Hello, and welcome back! Today we’re going to talk about something that is making a big comeback: Vintage technology.

You may wonder “Vintage tech making a big comeback? Is this dude whacked out??” NOPE! You’re seeing this right. The way we used to do things back in the day is starting to become relevant again in the modern day. From the return of vinyl records and cassette tapes to the increasing popularity of retro gaming, Old school is becoming the new cool in the 2020s. This phenomenon was sparked mainly by the COVID-19 pandemic (Although records started coming back into relevance a few years before that)

With this post, we’re going to talk about another niche that is gaining popularity among certain groups that you may have heard a little bit about: Retro computing.

WHAT IS RETRO COMPUTING: Retro computing is the act of using old, outdated computers and hardware for modern day tasks. Tasks ranging from gaming to document management, and even attempting to bring that old Commodore 64 onto the modern internet. (Yes people do this! I’ll explain more on THAT part. If you read my last blog post, I told you this would be a fun read!)

Depending on what you wish to do with an old computer, you’ll want to know HOW to accomplish this task.

WHAT DEFINES A RETRO COMPUTER: To most, a “retro” computer is one from 1999 and before, although some are also keen to do it on early 2000’s hardware. Notable examples of retro computers are as follows:

* Any Commodore computer (The Commodore 64 is the most popular)
* Any original Macintosh computer (Based on the Motorola 68k or PowerPC CPUs)
* Any PC running a Pentium II or older CPU, with CPU models in the *86 range being the most popular. (While PIII came out in the late 90s, that was more of an early 2000s product)
* Any 80s era “Home Computer”, such as the Tandy TRS-80, Color Computer, etc, as well as others from Mattel, Texas Instruments, Timex-Sinclair (The T/S-1000 was a slightly modified US version of the Sinclair ZX81 from the UK), etc (Did you know that Atari also made home computers in that time?). Entertain yourself a little bit. Go online and look up “Hey Hey 16k”.

WHAT DO I NEED FOR RETRO COMPUTING: Well, to start off, you’ll need an old computer from that time period. While these are getting harder to come by, they are out there. Check places like eBay, Swap meets, Flea markets, etc. Depending on how you will be working with your system, you may need other accessories as well, such as:

* Floppy disks (Both 3.5 and 5.25 – Check online)
* USB floppy drive (Or another PC with a working floppy drive – NOTE that you can only get a 3.5″ USB floppy drive. There are no 5.25″ ones! If you need 5.25″, you’ll need a working PC from 1992 or older.)
* Blank CDs (Not DVDs – Check online)
* USB or internal CD/DVD Burner (Sold in stores, or use a PC that has one)
* A reliable source for retro software (Archive.org and Google are your friend)
* Appropriate mouse and keyboard (I’ll go over the differences in peripherals later)
* Network hardware/cables (If you intend to do networking)
* Sound Card & Speakers (IF you want sound, although some things use the internal PC speaker)
* Extra hard drives, floppy drives and/or CD drives (Hard drives especially as the older ones tend to fail more frequently)
* Game controller (NOT an XBOX controller!)
* Drivers for hardware – Just like with your printer/copier, you need drivers to make things work on your PC.

OPERATING SYSTEMS: In the old days, the most common operating system was known as BASIC. There was also another one called CP/M. CP/M was more common on computers from Kaypro, Osborne, Sharp, etc. IBM, with the help of Bill Gates, would later go on to produce what is now known as DOS, or Disk Operating System. DOS was very simple as it did not require a hard drive at all, as it was small enough to be able to run off of a single floppy disk, and could live within the original 640kb RAM on systems of the day. Microsoft also produced it’s own version of DOS called MS-DOS. This version would live on as a base in Windows systems up until the release of Windows XP.

DOS was designed for the x86 architecture as an alternative to BASIC and CP/M. With extra programs, it is possible to run programs from these earlier systems on DOS. QBasic is the most popular interpreter for BASIC programs. (Do we remember the game where we played as gorillas throwing explosive bananas at each other? Yeah, that came with QBasic. PS: If you’re feeling nostalgic for that game, there is a port of it on the Google Play store for Android.)

