In April Slashdot reader Adam Bradley won an eBay auction for an IBM 360 mainframe computer. Then he began blogging “the saga that unfurled” in transporting it from an abandoned building in Germany to the U.K. (where Adam volunteers at The National Museum of Computing in Bletchley, England.) “The traffic from Slashdot on our original posts was incredible,” he writes today….
Tag: vintage
Can You Use Modern Displays With Vintage Computing Hardware?
Long-time Slashdot reader 50000BTU_barbecue likes using vintage computers from the 1980s and early 1990s — ” real hardware with all the weirdness that goes with it.” But what do you do for a monitor? Especially when “old CRTs are starting to lose sharpness and brightness and may get tossed or damaged when moving…” We still use the same electrical plugs, and…
NASA’s latest exoplanet posters are a Halloween treat
Just in time for Halloween, NASA has released two new posters celebrating some truly terrifying exoplanets, or planets outside our solar system. Free to download, the entertaining posters recall vintage horror movie advertisements but have a decidedly astronomical focus. Source: https://phys.org/news/2019-10-nasa-latest-exoplanet-posters-halloween.html…
Bell Labs Plans Big 50th Anniversary Event For Unix
Photographer Peter Adams launched a “Faces of Open Source” portrait project in 2014. This week he posted a special announcement on the web site of Bell Labs: Later this month, Bell Labs will celebrate the 50th anniversary of Unix with a special two day “Unix 50” event at their historic Murray Hill headquarters. This event should be one for the history…
Have astronomers found a hyper-volcanic exomoon?
Astronomers have found evidence for a possible exomoon orbiting a gas giant planet 550 light-years away. If they’re interpreting the evidence correctly, this moon would be a place of destruction, even more volcanically active than Jupiter’s famous volcanic moon, Io. Source: https://earthsky.org/space/volcanic-exomoon-exo-io-wasp-49b…
Image: Subsea scouting with NEEMO NXT
That is not the ESA Kids mascot Paxi’s ship on the right. Nor is that a vintage diving suit on the left. It is lunar exploration with an aquatic twist. Source: https://phys.org/news/2019-09-image-subsea-scouting-neemo-nxt.html…
Vintage 30-Year-Old Mac Resurrected As a Web Server
Long-time Slashdot reader Huxley_Dunsany writes: After much work rebuilding and upgrading it, my Macintosh SE/30 from 1989 is now connected via Ethernet to the Web, and is hosting a simple website and old-style “guestbook.” The site has been online for a few days (other than semi-frequent reboots of the system when it gets overloaded with requests), and has served nearly 20,000…
University of California Sues Five Major Retailers Over Edison-Style LED Bulbs
The University of California is suing five major retailers, including Amazon, Walmart, Target, IKEA, and Bed Bath & Beyond, for infringing on four patents related to “filament” LED light bulbs. Reuters reports: These patents relate to what the university called the “reinvention of the light bulb” by researchers at the University of California, Santa Barbara led by professor Shuji Nakamura, who…
A new plan for keeping NASA’s oldest explorers going
With careful planning and dashes of creativity, engineers have been able to keep NASA’s Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft flying for nearly 42 years—longer than any other spacecraft in history. To ensure that these vintage robots continue to return the best science data possible from the frontiers of space, mission engineers are implementing a new plan to manage them. And that…