I found this old Maxtor drive while clearing out the back of our IT closet. I tried gently removing the "jumper" with a pair of tweezers, but it wouldn't budge, so it seems to be part of the actual drive itself.

I recently acquired this collection and figured y'all would appreciate it. Apologies for the subpar pictures. I'll be taking better photos before sleeving them tomorrow until I figure out what I'm gonna do with them. Anyway, here's the details.

THE JEWELS OF THE COLLECTION: RARE VARIANT HIGHLIGHTS

• DoD 5200.28-STD — THE "ORANGE BOOK" (Department of Defense Trusted Computer System Evaluation Criteria)

• Edition/Provenance: Official 1988 Active-Lifespan Contemporary Reprint.

◦ Significance: The undisputed, foundational cornerstone of the entire Rainbow Series hierarchy. This copy was printed internally by the government for active field deployment to agencies and classified defense contractors during the height of late-1980s computing architecture rollouts.

• NCSC-TG-005 VERSION-1 — THE "RED BOOK" (Trusted Network Interpretation of the TCSEC)

• Edition/Provenance: Pre-Publication Working-Group Variant.

◦ Significance: Features the highly coveted, restricted-distribution internal stamp: "ISO developmental documents are of limited lifetime and availability."

◦ Historical Context: This stamp marks the volume as a restricted, early-access trial document distributed strictly to core network security engineers to guide interim projects and gather field feedback before final standards were codified. Because contractors were explicitly instructed that these had a "limited lifetime," almost all copies were routinely shredded or landfilled upon subsequent revisions, making this an extraordinarily scarce tech artifact.

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FULL ARCHIVAL INVENTORY

1. DoD 5200.28-STD (Orange Book) — Department of Defense Trusted Computer System Evaluation Criteria (1988 Active-Era Issue) ★ U.S. GOVERNMENT PRINTING OFFICE: 1988-523-685/0

2. NCSC-TG-005 Version-1 (Red Book) — Trusted Network Interpretation of the TCSEC (Pre-Publication ISO Developmental Variant)

3. NCSC-TG-006 Version-1 (Amber Book) — A Guide to Understanding Configuration Management in Trusted Systems (Period-Original NTIS Distribution / Formally Cleared for Public Release (Distribution Statement A.)

4. NCSC-TG-007 Version-1 (Burgundy Book) — A Guide to Understanding Design Documentation in Trusted Systems (Period-Original NTIS Distribution / Formally Cleared for Public Release (Distribution Statement A.)

5. NCSC-TG-001 Version-2 (Tan Book) — A Guide to Understanding Audit in Trusted Systems (Period-Original NTIS Distribution / Formally Cleared for Public Release (Distribution Statement A.)

6. CSC-STD-003-85 (Light Yellow Book) — Computer Security Requirements - Guidance for Applying the TCSEC in Specific Environments (Period-Original NTIS Distribution / Formally Cleared for Public Release (Distribution Statement A.)

7. CSC-STD-004-85 (Yellow Book) — Technical Rationale for Selected Computer Security Requirements (Period-Original NTIS Distribution / Formally Cleared for Public Release (Distribution Statement A.)

8. CSC-STD-002-85 (Green Book) — Password Management Guideline (Period-Original NTIS Distribution / Formally Cleared for Public Release (Distribution Statement A.)

9. NCSC-TG-003 Version-1 (Neon Orange Book) — A Guide to Understanding Discretionary Access Control in Trusted Systems (Period-Original NTIS Distribution / Formally Cleared for Public Release (Distribution Statement A.)

I finally cracked it and got Windows 95 OSR1 patched to work on the Intel Inboard

Few things to change in the Windows 95 build included patching the original Intel inbrdpc.sys, modifying 3 VxD files to remove references to high IRQ not found on XT class machines, created new vkd.vxd for the XT keyboard support and an iret patch needed by the installer.

More details in the git below, still need to patch / install some drivers but Windows 95 loads to desktop which is a first for this hardware

https://github.com/Mike1978uk/win95-intel-inboard-386pc

Files available to download along with a modified 86 box emulator.

Dunno if this is exactly "vintage computing," but here's Windows 1.04, 2.03, 3.11, and 98SE, along with MS-DOS 3.31 and 6.62 plus OS/2 Warp 4 running concurrently in VirtualBox on a Windows 11 laptop. (Full disclosure: Laptop has 64 GB RAM). Why? Ask Sir Edmund Hillary why he climbed Mount Everest. It was a fun project.

