Ah…more on my continuing adventures with the not-so-vintage, but very much obsolete Compaq IA-1. I got Midori Linux running long ago, but I’ve since longed to turn this thing into an MS-DOS machine, maybe to play some old shareware games with. The hardest part of booting MS-DOS on the Compaq IA-1 is making a bootable partition on a compact flash card. The IA-1 treats its compact flash slot it has like a regular ole IDE hard drive connection, as compact flash cards have a native mode that emulates IDE hard drive behavior (and therefore, the compact flash, when in use, is not hot-swappable). The problem arises when you try to format a compact flash card using a common USB compact flash adapter: Windows treats the card as a removable drive, and thus, no low-level formatting options (like making it bootable with system files on it) are available.

Luckily, with a tip from the I-Appliance BBS (an incredible resource, by the way), I found a freely-distributable program from HP that they made to format their Disk-On-Key USB JumpDrives (or whatever they call them newfangled things these days) to make them bootable. And guess what– it seems to work with all removable drives! It’s an incredibly nifty little program; there’s even a DOS version. So how do you get it? Relax, I’ve done all the work for you (impatient people who don’t actually read what I write will no doubt be struggling to find the link — buried in the text!). Here, in this file, is a perfect little Compaq IA-1 MS-DOS kit. Included in the zip file is the aforementioned program installer (for Windows, also includes DOS version), and a directory containing a modified version of MS-DOS that came with Windows 98 (some wise-guy Windows-hata changed all the files to say “MS-DOS 7.10” instead of “Windows 98” when you boot, etc., but it works great). All you have to do is install the program, set up your compact flash adapter, insert a card, run the HP program, and format it to include system files. When it asks which files to include, simply point it to the “MS-DOS 7” directory that is included in the ZIP. There you go.

After that, you’re on your own. I’ve played a few games of Scorched Earth and ZZT on it so far, but it’s a tad bit lacking without any sort of PC speaker sounds. Also, I have absolutely no DOS drivers for any of the IA-1’s built-in hardware, so unless you find them or write your own, you’re stuck to only the most rudimentary of programs. But still, MS-DOS on the IA-1 is a wonderful starting point to bigger and better things. Windows 98 on a microdrive anyone?

Another IA-1 update: I bought a used NetGear MA111 wireless 802.11b wireless network adapter because its chipset is supposedly supported by the drivers built-into the Midori Linux distro I’m using. So far, no luck getting it working, but I haven’t tried everything yet. I’ll mess with it some more later.

Also, here’s a cool PC World article on why Internet Appliances never took off. Tomorrow’s computer collectibles…today! Get ’em before they hit the dump.

A few weeks ago, while playing through my Atari 800 game collection, I discovered a rare gem that I’d never played before. It quickly made my way into a top ten list of most underrated games of all time (well, for the Atari 800 at least). It’s called Dandy Dungeon, a 1983 release through the Atari Program Exchange (APX) written by then-MIT-student John Palevich. At first glance, it appears to be a Gauntlet clone with primitive graphics (the Gauntlet of which I speak is the 1985 Atari Games arcade release), but it turns out that Gauntlet, not Dandy, is the clone (apparently, Mr. Palevich wasn’t too happy about Ed Logg stealing his design and sued Atari Games over it). I had played another game just like Dandy before for the Atari 7800 called Dark Chambers with exactly the same gameplay, but different graphics. Well, it turns out it’s no co-incidence — Dark Chambers was written by John Palevich as well, commissioned by Atari Corporation later on. As an interesting bit of trivia, Atari Corporation and Atari Games were two separate companies by the time of Gauntlet’s release in 1985.

So then, why is Dandy so cool? I’ll give you my first three reasons: it plays like a dream, it supports four simultaneous players, and it includes a built-in dungeon editor! The included dungeon designs aren’t very good, I’ll admit, but the ability to design your own dungeons overcomes this weakness (plus, I found six Atari 800 disk images with dungeons designed by different people — see below). Gameplay is smooth, robust, and the controls are great. Also, like in Gauntlet, slugging it out with three other friends is priceless. Finding good four-player games for the Atari 800 is tough, so I’m very happy about this feature.

