Mike, First of His Name @mike@chinwag.org

Honestly my favourite thing about the fediverse at the moment is the #breadposting - more please. Never stop not breadposting.

#bread #baking

Hi #Chinwag - please consider yourselves informed that @dolldolldoll is now your official "backup admin" if a hit-by-a-bus situation should occur - follow her main at @dolldolldoll if you want!

I've known Ivy for close to two decades now, we've co-sysadmined things previously and I vouch that you can trust her as you trust me.

Ivy will have access to all the backend systems and accounts, not to run things on a daily basis, but to ensure continuity of service if I can't.

#mastoadmin

Hey, I just wanted to say a quick #welcome to the recent Chinwag arrivals!

Chinwag's reason for existing is to provide communication tools for people, which is something I've always been interested in. I kind of target #Australian users, but welcome anyone from anywhere.

Please read our rules: https://social.chinwag.org/about/more

And our privacy policy: https://social.chinwag.org/terms

There's a basic guide to using Chinwag Social here: https://chinwag.im/social/

If you have any questions or concerns hit me up!

The treasures in these boxes just keep coming. #retrocomputing #retrogaming

Well, it boots - kind of. I suspect the floppy drive needs some cleaning as it sometimes completely fails to read a disk, and then on another attempt the same disk will boot somewhat before giving up a read error.

The exact same behaviour has happened with multiple system disks, so I'm definitely leaning toward suspecting the drive rather than the media right now.

Still, the base machine looks like it's working, which is great!

Here's our baby!
https://oldcomputers.net/pied-piper.html

Oh my god it's actually called a "Pied Piper"! I guess that's what the PPC on the labels is short for. I think I've got enough established to do some real research now.

No sign of capacitor leakage or obvious damage so far, I might take a gamble and just plug it in tomorrow, unless I notice anything odd before then.

Interesting that it's got what appears to be an add-on card for two serial ports installed.

Bonus content in the boxes! copies of #UNIX PDP-11 source code from a University of New South Wales operating systems course!

I'll crack the case on this before long and take heaps of photos, but here's a bit of an overview.

Anyone have any idea what type of printer port this is? I'm keen to have a look and see what comes out of the TV mod(ulator?) port too.

It comes with what I recall being a composite green screen monitor. If that doesn't work I'm sure my Commodore 1701 will do the job.

Hoping that there's another copy of the system disks in one of the boxes. Don't want to risk the originals.

It's #retrocomputing time!

While my mum is moving house, I'm babysitting and doing any required maintenance on her partner's stash of old computers.

There's some interesting stuff there - a ZX81, a Spectrum 4k (with funky microdrive) ... and this one weird beast. I don't know a lot about it, beyond that it runs CP/M. I've used it before many moons ago. I think it was the first thing I played Zork on.

Anyway ...

I drove 250km to do a job today, and because I'm an idiot I think I'm going to have to drive 500km tomorrow.

I'm involved in a project that has led me to searching for things like "DIY autocue" so that's going to be fun.

As I suspected, yes I do have everything I'm going to need just lying around the house.

Turns out the above was my 10,000th toot. What a journey it's been.

Don't forget to like and subscribe.

At 3pm I suddenly realised I'd forgotten to have lunch. In the middle of cooking something to remedy this situation, I remembered I had actually had lunch after all. I have no point to make here.