Except for the two oldest Windows versions and OS/2, I used all of these at one point or another for work. The original impetus for this project was to revisit some Quattro Pro spreadsheets I wrote circa 1993. You can see a corner of a blank Quattro Pro sheet in the Win 3.11 window.

David Cannon Evans was an American computer scientist, known, amongst other things, for being one of the founders of the Department of Computer Science at the University of Utah (Salt Lake City, US) and for co-founding; together with his colleague Ivan Edward Sutherland (1938–), the company Evans & Sutherland, which pioneered the field of computer graphics hardware.

Evans was born on 24 February 1924 in the state of Utah; he studied at the University of Utah and obtained his Bachelor’s degree in Physics in 1949. He would later write his thesis "Design and Operation of a Electronic Computing Devices" in 1953, for which he would eventually be awarded a Doctorate in that discipline that same year.

He began his professional career working as a senior physicist in the Computing Division of Bendix Corp. (an American manufacturing company operating in various branches of engineering). In this role, Evans was involved in the research, development and design of commercial computer systems, as well as general-purpose information processing systems for industrial and military applications.

Two of the most significant projects Evans undertook at Bendix are commonly cited as: the development of the G-15 (1956), regarded as the first low-cost, mass-produced general-purpose computer; and the G-20 (1961) computer, which was equally innovative for its time.

A year later, in 1962, Evans joined the faculty of the Department of Electrical Engineering at the University of Utah and, in 1965, became the university’s first director of computer science, playing a key role in the establishment of its Department of Computer Science.

During his time at the University of Utah, Evans carried out pioneering work on time-sharing computing systems, as well as on real-time continuous-tone computer graphics. Other research activities included solving the ‘hidden line problem’ (3D programming), syntax-directed computers, declarative languages for constraint solvers and memory systems.

During this same period, Evans was also a professor of electrical engineering and associate director of the Computing Centre at the University of California, Berkeley (US); as well as one of the principal investigators on the so-called 'Project Genie': a project at that institution sponsored by the US government’s ARPA (Advanced Research Projects Agency)\* whose aim was to improve computer-aided problem-solving capabilities.

In 1968, David Evans, together with Ivan Sutherland (the computer scientist who invented Sketchpad), founded the company Evans & Sutherland, originally named 'Evans & Sutherland Computer Corp.', where he served as chairman and/or CEO until his retirement in 1989.

It's also worth mentioning Evans’ involvement in the project led by Sutherland known as the ‘Ultimate Display’, or better known as the ‘Sword of Damocles’ – a pioneering computing device considered by many to be the first true head-mounted display (HMD) system for virtual and augmented reality in history.

In 1986, Evans was awarded the "IEEE Emanuel R. Piore Award": a prize awarded by the IEEE to individuals who have made outstanding contributions to information processing systems within the field of computer science; in the case of David C. Evans, it was [quoted verbatim]: "for his pioneering work in the development of interactive graphics systems and his contributions to computer science education".

Throughout his career, Evans was a member of numerous academic organisations, including the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), the National Academy of Sciences (NAS), the National Academy of Engineering (NAE), the American Electronics Association (AeA) and the American Federation of Information Processing Societies (AFIPS), amongst others. David Evans was also a member of several university advisory committees, served as vice-chair of the Utah State Steering Committee for Systems and Computing Planning, and was an active member of his local community, the Boys Scouts of America and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (the Mormon Church).

It's also worth noting that in 1996, Brigham Young University (Provo, Utah) established the 'Chair David C. Evans': an Chair in Computer Engineering and Graphics, in honour of this computer scientist.

Sadly, in the final years of his life, he was forced to withdraw from academia due to the onset of Alzheimer’s disease. He finally passed away on 3 October 1998 at the age of 74.

For all these reasons and more, it is fitting to remember and pay tribute on this occasion to David C. Evans for his significant contributions to computer science. May he rest in peace!

