Casemodding

Today, a friend of mine mentioned the Raspberry Pi, a miniature computer sold as a naked circuit board. The idea is that you build some sort of chassis (or not) and add an SD card (the kind of memory card frequently used in cameras) to function as a hard drive. It reminded me of the summer that I built an abomination that would today look like a parody of the Raspberry Pi. For some reason, I had come into possession of an old (by today's standards more or less ancient) laptop, a Dell with what I think was a Pentium I processor. The machine was bulky, the battery completely worn out and the screen quite horrible. But, I saw promise where everyone else saw only garbage.

So, I promptly opened it up, and with a non-trivial application of violence managed to separate the motherboard along with the CPU and RAM from the chassis. Then I attached said motherboard between two slabs of acrylic glass that I had spray painted black. A 1GB Compact Flash card replaced the hard drive (using a cheap IDE-CF adapter I bought from Hong Kong on eBay), technically providing it with a solid-state drive. So, this machine was in more ways than one a sort of predecessor of the Raspberry Pi. Then I plugged in a PC Card-based ethernet adapter, since this machine was so old that it didn't have an ethernet port on the motherboard. Finally, I built a replacement battery using six ordinary rechargeable 1.5V AA batteries. I think the idea wasn't to make this monstrosity portable, but rather to ensure that it could cope with power loss, rather like a low-budget UPS. Finally, I hooked it up to a screen and keyboard, installed Puppy Linux (command-line only, of course) and set it up to make it accessible over my local network. The thing worked as well as could be expected, as far as I can recall. It booted up fast enough, and could handle lightweight tasks.

The casemodded machine. Unfortunately, I never took any pictures of the original laptop. I also can't remember where I got that wire mesh, but it was most certainly not intended for that.

 The original idea was to build some sort of contraption using the pins on the parallel port to trigger a micro switch, enabling it to turn some other device on and off. I never got that far though. After a while, it ended up in a cardboard box in storage.

Today, I dug it out and hooked it up to a power supply. It didn't boot up when I pressed the power button. So I took it apart, and found that it had taken a bit of a beating during the move. Some connectors were loose. A hour of troubleshooting, reconnecting and disconnecting stuff, and it still didn't boot. So I removed the CF card hard drive and hooked it up to the card reader on my current PC. There wasn't much on it, but it told me that the last time the machine had been running was on August 27, 2009. The log files also told a tale of a failing file system that I had obviously not cared enough to repair. I repaired it now, mostly out of curiosity. Not that it makes any difference, the machine will now finally go its eternal rest at the local recycling facility.

And I will probably end up getting a Raspberry Pi.

/ Tony

Sinclair QL

The Sinclair QL was a personal computer released in 1984, intended for "the small business and the serious hobbyist" (Salus 2011, The Daemon, the Gnu, and the the Penguin, ch. 21). The "QL" stands for "Quantum Leap". It was on a machine like this that Linus Torvalds (the original creator of Linux) developed his programming skills in his late teens. It had a 7.5 Mhz processor, 128K of RAM and two cartridge drives for the tiny so-called "Microdrive" tape cartridges.

I found an ad for a Sinclair QL by pure coincidence, I was actually looking for old UNIX machines. The stunning looks made it hard to resist. Since the buyer lived relatively close, I decided to save the cost (and risk) of shipping by picking it up in person. I had no car at the time, so I took the bus and was met by the seller at the bus stop. He was a friendly old geek, probably around 60. Rather than bringing the Sinclair to me at the bus stop, he drove me to his home to pick it up there. His house was quite a sight: tables, shelves and benches were covered with circuit boards, archaic manuals, computer magazines from past decades and various bits and ends. Over a cup of coffee, the old man spoke enthusiastically of his younger days, when he apparently had been quite adept at programming in BASIC. He showed me old magazines with page after page of source code that one could type into one's computer, a very laborious and demanding method of copying but probably quite effective in the days before cheap data storage media and network connectivity. I was nodding, trying to keep up with his fast-paced explanations, hoping that he wasn't going to reveal that he was a serial killer. Before I left, he even got the point where he told me that he had thrown away such vast amounts of electronic waste that he was now banned at the local recycling facility. But, he confided with a smug smile, his wife now brought his old discarded computers to that same facility without him, leaving the staff there clueless. I made a mental note to myself that I must not end up like this, collecting old computers is not a harmless hobby, it seems.