Microsoft would then continue to innovate how we interact with computers, with the release of Windows 1.0 in 1985. Ultimately, it would take awhile for Windows to catch on, with 3.1 becoming popular on home computers in the early 1990s. GEM Desktop was another popular alternative to Windows on IBM and compatible PCs.

IBM COMPATIBLE? WHAT IS THAT: It’s more of a marketing term than anything. IBM Compatible just means that the competitor brand PC you have uses the same Intel x86 architecture as an IBM computer of the time, and can use the same hardware and software interchangeably. Compatibles were often cheaper than a real IBM computer at the time, and were well suited for home use. Almost every major PC maker made compatibles in that time, such as:

* Dell
* Hewlett-Packard
* Tandy (Radio Shack)
* Packard Bell
* Leading Edge
* Panasonic
* Sharp
* Acer

GETTING YOUR COMPUTER RUNNING: In the case of systems such as Commodore, Atari, etc, you’ll just need a disk or tape with a program on it. The OS on these are baked into the system’s ROM. On PCs, you will need a boot disk if the machine does not have a hard drive, or the one it does have is not working or has been wiped. We’ll touch on getting DOS running. This is the easiest system to get going. You can go to a website such as bootdisk.com and download a disk image with basic DOS on it to get the system going. Many of the downloads there will require an external program, although some come with a built-in writing tool. For this, we will use WinImage. You can get a 30 day free trial of WinImage for this purpose.

NOTE: You will need a PC running Windows 7 or below for this, as Windows 10/11 will throw an “Access Denied” error when trying to write a floppy image, even if you run it as admin.

For this, you will need to know what type of floppy you need. Older 80s era x86 PCs will only have a 360k 5.25″ floppy drive. If you’re running into this, then you will definitely need another old, operational computer with a working drive to create this disk, and you will need to make sure you download a 360k image. IF you’re lucky, you MAY have a 3.5″ floppy that is 720k or 1.44M. These will usually be marked on the drive. As for the disk, there is a way to tell:

On a 720k floppy, you will only have one hole in the corner, which is the write protect tab.
On a 1.44M floppy, you will have two holes, one in each corner. One is the write protect tab, the other tells the drive that the inserted disk is a 1.44M one. 1.44M drives can read and write both 1.44M and 720k disks.

Be sure your boot disk image matches the size of the disk you’re writing it to.

USING DOS: DOS is a simple, command line interface. The following commands will get you around fairly efficiently. Items denoted in <> are other syntaxes:

DIR: Lists the current directory (use /p to have it pause on a long directory listing)
CD <name>: Changes to another directory in the current one
<drive letter>: : Changes to the root of another drive (Example: A: would change to the directory of the primary floppy disk)
DEL <file>: Deletes a file from the disk.
COPY <source> <destination>: Copies a file to another location (ex: copy a:\test.txt c:\) Specifying * as the source will copy ALL files in that directory to the destination drive. You can also use *.ext to copy only files of a certain type (example, *.txt will copy all text files over to the destination drive.)
SYS <drive letter>: Transfers the system boot from the boot disk to the primary hard drive, allowing the PC to boot from the hard drive. (ex: sys c:)
<program name> <file>: Opens the specified file using the specified program (Ex: qbasic c:\basic/test.bas would open “test.bas” in QBasic)

While there are other commands, these basic ones will help you get around in the system.

DRIVE LETTERING: Drive lettering is another part of DOS, that exists in Windows to this very day. Drive letters go from A to Z. The most common ones are A and C. While any drive can be any letter today, it was different then. Let’s look at the common ones:

A: The primary floppy disk drive. This is commonly the boot drive when booting from a floppy.
B: The secondary floppy disk drive.
C: Primary hard drive. This is commonly the main system drive where the boot record and OS reside.
D: Secondary hard drive. This would be the CD drive on PCs that had them at the time. Can also be a secondary hard drive if you have one installed.
E-Z: Additional drives (CD, Hard, etc) – On modern PCs, external drives will usually show up here)

On modern PCs, A and B are really no longer used as they do not have floppy drives, although the mapping still does exist, as when you plug in a USB floppy drive, it will usually show up as A:

LET’S GET SOME SOFTWARE: Now that you have a running PC with a working OS (albeit basic), Time to put it to use. There are many places online where you can find software, games, etc that will run on your retro system. One big place to look is on The Internet Archive at archive.org. You can find many DOS based games, office programs, utilities, etc. If you want to get fancy and try taking your system online, there’s utilities for that as well, with most all of them being legal freeware. I’ll get more into that later as there is a lot involved.