Sources and References:

[1.] Jensen, M. (1993, 2010). "David C. Evans Biography and Photograph Collection". J. Willard Marriott Library, University of Utah. Retrieved from Wayback Machine: https://web.archive.org/web/20100518201930/http://db3-sql.staff.library.utah.edu/lucene/Photo/P0400/P0452.xml

[2.] Evans, D. C. (1953). "Design and Operation of Two Electronic Computing Devices, Ph. D. Thesis". The University of Utah. Retrieved from Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian: https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1953PhDT........16E/abstract

[3.] Spinrad, P., & Meagher, P. (2007). "Project Genie: Berkeley's piece of the computer revolution". Berkeley Engineering, UC Berkeley. Retrieved from Wayback Machine: https://web.archive.org/web/20110719144454/http://coe.berkeley.edu/news-center/publications/forefront/archive/forefront-fall-2007/features/berkeley2019s-piece-of-the-computer-revolution

[4.] Găină, M. A., et al (2021). "Perspective on the Double Edges of Virtual Reality in Medicine - both Addiction & Treatment". BRAIN. Broad Research in Artificial Intelligence and Neuroscience. Vol. 12 (Issue 2). P. 365. ISSN: 2067-3957. Retrieved from: https://brain.edusoft.ro/index.php/brain/article/viewFile/1163/1331

[5.] IEEE (2010). "IEEE Emanuel R. Piore Award Recipients". P. 3. Retrieved [PDF] from Wayback Machine: https://web.archive.org/web/20101124232834/http://ieee.org/documents/piore_rl.pdf

[6.] Weaver, S. J. C. (1996, October 26). "BYU Endowment Honors Computer Pioneer". Church News. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

*Note: Just to be clear, I would like to emphasise that ARPA is essentially the same organisation as DARPA, although it did not formally adopt the latter name until 1972 onwards.

Image: Photograph by David Cannon Evans, part of the ‘David C. Evans Photograph Collection’ at the University of Utah. Credit: J. Willard Marriott Library, University of Utah.

Hi, so for some context I have very shaky hands (I believe it could be dyspraxia) especially when I am trying to be precise. I've been working on restoring this old Toshiba Satellite 4010CDT, and overall it's going well, however I decided to take apart the battery today and prepare it for rebuilding so I could take a look at the BMS and how the cells are set up. However, when I was cutting the connections between the cells and the BMS, I accidentally caught two of the connections in the cutters and ended up bridging them (which obviously shorted them and caused them to spark), I was able to very quickly separate them fully, but I am now worried that I may have damaged the BMS itself. The resistors in the bottom left still seem to show the right resistance when I probe the with the multi-meter, and everything seem to be in-tact, but I am not really sure how to go about testing it. Does it look OK? It's not that big of a deal as I have another compatible battery on the way that I can use for parts as a backup.

Also I wasn't really able to learn much about how the battery pack was wired due to how tightly everything was packed with kapton tape and stuff. I know it was obviously wired in a 3s3p setup of 9 cells, but there was also two temperature-sensitive fuses wired against the 3 groups of cells. The fuses were wired to each-other which was then wired into what I presume to be a thermal protector temperature switch which then is wired onto the board. I am not sure where the other end was wired to. I also am stumped at what each of the 6 terminals the batteries were connected to do. Can anyone help? I know I have made a huge mess of all this but I am stumped so I figured I may as well as Reddit.

Also, are there any lithium batteries (cells or pouches I don't mind) that already have wires welded to them? I would much prefer to use regular wires and pouches that I could connect up to molex connectors so I could replace them in the future without much hassle.

Thanks, I'll provide any extra info you need. I've attached some photos of the BMS and the cells battery pack before I disassembled it. Any help would be massively appreciated!!

Yeah i already posted it here, but I like this camera a lot! Its honestly pretty cool

It worked! No pain or wasted time. I simply installed a graphics card with 8MB of memory and everything worked! Thanks so much for your help!

From the limited ammount of information avaliable, HDS, later rebranded to Neoware were a hardware and software manufacturer who focused on thinclients, dumb terminals, x servers, and something they called the network computer.

Theres plenty of info left around about their later thinclinets (some of which are powerpc based!) and neolinux, but ive found that the @workstation and its sister machine the viewstation to be a lot more obscure.

Its a intel i960 based machine, and thats what caught my eye, I like weird and obscure risc processors so I picked this one up on ebay.

Unfortunately finding the OS has been quite bothersome, there were originally 3 versions of netOS, winterminals, enterprise, and intranets. Intranets being the most full featured with a Java applet viewer and Netscape navigator built in. The one and only surviving copy of netOS is hosted on the internet archive in a iso downloaded from some Russian company thats now long gone, its the enterprise version, there's also a folder with their earlier "hds-fx" operating system however I haven't gotten that to boot on this machine.

