since it's perceived size isn't the same as its bounding box size, and nudge Win16 and WinXP downward since their visual center isn't at the center of their bounding boxes.

EDIT: Oh, and folderify-v2 crashes with "No such file or directory: 'iconutil' on Linux, so the next steps are to delete the @2x variants in the resulting .iconset folder, and then use png2icns to combine them into OSX icon files (png2icns doesn't like the @2x variants.) since I prefer to do as much of the process as possible on the Linux machine that hosts the share so I don't need to keep turning off read-only.

You should send these to macosicons.com!

Can you bbs with a cell phone?

BBSing is the schnitzle!

oldhighgerman wrote on 2024-08-09, 00:33:

Can you bbs with a cell phone?

BBSing is the schnitzle!

Actually it's still quite common in Taiwan:

https://www.ptt.cc/bbs/index.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PTT_Bulletin_Board_System
https://play.google.com/store/search?q=PTT&c=apps
https://www.apple.com/us/search/PTT?src=globalnav

Although most of its users don't even know the telnet protocol anymore.

Bruninho wrote on 2024-08-08, 23:52:

You should send these to macosicons.com!

Do they still want Yosemite-styled icons? I specifically made those for the OSX 10.13 boot option on the two Intel macs I have and I've read that style only lasted to 10.15.

dormcat wrote on 2024-08-09, 00:54:

Actually it's still quite common in Taiwan: […]
Show full quote

oldhighgerman wrote on 2024-08-09, 00:33:

Can you bbs with a cell phone?

BBSing is the schnitzle!

Actually it's still quite common in Taiwan:

https://www.ptt.cc/bbs/index.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PTT_Bulletin_Board_System
https://play.google.com/store/search?q=PTT&c=apps
https://www.apple.com/us/search/PTT?src=globalnav

Although most of its users don't even know the telnet protocol anymore.

I'm trying to process this and not be disparaging in any way. Taiwan, I have to believe, has more tech per square inch then we (US) per square mile. Not to the exclusion of pots. Why then would communicating by cell phone in a particularly "analog" style be so popular? In the strictest terms, a "cell" phone is an analog device, it:s actually a term that's held over from the earlier days of portable and car phones, and some early handheld devices. I doubt there's much of any actual cell phone service still left on earth.

oldhighgerman wrote on 2024-08-09, 02:02:

I'm trying to process this and not be disparaging in any way. Taiwan, I have to believe, has more tech per square inch then we (US) per square mile. Not to the exclusion of pots. Why then would communicating by cell phone in a particularly "analog" style be so popular?

Short answer: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herd_behavior

Long answer: While Taiwan helped building the "1977 Trinity" and many other family / personal computers throughout the 1980s, most families didn't have them due to high cost and minimal usefulness (remember the language barrier) so few companies had invested the dial-up service due to minimal demand. We didn't have equivalent online services (CompuServe, Prodigy, AOL, etc.) either.

More and more PC started entering Taiwanese homes and offices in the early 1990s but the majority of computers were still completely network-free. A small number of geeks started hosting dial-up BBS so fans of the same hobby could exchange files or info (I learned Telix during this time); for most people, however, a computer was nothing but an advanced typewriter (word processing) / calculator (spreadsheet).

At the same time the government sponsored Taiwan Academic Network (TANet), fixed network for top-tier universities in labs, classrooms, even down to four fixed IP addresses per dormitory room (i.e. one per student). College students (boys in engineering majors in particular) soon discovered those free bandwidth could be used for tons of "stuff" far beyond its original academic purposes. In addition to playing Doom via IPX and exchanging NSFW photos and videos, SNS-styled BBS (over TCP/IP using telnet protocal) were established in labs and dorms. Some larger BBS could host thousands of users online simultaneously (impressive at that time).

Managing a large BBS required manpower and funding. While most text-based BBS were in decline in late 1990s to early 2000s, PTT was one of those -- perhaps the only one -- survived the progress of Win9x / WinXP and the WWW impact. With users migrating from fan- and college-based BBS to PTT (itself was originally based on NTU and had some disputes after it commercialized, but that's another story), news media smelled the money: they found that many ongoing news events could spread out on PTT way faster than traditional media (remember this was the time when Twitter or Facebook didn't exist) so they installed reporters on PTT and they could receive the news from netizens FASTER and FREE than sending their reporters to the news scene. More netizens poured in to watch latest news and/or provide "inside stories" to lurking reporters. More media followed suit. The rest is history.