What makes Dandy like Gauntlet and, yet…unlike Gauntlet? First of all, similarities include running around a dungeon shooting monsters with up to four friends, collecting food, using potions (bombs) to kill masses of monsters (who just so happen to come from generators at times). Also, you depart each dungeon level at an exit and descend to a lower dungeon level. The most obvious difference between the two, to me, is the fact that your health doesn’t tick down over time in Dandy like it does in Gauntlet (an ingenious feature to swallow up more of your quarters in the arcade — Mr. Logg knew what he was doing). Also, the monsters in Dandy Dungeon have a strange hierarchy that is slightly hard to explain. There are different “levels” of monsters. Each level, or strength, per se, looks different, but they all behave the same (they don’t shoot, just run at you). The higher the level of monster, the more shots it takes to kill it. But with each shot along the way, the graphic for the monster changes down to a lower level of monster, until it dies. For example, there is a “little man” monster who takes only one shot to kill. Then there is a “smiley face” monster that takes two shots. However, when you shoot the smiley face monster, it turns into the little man monster, who in turn only takes one shot to kill. It’s weird, I know…Dark Chambers is just like this too. Luckily, Ed Logg had the sense to change this confusing design feature when designing Gauntlet (which has discrete types of monsters that each have different characteristics). Also, in Dandy, you can save the food you collect for later use, which is nice — in Gauntlet, you eat it immediately, whether you need it or not.

If you’d like to play the game, get a good Atari 800 emulator (I recommend Atari800WinPLus) or an SIO2PC cable to play it on a real Atari, then download the disk image. If you want different dungeon map packs, here they are: Pack 1, Pack 2, Pack 3, Pack 4, Pack 5, Pack 6. Finally, here’s a note on gameplay that’s not immediately evident: to use collected food, press 1 through 4 on the keyboard, where the number you push is the number of the player who wants to use stored food. The same goes for bombs, although you hold down the SHIFT key while pressing the number. You can also shoot bombs, of course, for immediate effect.

Have fun! Please feel free to share your comments on the game below in the comments section.

[Update: 11/17/2014 — I changed the SIO2PC link from sunmark.com (now long since gone) to a link to AtariMax that works. ]

I had no trouble putting Midori Linux (best package found here) on the IA-1 last night after following these instructions (and using a program called WinImage instead of Dskprobe in Win2k). For anyone taking notes, make sure you use the El Torito image first before attempting to install/boot Midori, as listed in the instructions above.

This thing is cool. I never expected to have so much fun with it. The particular Midori distribution I used has been tailored specifically to the unit, so everything works instantly — LCD, keyboard, sound card, modem, USB ethernet, and USB wlan drivers are included. It’s got an XFree86 GUI with the Ice window manager (looks nice) and some apps like Opera, an email client, and an MP3 player, which are useful. It’s amazing they squeezed all that stuff into 16 megs of space. Once I get a USB ethernet NIC, I’m thinking about putting it in the living room, hooking it to the stereo, and using it as a streaming MP3 client (The XMMS MP3-player built into the Midori package supports this). You could do a lot of neat stuff with this machine. Maybe I’ll put MS-DOS on it and run a BBS. Or perhaps it should be my dedicated Klondike solitaire machine. 🙂 Either way, this thing is neat. If you can find one for under $30 and are comfortable with doing some simple modifications, get it.

(Update: 01/28/2013 – Since most of the Compaq IA-1 pages out there are dead now, I’ve decided to host a version of the Midori Linux image for the Compaq IA-1. You can download it here. It also includes the El Torito boot image and instructions on how to use it in a text file.)

I got my Compaq IA-1 today. It’s a spiffy little Internet machine from the peak of dot-com optimism (read: circa 2000). Unfortunately, it only runs a dumbed down version of Windows CE, was designed to use only Microsoft’s MSN ISP service, doesn’t have an Ethernet card built-in, and won’t do anything unless you’re connected to the Internet. So why get it? Because it was absurdly cheap and really neat-looking — and you can put Linux on it! That’s right, folks…these days, someone could find a way to put Linux on my toilet if they tried hard enough, and I wouldn’t be surprised if there is already a guide somewhere out there to do just that.