 

Back home, I played around with the Sinclair QL for a while. The operating system wasn't too impressive, since I was accustomed to UNIX and Linux. Nevertheless, I played around with writing crude programs in BASIC and then storing them on the Microdrives. The seller was kind enough to include an original binder manual in perfect condition. Some day, I will have to try to get a hold of the office suite that was bundled with the Sinclair QLs back in the 1980s.

While the software on the Sinclair QL didn't manage to keep me interested for very long, I still think that the machine itself is an exceptionally aesthetical design. The matte black boxy shape, the way the keyboard is elevated in two levels, the petite Microdrives: it's perfection. It shows the talent and skill of someone who managed to take the best design trends of the 1980s and combine them into a single machine. Truly remarkable.

Introduction: a Computer Archaeologist Reminisces

Why would anyone come up with the idea of writing about old computers and command-line prompts? I'm not a programmer, nor do I work in the IT sector. Admittedly, I have in the past been working short stints as web admin, support tech guy and head of IT at a small business. That doesn't really explain anything, though. My fascination goes back long before all that.

I was born in 1981. Growing up during the Cold War, I rarely saw actual computers as a small child. There were Commodore 64s, my own VIC-20 and various game consoles, but apart from the occasional 286 and 386 running DOS and Windows 3.11, I didn't come into direct contact with computers. On TV, computers were portrayed as bulky terminals with green glowing letters and 5.25" floppy disks. I can still recall fragments of "V" and "Magnum, P.I". Then of course there's the awesome text-based interface in "Alien"*. Somewhere in my mind, those images got stuck. To me, those terminals were the real deal, not like the entertainment machines I was used to. They represented the mysterious power of the computer, the machines that held all the promise of the future. They could also be scary, like Skynet in "Terminator", which only made them more fascinating.

 

The computer terminal "mother" from "Alien" (1979)

It wasn't until circa 1994 that I started to learn how to use computers, using the 386 machines at school. Windows 3.11 was puzzling, even though I was 13 years old and an had extensive experience with video games, I had almost no experience at all of PCs. In late 1995, I bought my first real computer, a 486 with a 33 Mhz SX processor and 16 MB of RAM. The hard drive held about five hundred megabytes or so. This machine was hardly state of the art when I bought it, but it had Windows 95 and soon I was using it to connect to the Internet. The melody of the 33.6K modem dialling and then initiating the connection is something I will never forget.

Strangely enough, one of my strongest memories is how the 3.5" floppy disks felt. Picking up  brand-new black disk without a label, I would admire the subtle texture of the surface, the hard edges, how thin it was compared to its length and width, how the metal cover would snap in place if you slid it back manually to expose the opening to the magnetic media inside. The form was just as fascinating as the function of it.

Many years later, coincidence made me start experimenting with the somewhat obscure operating system FreeSCO on that same old 486 that I had bought in 1995, by then it had been reduced to a mere plaything for years. As I sat there staring at the interface, typing in commands at a text prompt, I felt like I had come home. Finally, I could relive my childhood memories, and learn something in the process. Tinkering with Windows had become tedious (even the then-new XP failed to inspire any enthusiasm in me), FreeSCO brought back the joy in computers, and the beauty I remembered.

The command-line on my current computer

From there on, it didn't take long for me to get started with Linux. Today, I type this on a Ubuntu** machine. While I have accepted that a graphical GUI is quite necessary for many tasks, I still use the command-line every day. Over the years, I've tinkered with UNIX versions and bought arcane old machines simply for their aesthetical appeal. In this blog, I will try to convey the beauty I see in them. I guess I'm a computer archaeologist of a sorts. While others may want to admire ancient vases or pre-historic jewellery, I love to look at obscure machines and outdated operating systems. Not because I admire their function, but because I adore their form. Perhaps this make some sense to you, perhaps not. Then again, that's the whole point of art, not everyone will appreciate it.

/ Tony


* I think I watched "Alien" when I was ten years old. It wasn't a very bright decision at the time since it terrified me beyond sense and reason, but today I love that movie. A few years ago, I decided to re-watch it. Immediately afterwards, I felt so inspired that I sat down in an entirely darkened room and just played around with a command-line for quite a while. Of course, I made sure it was in full-screen mode and that the letters were green, on a black background.

** Ubuntu is an operating system based on Linux