The Wiert Corner – irregular stream of stuff

Jeroen W. Pluimers on .NET, C#, Delphi, databases, and personal interests

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Archive for the ‘History’ Category

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A ton of keyboard conversions via GitHub – trekawek/mac-plus-ps2: Arduino project that allows to connect a PS2 keyboard to Macintosh Plus

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/12/12

This is for earliest compact Apple Macintosh systems predating the introduction ADB (Apple Desktop Bus) on Macintosh SE and Apple Macintosh II (and Apple IIgs which technically is not a Macintosh):

[Wayback/Archive] GitHub – trekawek/mac-plus-ps2: Arduino project that allows to connect a PS2 keyboard to Macintosh Plus

Before continuing to an even more impressive keyboard and mouse interfacing project below (basically many kinds of modern keyboard, mice and gamepads to many retro computers) that I found thanks to doing some more research after finding the above one, lets summarise where the above one is still useful for:

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Posted in Apple, Arduino, Classic Macintosh, Development, Hardware Development, History, Power User | Leave a Comment »

Karateka IBM PC Model 5150 Longplay – YouTube

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/11/28

Karateka (which appeared way before the even more famous Prince of Persia which appeared 5 years later) memories of the past, for which I totally agree with the conclusion: the game on Apple ][ was way better:

[Wayback/Archive] 𝔸𝕟𝕒𝕥𝕠𝕝𝕪 𝕊𝕙𝕒𝕤𝕙𝕜𝕚𝕟💾 on Twitter: “@textfiles Jordan’s opinion on the IBM version”

JULY 31, 1986 Just looked at the JULY 31, 1986
Just looked at the “final” version of PC Karateka. It seemed OK, I guessed, except for overall sluggishness, frequent disk accesses, and a few minor graphics glitches. Then I booted up the Apple version to compare… and it was so smooth, it made me want to cry.
The PC version is maybe 50% of what it should be. I can’t even tell these guys s what to fix… it’s a million little things, and they’re just not up to the hassle. That kind of attention to detail is why the Apple version took me two years. This version is probably the best I’ll ever get out of them.

You can play the PC version online at [Wayback/Archive] Karateka IBM Version 1986-01-30 (1986-02-04) (ID 0873) : Jordan Mechner : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive

Internal Alpha version (1986-01-30) of the IBM port of Karateka by Jordan Mechner.

It was ported to many platforms, and there was a great documentary too. So there are more YouTube links below than [Wayback/Archive] Karateka IBM PC Model 5150 Longplay – YouTube which has this great description:

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Posted in 6502, 8086, 8088, C64, Commodore, History, IBM PC Model 5150, Power User, Retrocomputing | Leave a Comment »

Hacking in Progress or HIP ’97 – corbosman on Twitter: “Just found this highly advanced drawing of the network setup at HIP97. The ??? probably meant we didn’t have the hardware for it yet.”

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/11/17

Such a cool historic artefact: [Wayback corbosman on Twitter: “Just found this highly advanced drawing of the network setup at HIP97. The ??? probably meant we didn’t have the hardware for it yet.”

It is a nice addition to the existing HIP97 information, of which some is at:

This is the diagram of the unique network [Wayback/Archive] corbosman on Twitter: “@bwgveer @Quux_NL The fact we were able to bring 6mbit into a field in the middle of no where in 1997 (the era of dialup) was quite a feat.”:

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Posted in Conferences, History | Leave a Comment »

Een paar linkjes waar Jan Disselkoen genoemd wordt

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/11/16

Het is al bijna 20 jaar geleden dat Jan Disselkoen overleed, en doordat hij al in 1995 permanent werd uitgeschakeld is er vrijwel niets op internet over hem te vinden.

Toch jammer, want hij was naast een aimabele man ook een erg goede radiotechnicus bij de NPO en haar voorlopers.

In de studio de rust zelve, dat kun je op deze twee video’s zien (de eerste een fragment in zwart-wit, de laatste ruim 12 minuten in kleur waarop Jan rond 10:00 achter de mengtafel zichtbaar is tijdens de allereerste uitzending van Radio Veronica als Veronica Omroep Organisatie in het publieke bestel om 08:00 op 28 december 1975 tijdens de opening van Hilversum 4).