Some of the unit’s virtues are thus: a 266MHz AMD K6 CPU, 32MB SDRam, internal 16MB Flash RAM, integrated 800×600 color LCD display, four USB ports, a 56K modem, built-in microphone and speaker, a compact flash slot, wireless IR keyboard, and it’s tiny! Supposedly, the best form of Linux for the IA-1 is a variant called Midori, so I’ll try that out and let you know how it goes. With any luck, I’ll have an underpowered web-browsin’ machine in a few days. What’s the point? I have no idea. It’s the hack that counts.

I woke up groggy and cranky this morning, thinking about all the trouble I had setting up Windows 95 on one of my machines last night. The main problem with Windows 95 is that it’s just not cool. No matter how you slice it, it reeks of squareness. “What I really need,” I thought, “is a totally cool way to run my computer.” But after some hard thinking I realized that such a computing product doesn’t exist. I sat down for breakfast, resigned to the fact that I would be stuck with Windows 95 forever. I didn’t get five minutes into a bagel when the doorbell rung. It was David, my friendly neighborhood postman with a package for me. “What ever could be inside?” I wondered, as I tore into the box with excited impatience. I pushed aside the layers of bubble wrap to reveal…

“Oh boy.” I thought with disappointment, “Another archaic copy of OS/2 for my collection. Whee.” I was about to set the box down on a shelf and forget about it when my eyes meandered over to the upper left corner of the box cover. “Whoa! What’s this…?”

“Holy mother of goat cheese!” I screamed, nearly dropping the box from my hands. It was as if IBM had been looking into the future and totally reading my mind all those years ago when they released OS/2 Warp, the apparent mother of all operating systems. I flipped the box over onto its back to read more: “The new 32-bit, multitasking, multimedia, Internet-accessed, crash-protected, Windows friendly, totally cool way to run your computer.” Now that was what I needed to hear. No more Windows 95 crap for me. I rushed to install the system on my machine and experienced the pure operational bliss that is OS/2 Warp Version 3. It was a Christmas Miracle.

A Proprietary Mystery

All I knew about this box before I bought it was that it was an airline reservation terminal at some point, and that it cost $2. So I went for it, not only because it looks cool, but also hoping that it might be a standard RS-232 serial terminal. Well, so far, no such luck. This thing is pretty weird. I’m not sure what system it was designed to hook up to, but it appears non-standard. It has four connectors in the back: a DB-9, a DB-25, a DB-15, and a female BNC jack (see picture below), labeled J1 through J4 on the chassis. The DB-25 is used for the keyboard. When I initially power it on, all the red LEDs on the keyboard light up and the main unit emits a steady beep that never stops. I guess it’s not happy that it’s lost its master — whatever mainframe that drove it back in the day (the other very obvious possibility is that it’s broken in some way). I can’t get anything on the built-in green CRT, not even a cursor of some type. I hooked the DB-9 port up to a modem to see if it might come alive with a serial input, but no luck. Same behavior.

Upon cracking it open, I found some curious stuff. The thing that surprised me most at first glace was that there is no logic on the main board inside the base unit at all– only power supply stuff. And of course, all the video circuitry is in the top “monitor” portion of the box. Also, the the DB-9 and the DB-15 connectors are both wire-wrapped (Exactly how old is this thing?!) to the DB-25 connector, and the DB-25 connector has a few pins connected to wires going to both the monitor section and the power supply. Much to my surprise, the DB-9 doesn’t have the usual pins for RS-232 connected to anything (2, 3, and 5, if I recall correctly). In fact, only pins 1 and 6 are wrapped. All the posts on the back of the DB-15 are wrapped and connected to the DB-25. As a result, I would have to guess that this is the main data connector. I also noticed that the BNC jack goes directly to the monitor section; I suspect it’s a direct composite video input, which is not too uncommon on terminals at the time. Maybe I can use it as a green screen monitor, if nothing else…not that I need one.