POINT AND CLICK: At this point, you’re probably thinking to yourself “DOS is cool and all, but can it be easier? Can I have something visual?” The answer here is YES. What you’re looking for here is called a Desktop Environment. While there’s a couple out there, such as GEM Desktop, one common, popular one out there is Windows. Depending on the age of your PC, you may want to go with Windows 3.1. You can also find this on archive.org, but you may also check places like eBay, Swap meets, or even other retro software sites. For this, there will be a few different disk images. Can you imagine trying to install Windows 11 off of floppy disks? You’d be buried in disks! Bonus points if your retro system comes with a working Windows installation!

If you do install 3.1, it should start up on next boot. If it does NOT, simply CD to the WINDOWS directory, then type in “win” to start it up.

GOING ONLINE: I know, I know, some of you are out there reading this and thinking to yourself “Dude can I take this thing online?” The answer here, while being YES, does have some caveats:

* Modern sites will not work (Directly anyways) with older systems due to the newer SSL protocols not being supported.
* You are vulnerable to any unpatched exploits since these systems no longer receive updates.
* Even if you can connect to the site, chances are it will not render correctly due to the browser not supporting the site’s code format. (Google still works on retro systems, and yes this is intentional by Google)
* The servers for many older internet based programs and games are likely either long gone, or have updated to newer protocols that do not work with the older software.
* There is no IPv6 support (This came along on Windows XP)
* TCP/IP can be a little fiddly on some older versions of Windows.
* Finding the correct drivers for an Ethernet card can be tricky. If your system already has a card, and it runs, it likely already has drivers.
* Some older Ethernet cards don’t get along well with modern switches. (Erratic or no connection is a major symptom.)
* Emulating dial-up networking requires some extra equipment. (Namely a system to dial into, and some sort of phone line simulator or PABX system)
* Networking on DOS requires a lot of manual interaction, from loading a packet driver to setting up a TCP/IP driver.
* The experience will be quite slow. (Due to the speed of the system)
* Most all messenger systems that once worked on these systems are no longer around. (ICQ, AIM, MSN, etc). There are projects out there that do revive these systems to work with third party servers, but they do take some work to make operational.

The biggest takeaway I can give you here, is if you are going to network your retro system, I recommend connecting it to a closed network with no direct internet access. This is good for playing LAN based multiplayer games without exposing yourself to any online threats. If you must have internet for some reason, be sure you have a good solid hardware firewall between it and the internet. There are ways to get online without exposing the system.

PROXY SERVERS: One way to bring an old system online is through a proxy server. A proxy server is a system that sits between the source and destination systems, and essentially acts as a relay between the two. The three systems I will describe here work that way but do much more:

BROWSERVICE: Browservice is a Windows/Linux based rendering proxy that uses Chromium as it’s base. With this, you point your browser at the IP:Port of the Browservice instance. You will get a mostly empty page with a browser bar at the top. You will use this to surf the web. Browservice converts the webpage into mapped image files that the older browsers can work with. Some features, such as streaming video, do not work with this well if at all. This system may not work with all older browsers.

WEBONE PROXY: WebOne Proxy is a true proxy server that serves to convert modern HTTPS websites to work on older browsers. It does this by accessing the site, stripping out the SSL, then sends it onto the browser. Since this is generally a 1:1 rendering of the webpage, there’s a chance it will not work on your browser. WebOne runs on Linux and Windows systems. To use this, you would configure the IP of the system hosting WebOne as an HTTP proxy server. The default port is 8080 but it can be changed. If the website you want can’t be found online, it will check the Wayback Machine on archive.org for the last cached copy, and present that to you.