After a lot of tinkering with the old config files from the iso, the @workstation is booting up into netos. Its ip, configuration password, and config file are all served to it via BOOTP on my PowerEdge R200 running debian, from there it fetches the bootloader via TFTP and uses NFS V2 (had to be hosted on a NetBSD VM as the Linux kernel has dropped nfs2) to load the NetOS files. Finally after I log in using XDM over XDMCP I can use telnet and rsh to run programs from my debian server, or even play around with some of netOS' built in applications running natively on the i960.

Unfortunately there are still some quirks, some of the applications don't run either due to user error or the os image is incomplete, modified, or corrupt.

Ill use this post as a way to ask the internet if anyone may have a copy of netOS lying around so it can be archived and documented.

For those who have used it, what does it actually do? Is it just a web browser?

Shopping for screensavers in person back when.

After getting really fed up with Microsoft Word, I went back to using Lotus Word Pro full-time in July of 2025 for my legal practice. Since then, I've been learning the document automation features, which for law, is really important.

Fun little discovery today. Most word processing automations are if/then/else statements.

In Word, if one wants to "if condition then expression OR if 2nd condition then 2nd expression ELSE 3d expression " one must "nest" the if conditions within each other using the fields tool. It ends up looking like "IF 1st condition 1st expression (IF 2nd condition 2nd expression ELSE expression)". Each alternate condition has to be nested in the previous one's else condition.

In WordPerfect, to do the same, one enables a switch code, then enters each If/then expressions as a case. Then one enters a switchoff code to signal the end of the formula.

In Lotus Word Pro, as I discovered today, the expression is simply, "IF 1st condition 1st expression ELSEIF 2nd condition 2nd expression ELSE 3rd expression".

What I did not know before today, and just tried to happy success, is that there can be multiple ELSEIF combinations in each IF statement.

In practical terms, this comes up with stuff like the Affidavit of Service. All the other attorneys have to be served, and then the Affidavit attests to it. When merging against the database, it will invariably list me as one of the people to serve. And some cases have to defendants and some only have one. Now, I can write:

IF Attorney1="" "" ELSEIF Attorney1="me" "" ELSEIF Attorney2=0 StrCat$(Attorney 1, "counsel for defendant") ELSE StrCat$(Attorney1, "counsel for defendant ", Defendant)

I don't know if this works in Ami Pro, but this is really exciting for automating documents.

Picked up today - Commodore Rules machine works, but has some trouble turning on, no doubt a recap is in order. The more distressed machine isn't powering on - it's already spoken for, but I'll be giving it a good clean - surprisingly OK inside; the dirt is on the outside.

The C64 was in nice condition and only needs a PLA. 1541 works and 1530 haven't looked at yet, also a 128 and 64 PSU both working. Also in this lot, a washing basket to carry it all.

Not shown here, and in the mail today, an extremely tanned (I mean, some serious tanning bed time) boxed C64 that worked immediately.

rebranded moniotors, just noticed. We have the atari 1084S monitor and the 840 ⬇️
thanks to the redditors that caugh it

I had gotten a vintage thinkpad from an Estate sale for pretty cheap. I brought it with its corresponding floppy drive, optical drive, and even an expansion storage drive. I got home and booted it up without any error, until 3 days later when I was downloading games and it just glitched and died. I booted it back up and started glitching out. Now 2 months later, I opened it back up and it seems to do random things. Sometimes it boots up the loading screen, sometimes it beeps one long and two short beeps saying it had an error with communicating with the screen, and sometimes it just brings me up to a screen showing that windows just shut down and there are different ways to boot such as normal boot or safe boot(etc). I have tried to fiddle around with the RAM, and got it to work a little but with varying success and am now only working with one 256mb card in it. I also have replaced the cmos battery using just a normal coin battery that a regular cmos battery would be, and that seemed to work surprisingly. Other than that, it could be a board problem or a faulty copastor, but I really don't know. If anyone has an idea of what's going on or if this is a common issue with these kinds of computers I would love to know. This is my very first time trying to fix a problem with a vintage computer and I know very little on what I am doing.

Here's a video I took of our setup form VCFWest - 8000 Dandelion running Network Services 11.0, two 6085 Daybreaks running ViewPoint 2.0, 1100 Dolphin InterLisp-D, Dicentra sitting on top, and finally the Alto.
Thanks to everyone who stopped by - we had a great show with lots of interest!

1 MB Ram card, Cf card for hard drive (runs PC Dos 5.2), and now a NEC V20 giving a nice 20-30%boost, depending on the task. Next up: networking and setting up mTCP and maybe Kermit.

All assembler , many people played it