Then I opened the keyboard. That’s where things get even more interesting. All the logic is in the keyboard unit itself. That explains the wiring on the DB-25 keyboard connector and everything else I saw in the main unit. Looking for an MPU of some kind, the only chip I recognized in there is an Intel 8048, which is apparently a common (and now very cheap) microcontroller used in some IBM PC-compatible keyboards. According to a few sites I found, the 8048 was first produced in 1977, dating this unit to that year or later. Cosmetically, I initially dated this unit to 1978-79 in my head, so that matches up pretty well. At about this point in messing with the Incoterm, I had to give up and put it back together. Why? First of all, it was cluttering up my dining room floor, making it hard to walk around. Second, I didn’t want to forget how to put it back together, and third, I have other things to take apart. 🙂

Digging A Little Deeper

Right after writing most of this entry, I remembered that there is a sticker on the base unit that has a United Airlines logo and the word “Apollo” on it. I decided to search Google for “United Airlines” and “Apollo” and I found some neat info — not about the hardware, but the Apollo reservation system itself. There’s some computer airline reservation history over at Wikipedia, a United Airlines history page, and airline fan site that says that the Apollo system was set up some time in 1970-71 for UA internal use and made public (to travel agents) around 1976. Then I ran across a cool article from 1996 talking about how the entrenched airline reservation systems like Apollo were on the verge of becoming obsolete thanks to consumers being able to look up flights by themselves on the Internet. Somebody should write a book about how the Internet completely shook up established institutions like that. Well, they probably already have. But as more and more time passes, such books will become less speculative (Wired: “eCrisp: The way you toast bread is about to change forever.”) and more historical (“Through blogs, the Internet put editorial power back into the hands of the average man.“). I like my toast just how it is.

If anyone can contribute any knowledge as to how this terminal works or anything else about this it, please let me know. Until then, it will remain a nice conversation piece.

The keyboard unit without the case. Notice the ICs on the top of the board. There are also two unused key switches that are normally covered up by the chassis.

A label on the bottom of the unit that lists info on the terminal.

I was just looking through my collection of old computer images today when I noticed this one. Someone is apparently tossing an $800 Epson HX-20 computer (incidentally the world’s first “laptop”) toward this creepy disembodied hand. Or perhaps the HX-20 had flying capabilities that I wasn’t aware of. Either way, it’s pretty weird. What will people in 1981 think of next?

For more info on the Epson HX-20, check out this cool page. And if you want some original documentation on this early portable, check out Epson’s own product support site for the HX-20!

Computer hard disks weren’t always as reliable as they are now. From 1992 up until about five years ago, it seemed that I had a drive crash on me at least once every two years (Hmm.. they ceased right about the time I stopped buying OEM Western Digital drives from a questionable source). A total drive meltdown was always a terrible event, but it was still no where near as catastrophic as it would be now. You see, back then, the data on my computer was usually just stuff I had downloaded from BBSes or the Internet, maybe some text and Word files, and a few games. But these days, people keep their entire lives on their computers, including home movies, digital family snapshots, personal correspondence (in the form of emails), and gigantic music collections. Not to mention that more original creative work than ever is being done on computers these days — musicians record directly to them, photographers process their pictures on them, illustrators draw and paint with them, and writers write with them. This creative data is unique and irreplaceable — you can’t just download it again if you lose it, making a data backup plan absolutely essential for the modern computer user. Of course, I’m sure most people don’t back up their stuff, and computer users everywhere lose valuable data on a daily basis. Considering the importance of the personal data on PCs these days, I find it absurd that computer manufacturers don’t include some sort of redundant disk protection by default in every PC sold (or at least the build-to-order option). As RAID controllers get more economical thanks to the widespread adoption of the Serial ATA standard, such a scenario will become more realistic. I’m going to go out on a limb and predict that in five years, redundant data protection of some kind will be a standard feature on all consumer PCs. From now on (starting with my last two computers), I’ll never build another computer again without at least RAID level 1 (data mirroring) protection. I also do daily backups to an external hard drive on my three main computers for an extra level of safety.