PROTOWEB: Protoweb is an external service that serves up restored versions of early web sites. To set this up, you would need to configure your system or browser to use Protoweb’s servers as an HTTP proxy. While this works well with every browser out there, access is limited to Protoweb’s own network of sites (Which are mostly the popular ones such as MSN, Yahoo, etc.). There is no access to the wider internet (Other than access to live Wikipedia), but you can go back in time and see what the internet was like back in the good old days! (Complete with Flash!)

With this, there are also some sites out there that intentionally do not use HTTPS/SSL to allow older systems trouble-free access to them. These are sites that generally cater to the retrocomputing crowd, such as those providing software/games for these systems.

GAMING, RETRO STYLE: This is by far, one of the most popular things to do on an old computer. Playing games on your vintage system doesn’t take much. The only thing you need to keep in mind when doing retro gaming, is the specs of your rig, especially graphics. Retro gaming loses it’s fun when the graphics are constantly stuttering due to an underpowered video card! Bear in mind that the graphics of yesterday’s games won’t be near as good as what you will get today. (Then again, you’re not going to stuff an RTX into your old Compaq, are you?!)

CAN I RETRO GAME ON MODERN HARDWARE? Maybe. Some games will work on modern systems, but the majority of the games you’ll encounter here will either not run at all, or require an emulator of some sort to play.

WHAT HARDWARE DO I NEED? It depends on what games you want to play. If you intend to play old DOS games from the 1980s-90s, then you won’t need much in the way of video or processing power. Some games, like Red Faction for example, require a video card with 8MB of memory. This is common on computers from 1999 onwards, but for older systems, you would need a dedicated video card. While there’s many types, we’ll cover the most common ones:

ON-BOARD: An on-board video card is one that is built directly into the motherboard. The existence of a video port alongside the rest of the system ports is indicative of on-board graphics. Unlike today where these are built into the CPU, original on-board cards had their own chipsets. Budget home computers often had the graphics on board.

AGP: Short for Accelerated Graphics Port, this is the best method of adding a video card to your PC. The AGP port is only for graphics cards. This port is signified as a brown slot, slightly shorter than the PCI slots, and a bit furter back than the PCI slots. The AGP slot is always going to be the first slot on the board.

NOTE: Not all systems will have an AGP slot. This is especially true on OEM motherboards with on-board graphics.

PCI: Short for Peripheral Component Interconnect, this slot is the most common on systems from 1993 onward. PCI slots are signified as a white slot, close to the edge of the motherboard. Most systems will have at least two of these slots, with some having 4 or more. PCI slots are used for everything from graphics to sound. The most common use of PCI in the early days was to add a dial-up modem to a PC, and the vast majority of home desktops came with a PCI modem (Some budget systems came with an ISA modem IF it had an ISA slot). While PCI has been largely superseded by PCI-Express, PCI slots hung on until the mid to late-2010’s.

ISA: Short for Industry Standard Architecture, these are found in PCs from the early 1980s all the way up to around 1997. ISA slots are black with thick pins in them. Early ISA slots were 8-bit, but later on, 16-bit ISA slots were also created. The difference between the two is that 16-bit slots have a second, smaller slot that is dividied from the main 8-bit slot, while an 8-bit slot alone does not have an additional connector. Like PCI, ISA was also commonly used for multiple things. Early home computers would have a sound card, dialup modem, or both on a combined card plugged in here. This card often also acted as the CD-ROM controller. On 80s era computers, this was most often used for a disk drive controller.

VLB: Short for VESA Local bus: This was an extension of the PCI architecture, and a precursor to the coming PCI standard. VLB was most commonly used for high performance cards, such as video cards, and universal I/O cards (Disk controllers, Ports, etc). VLB slots are 16-bit ISA slots with an additional brown slot behind it. This brown slot will look like a reversed PCI slot. ISA cards can be used in these combo slots. VLB slots can be found on systems between 1992 and 1993, which is mostly 486, and some very early Pentium systems.

When setting up a vintage system, try to plan around what you want to do with it. This will make all the difference in how your experience goes.