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Posted in About, History, Personal | Leave a Comment »

More Apple ][*, //* II* and classic Macintosh hardware upgrades

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/11/14

The mini micro classic Apple emulators related post last week became way too big, so here is the classic Apple 2/Macintosh hardware upgrade part follow-up I announced in Some notes on mini/micro Apple //e emulators.

Last week, I mentioned [Wayback/Archive] ARC Javmaster – YouTube. Let’s continue from there for an even bigger post (:

Javmaster actually has a shop at [Wayback/Archive] Welcome to the 8-bit stuff store – 8 bit stuff cool retro computer 3D gadgets and geekery with a lot of interesting (mainly Apple ][ era related) retro things like:

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Posted in //e, 6502, Apple, Apple ][, Classic Macintosh, History, Macintosh SE/30, Power User, Retrocomputing | Tagged: , , , , , , , , | Leave a Comment »

ASCII Art Archive, my own ASCII signature, plus many FIGlet and TOIlet ASCII font art links

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/11/11

Earlier this year I bumped into [Wayback/Archive] ASCII Art Archive

This brought back instant memories about ASCII art, so in the future expect af few unfinished blog-posts that were in my “if I ever get to it archive” about it.

Let me start with my very limited ASCII art I used in late 1980s and early 1990s newsgroup and LISTSERV mailing list signature I reconstructed from a comp.virus post¹ having some very old contact data²:

    o  _   _  _   _   _            voice: +31-2522-20908 (18:00-24:00 UTC)
   /  (_' |  (_) (_' | |           snail: P.S.O.
__/                                       attn. Jeroen W. Pluimers
                                          P.O. Box 266
jeroenp@rulfc1.LeidenUniv.nl              2170 AG Sassenheim
jeroen_pluimers@f521.n281.z2.fidonet.org  The Netherlands

Shortly after that, my main source of income moved from the command-line to GUI based tools, so I temporarily kind of lost interest in command-line tools and customs. In that period FIGlet (see below) got created, which I totally missed (though I vaguely remember the 1.0 version being named newban).

The link at the start of this blog post not only pointed me to FIGlet, but also has a lot of examples (like some [Wayback/Archive] ASCII Art Logos – asciiart.eu) of which many by ASCII artist Joan Stark, and also links to JavaScript based tools:

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Posted in ASCII art / AsciiArt, Development, Encoding, Fun, History, JavaScript/ECMAScript, Retrocomputing, Scripting, Software Development | Leave a Comment »

WinWorld: Microsoft Office 95

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/10/29

Just in case I ever need it for historic reasons:

[Wayback/Archive] WinWorld: Microsoft Office 95

Because back in the days various Office products had localised VBA (at least German and French products had; I’m not sure about other languages)

Via:

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Posted in Delphi, Development, History, LifeHacker, Office, Office 95, Office Automation, Office Development, Power User, Software Development, Windows, Windows 95 | Leave a Comment »

Algorism and algorithm are named after Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi, founder of algebra (via @annefleurdd)

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/10/14

I was in my 50s when I learned that both algorism and algorithm are named after the 9th-century Persian mathematician Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi who founded algebra.

Related:

Via:

–jeroen

Posted in Algorithms, Conference Topics, Conferences, Development, Event, History, Software Development | Leave a Comment »

30+ years of Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines from 1985 (and earlier Lisa / Apple II equivalents)

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/09/25

I hope someone has also archived all these in the Internet Archive as this is a great collection of historic material: [WaybackSave/Archive] GitHub – gingerbeardman/apple-human-interface-guidelines: Apple Human Interface Guidelines, et al.

If you have more of them: add them via a pull-request.

Related: [Wayback/Archive] Making It Macintosh: The Macintosh Human Interface Guidelines Companion : Apple : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive

A client that went belly up in the early 1990s had all these and similar books. In retrospect, I though have found a way to obtain them but back then I didn’t value the uniqueness of them enough and didn’t have the storage space for it (I lived in a 30m² apartment).

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Posted in //e, 68k, Apple, Apple Lisa, Classic Macintosh, Development, Hardware, History, Mac, NeXT, Power User, Software Development, User Experience (ux) | Leave a Comment »

Reminder to self: find back if non-archived early GMAIL (alias for GOLD MAIL on VAX/VMS) can be found back

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/09/08

Blog posts I should check:

In the meantime:

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Posted in History, Power User, Retrocomputing | Tagged: , , , , | Leave a Comment »

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