Therefore, even with smartphone apps and more fancy-looking websites, this old text-only relic has become a cultural bastion that newer technologies would never replace it completely. Unlike modern SNS apps like YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, its major drawback is lacking photo, video, and live streaming, making its effectiveness slowly in decline (most Gen Z don't use it at all), but many Gen X-Y still visit it regularly, just like my baby-boomer Mom insists reading news on PAPER every morning with breakfast.

dormcat wrote on 2024-08-09, 03:01:

Short answer: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herd_behavior […]
Show full quote

oldhighgerman wrote on 2024-08-09, 02:02:

I'm trying to process this and not be disparaging in any way. Taiwan, I have to believe, has more tech per square inch then we (US) per square mile. Not to the exclusion of pots. Why then would communicating by cell phone in a particularly "analog" style be so popular?

Short answer: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herd_behavior

Long answer: While Taiwan helped building the "1977 Trinity" and many other family / personal computers throughout the 1980s, most families didn't have them due to high cost and minimal usefulness (remember the language barrier) so few companies had invested the dial-up service due to minimal demand. We didn't have equivalent online services (CompuServe, Prodigy, AOL, etc.) either.

More and more PC started entering Taiwanese homes and offices in the early 1990s but the majority of computers were still completely network-free. A small number of geeks started hosting dial-up BBS so fans of the same hobby could exchange files or info (I learned Telix during this time); for most people, however, a computer was nothing but an advanced typewriter (word processing) / calculator (spreadsheet).

At the same time the government sponsored Taiwan Academic Network (TANet), fixed network for top-tier universities in labs, classrooms, even down to four fixed IP addresses per dormitory room (i.e. one per student). College students (boys in engineering majors in particular) soon discovered those free bandwidth could be used for tons of "stuff" far beyond its original academic purposes. In addition to playing Doom via IPX and exchanging NSFW photos and videos, SNS-styled BBS (over TCP/IP using telnet protocal) were established in labs and dorms. Some larger BBS could host thousands of users online simultaneously (impressive at that time).

Managing a large BBS required manpower and funding. While most text-based BBS were in decline in late 1990s to early 2000s, PTT was one of those -- perhaps the only one -- survived the progress of Win9x / WinXP and the WWW impact. With users migrating from fan- and college-based BBS to PTT (itself was originally based on NTU and had some disputes after it commercialized, but that's another story), news media smelled the money: they found that many ongoing news events could spread out on PTT way faster than traditional media (remember this was the time when Twitter or Facebook didn't exist) so they installed reporters on PTT and they could receive the news from netizens FASTER and FREE than sending their reporters to the news scene. More netizens poured in to watch latest news and/or provide "inside stories" to lurking reporters. More media followed suit. The rest is history.

Therefore, even with smartphone apps and more fancy-looking websites, this old text-only relic has become a cultural bastion that newer technologies would never replace it completely. Unlike modern SNS apps like YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, its major drawback is lacking photo, video, and live streaming, making its effectiveness slowly in decline (most Gen Z don't use it at all), but many Gen X-Y still visit it regularly, just like my baby-boomer Mom insists reading news on PAPER every morning with breakfast.

This is so cool. Thank you for writing all of this up.

If I had any idea what to look up I could read a wikipedia article about things like this, but I just find it so fascinating to hear these stories directly from people who actually lived through these times in places outside the US.

Also, not going to lie... I am a bit jealous of your ability to write so fluently and descriptively in what I'm assuming is your second language. If I tried to explain my early days of computing to someone in, say, Mandarin... it'd be very bad. 🤣

So I guess obviously these bbs' are Chinese language
Of little utility to occidental meatheads like me. A shame, it would be interesting to surf such holdouts.

I've never been on the Dark Web for instance. But not all of it is so dark. A significant portion of what and who goes on leans to the shady size to say the least. But since I personally am a person who wants to be free of the shackles of Big Tech/Schmendrick-holes, stuff like this is enticing. A hearkening back to when computers were a hello a lot more personal.

I used dialup to get onto the internet!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uHZ7A8DFPNo