PORTS, PORTS AND MORE PORTS: You definitely have it really easy today, with USB, HDMI and what not. If you’ve never used an old computer before, you’re going to run into ports you’ve likely never seen in your life. Don’t worry though, I will describe them here! Depending on what era of computer you manage to get your hands on, you MAY have some of the comforts of today’s systems in terms of ports.

SERIAL PORTS: These are either 9-pin or 25-pin, 2-row MALE connectors. The most common uses for these are mice and modems. Most systems have at least two of these, with one sometimes on the front for peripherals that used a serial port.

PARALLEL PORT: This is generally a 25-pin FEMALE connector. Generally used for printers, but some late-90s peripherals also began using this port.

PS/2 PORT: These are 6-pin round connectors. These can either be black, or one green and one purple. This is where your keyboard and mouse go.

NOTE: On pre-1995 PCs, you may encounter a larger, 5 pin round jack. This is for an older style of keyboard known as XT/AT.

GAME/MIDI PORT: This is a 15-pin, 2-row FEMALE connector. In the majority of cases, it is used for game controllers.

VIDEO PORT: Usually a black or blue 15-pin, 3-row FEMALE connector. This is where your monitor will plug in. You can find it either on the I/O panel with the other connectors for on-board, OR in one of the expansion slots if a video card is used. Higher end video cards may also have a 4-pin S-Video port and/or yellow composite port, for connection to a TV, as well as a white DVI connection. Some may also have more than one video port, for use with multiple monitors.

NOTE: On systems before 1988, you may see a 9-pin 2-row female connector. This is for a much older video standard. You’ll either need a monitor from that same era, or some sort of converter to connect this to a modern display.

SOUND PORTS: Commonly blue, pink and green, these are part of your sound card. Pink is for a microphone, blue is line-in (from a tape deck, etc), and green is out to your speakers. High end cards will have additional connectors for surround sound. Can be found in the I/O panel or in the expansion slots, depending on the configuration. Some higher end cards may also have digital outputs, or even a TOSLINK optical output.

EXPANDING YOUR SYSTEM: With add-on cards, you can add more functionality to your system. Below I will list some, with what slots/ports they will work with:

* Video card (ISA, PCI, VLB, AGP) – Add a video output to your system OR upgrade the current one.
* Sound card (ISA, PCI, USB) – Add audio to your system. (As well as a MIDI/Game port (Except the USB one))
* Ethernet card (ISA, VLB (Rare), PCI, USB) – Add networking to your system
* USB card (PCI) – Add USB ports to your system (Windows 95 OSR2 or newer required)
* Serial Port Card (ISA, VLB, PCI, USB) – Add (additional) serial ports to your system
* Wireless card (PCI, USB) – Add wireless networking to your system (98 or newer)
* TV Tuner (PCI, USB) – Adds TV functionality to your system. Some tuner cards were bundled in on video cards. (NOTE: Most tuner cards of this era were analog only, and will not work today without an external input, such as a converter box)
* FM tuner (ISA, PCI, USB) – Adds FM Radio functionality to your system.
* Parallel port card (ISA, PCI, USB) – Adds a parallel port to your system.
* Modem (ISA, PCI, USB) – Adds dialup/FAX functionality to your system. (Requires an active analog phone line OR a line simulator.)
* I/O card (ISA, VLB) – Adds disk drive, serial and parallel ports to your system (Only necessary on systems without their own controllers, such as older IBM XT/AT machines)
* Hard drive card (ISA, VLB, PCI, USB) – Adds hard drive functionality to your system (As in adding SATA ports to an older machine)
* Mouse card (ISA) – Adds mouse functionality to your system. (NOTE: Most from this era were proprietary, and would only operate with the mouse they came with.)
* PCMCIA/CardBus Card (PCI) – Allows the use of laptop PC cards with a desktop system. (Natively supported in Windows, Drivers needed in DOS)

In short, there’s a lot of fun to be had in the world of retro computing. While it does take some effort, once you get a rig running, you’ll have tons of fun with it! There’s a bit more to setting up an older system, but there’s plenty of resources online for that.