But my backup regimen isn’t really what I want to talk about today. No, it was my complete lack of one that we’ll focus on for the moment. Back when I lost my hard drives, I usually lost most or all the files on them as well. This functioned as sort of a “natural reset” (a big crunch, if you will) that set me back and forced me to clean up and start over. But once those natural resets stopped happening, things started building up. Data clutter reared its ugly head, and now data management and organization of all my files, including thousands upon thousands of legacy files, has gained incredible importance. Of course, it takes a lot of time to organize this data, but once you have it sorted out, it’s settled! Or is it? You still have to keep organizing every file you create, or else you will have a big mess on your hands, which I suspect is quite common among computer users. With larger capacity hard drives becoming ever cheaper for the foreseeable future, there will never be any need for the data pack rat to throw anything away. And with no natural resets, there will be no force making them throw anything away. At what point do I say enough is enough and trash MS Works files of 6th grade school papers? I just can’t bring myself to do it. At what point do I trash my collection of thousands of low-resolution, low-color images of old computers I downloaded off the web in 1996? I can’t bring myself to do it. I still have copies of DOS programs sitting around that I used in 1992. I have all my primitive MS Paintbrush computer artwork done in the mid-90s. I have archived HTML web pages that interested me in 1997. I have…lots of stuff. I’m swimming in it, and now with every new computer I buy, it’s hard to keep straight which file is where on my constellation of networked machines (which, I might add, keep my house quite toasty in the winter…whether I like it or not). I suppose I should centralize the data the best I can into a single, hyper-backed-up file server. I already have a similar server for most of my old files, but they aren’t actively backed up at the moment, and it adds extra cost to set that up. Either way, until I commit the money to it or — God forbid — “nature” takes its course and thrashes one of my drives, I’ll still be swimming in a digital sea of dusty — but priceless — data.

Ah…the trusty Goodwill store. Once the last bastion for countless old computers thrown out by a thankless middle-class America that had grown tired of them, it’s now merely a graveyard for broken VCRs and 1970s-era crockpots (you can always find at least one crockpot at any Goodwill store). So what happened? Around 2001, if I recall correctly, GCF was choking at the gills with hordes of truly worthless PC-clones that no one ever bought. They kept pouring in, non-stop, stacking up at the back of every store. The only thing Goodwill Industries could do to prevent themselves from being crushed by a mountain of PC trash was to stop accepting donations of computers, period. Unfortunately, this policy threw out the wheat with the chaff, the baby with the bathwater, so to speak. No longer could I find complete, boxed TI-99/4a’s, pristine Commodore Plus/4’s (yes, I found two of these complete in boxes Goodwill), and an endless supply compact Macs with personal resumes and strange letters still on their 10 meg hard drives (giving me hours of entertainment as an unexpected bonus).

But there are still some good things about the Goodwill store for the computer and gaming collector. For one, they still sell video games and systems, although they are pretty rare finds, and they’ve recently taken to locking them up in a glass case near the checkout counter. I’ve picked up an excellent condition SNES with some games (no AC adapter, though), and some really nice Genesis games in their original plastic boxes with manuals (Landstalker and Shining Force among them!) at Goodwill stores over the years. Also, they have a book section, which is the true focus of this entry, although it will ironically take up the least amount of space.

Paperback books cost fifty cents a piece; hard cover books, one dollar. That’s where I found the first edition of “The Media Lab” by Steward Brand (1987), hardcover and in great condition. This is a really cool find — an excellent addition to my computer history library — at a great price. It’s fun to see what was considered futuristic even as recently as 1987. The book has a great picture section in the middle (Grog no like words, Grog like piktures!), which, since I haven’t actually read the book yet, will have to suffice for a source of a description of the book. There are examples of early computer illustration software, rudimentary 3D computer graphics, anti-aliasing for digital text, force-feedback joysticks, holograms, AI, and something called NewsPeek, which was an idea for an electronic newspaper with eerie echos of the World Wide Web before such a thing existed. If it deals with computers and media, the MIT lab did it all first. And, if I may add personally, they also repeatedly failed to capitalize on their discoveries first, a ridiculous flaw of many a government and corporate think-tank and R&D division over the years (Xerox PARC comes to mind). “But RedWolf,” you say, “That’s not the purpose of a research institution!” I don’t care. Many incredible inventions are made at university labs, but it always takes a maverick separatist entrepreneur to break off from the organization and bring the benefits of those inventions to the masses. Otherwise, great ideas would stagnate there forever, and die on the vine where they were grown. Until new technologies are actively pushed and available in the marketplace, they’re just academic play-toys that don’t help anybody, hoarded by elitist engineers. So am I criticizing academic and big organization research? Hell yes. But hey, that opens up another can of worms, and I think it’s time to eat lunch.

…On second thought, maybe not.