Note: this post is based on a Mastodon thread. Last summer I got a Macintosh 512K at the VCF Swap Meet in Wall, NJ. I’ve been wanting to get a Fat Mac for a while, ever since I read Andy Hertzfeld’s book Revolution in the Valley: The Insanely Great Story of How the Mac Was Made. Well, technically I wanted a Mac 128K, but I had no interest in paying

Note: this article was originally written for the Club de Aventuras AD magazine. You can read it in Spanish translation starting at page 68 of Issue 60 of CAAD. Home computing in Yugoslavia, a country that no longer exists, was quite interesting in the 1980s. The geopolitically unique position of this socialist country during the Cold War produced a unique situation in terms of access to computers and technology. Yugoslavia

Introduction In early June I went to the VCF Swap Meet in Wall, NJ and picked up a supposedly functional TRS-80 Model I. I haven’t been very interested in TRS machines (other than owning a CoCo 2 for a moment) until I watched a video by Dejan Ristanović, one of the creators of the Galaksija project, who shared some less known facts about the history of the Galaksija and its

A few months ago I got a Compaq iPaq H3650, the same model that I had almost twenty years ago. This device left a strong impression on me, so even though I had (unfortunately) long ago gotten rid of my original one with a broken screen, I wanted to remember what these strange proto-smartphone devices were like. I got an iPaq on eBay for $10 (Pocket PCs are apparently not

Galaksija computer stores its characters in a separate 2716 Character generator ROM. While these characters are fixed in the ROM, you can easily design new characters and burn them onto your EPROM. This article will cover how the Galaksija characters are programmed and where to find them in the character generator ROM. Each character is 16 bytes, or 8 columns by 16 rows: Each character consists of 16 bytes which

Back in 2020 I built my first Galaksija computer, using the original single board design. Building this computer was quite a challenge for me, as I was pretty inexperienced with electronics. But the most difficult challenge was finding compatible key switches — so difficult actually, that it took me almost 3 years to find the right ones. This short article describes this journey, as well as a brief history of

It’s MARCHintosh! The month of March when the vintage computing community shares projects, creations and other content related to the Macintosh, in the vein of DOScember and SEPTandy. It’s almost halfway through March 2023, and due to my increasingly busy work schedule, I don’t believe I’ll get to do a project of my own. However, back in 2022 I did do a small #MARCHintosh project on Twitter, documenting the brief

A few weeks ago I got a Compaq iPaq Pocket PC, model 3650. While this device originally came out in 2000, I remember using it circa 2003 when my mom got it for work and passed it on to me because she had no use for it. While I probably only played around with it for a few months, it was a formative computing experience for me. Even though it

Edited May 16 2023 Orao was a Yugoslav 8-bit computer developed by Miroslav Kocijan for PEL Varaždin in 1984. Orao was common in elementary schools, mostly in Croatia, through the late 80s. Since 2021, I’ve been learning more about this microcomputer and developing hardware and software for it. While most of the information here is available on my Orao github repo, this page contains all the relevant information related to