48kRAM @48kRAM@oldbytes.space

Hello all you shiney new and not-so-new people! I've mostly ignored this account for a while but that will probably be changing. Expect lots of pictures of vintage computers and gripes about said. :)

Well, all the chips blank-check okay. I tested only one with write/verify/erase and it passed. But, yeah, I'm thinking they're all good. That makes it $1.27 per chip. Glad I ordered well in advance though -- delivery time was a little over a month.

Sadly, my microscope isn't powerful enough to pick out any manufacturer markings on the die :(

Time to test out the 27C128 chips that came in from .CN wrapped in plastic.

First off, they sent twice as many as I ordered so clearly they expect some to be dead.

Second, they all have the EXACT. SAME. MARKINGS. on them. All ST. All the same lot. Yeah....right. The surfaces all look sanded or lasered down. I'm sure they're remarked. Probably not ST either.

A slightly-less old #vintagecomputer for today: An HP Jornada 820 "Handheld PC". Although, it's more of a "PC Companion" -- in that weird time where laptops were very pricey and manufacturers were trying to make low-cost ultra-portables that kinda-sorta did PC things but never really succeeded.

Runs Windows CE on an Intel StrongARM CPU. Theoretically there's a NetBSD port for this thing, I think, but I've never gotten it to run.

OMG XML is such a shit-show

Good morning Fediverse! Here is your #vintagecomputer picture for today: my Issue Two 48k ZX Spectrum, kindly sent to me by @GedgeHead (we actually did a trade and I sent him some floppy drives in exchange -- that was fun!)

The machine included a large number of tapes, so I dug out my wife's old Panasonic tape player to load some games. Took a few tries, but I got it going. It was fun loading from tape again after 30 years (on my Atari 400, back then). Gedge did a composite mod on it before he sent it to me so I can run it easily on my PAL monitors here in the States.

Later, I sent some photos of the innards to "ZX Wife" (hmm...wonder if she's on Fedi...) who said it was probably originally a 16k Speccy that had been upgraded to 48k.

Hope everyone has a great day. Keep it retro 😎

Also from a modern post about the Dana:

"The AlphaSmart dana is technically a Palm OS PDA, in the same way that Hannibal Lecter is technically a famous chef" 🤣🤣🤣

My AlphaSmart Dana wireless came in today. It's been a LONG time since I've used a PalmOS device -- especially a version 4 device. And, of course, I don't have any <=1GB SD cards around to test file exchange. I might be able to load Palm Desktop on my Win98 PC to install some software. Gonna be a fun toy.

Also, my wife loves the feature where it will just "type" your document into a modern PC by acting as a USB keyboard. She might steal it from me to write on. Shoulda bought two! 🤣

How am I supposed to finish up the rest of my $dayjob day when I know I have cool old machines waiting at my post box? Ughh.....

Welp... they did not come in tubes, as pictured in the fleaBay ad 🤬🤬🤬

Just bought an album on Bandcamp and saw this in the Paypal email and did a double-take because the first thing that popped into my head was "Epic Records". Turns out it's "Epic Games" and, honestly, I'm not sure if that's better or worse...