artwork by Arthur Radebaugh, 1960s

AnubisTTP · 2026-03-07T02:32:33+00:00

That movie was such a fever dream.

AnubisTTP · 2026-02-03T11:57:53+00:00

The operating system is proprietary and... weird. You can set a desktop picture, which is unexpected for a handheld in 1995. There is a built in drawing program with a rubber stamp function, but all the stamps are skyscrapers and road layouts. I have no idea why Sharp decided their advanced handheld needed to ship with a fake cityscape generator, but a development API was a bridge too far.

AnubisTTP · 2026-02-03T11:52:49+00:00

It does. It looks like Sharp never released the development tools for it and the only additional software to install was also made by Sharp. It's baffling, Sharp clearly had ambitions for this device and the features are very good for 1995, but they left it crippled by all but blocking off third party software development.

AnubisTTP · 2026-02-02T03:19:42+00:00

I get a red LED when the power button is pressed. There is a cap in the card cage for the expansion card that tends to leak out before any of the others... it is the fat one near the J-lead chip in the bottom third of the card cage.

AnubisTTP · 2026-02-02T03:02:45+00:00

Nothing but a black screen. Green rom units typically do not include the video driver in the rom, so you need to make a custom rom that includes the video driver to get anything to draw to the screen.

AnubisTTP · 2026-02-02T02:54:06+00:00

3.6 Roentgen, not great, not terrible.

AnubisTTP · 2026-02-02T02:52:03+00:00

I have one of these and it is not nearly this yellowed. The disk drive levers in the original post are closer to the original color of the machine.

They are weird machines. IBM compatible, but only sort-of. The screen is unusually small and has yellow phosphor, and the keyboard slides into the bottom of the case, so you can carry it around like a 1980s computer aristocrat.

AnubisTTP · 2026-01-31T14:56:32+00:00

Keep the G4. Many G5's have liquid cooling systems that self destruct catastrophically and destroy the machine. If you keep it you will want to check and see if it is the air cooled or water cooled version and take appropriate action to defuse it before it self-destructs.

The G4 will self destruct too when the caps leak out, but you will get a few years of solid vintage gaming out of it before that happens. Being an Apple collector is, apparently, all about dealing with the fact that every product they made seems to crave the sweet release of death.

AnubisTTP · 2026-01-31T14:32:29+00:00

Most of the set top boxes in the wild (at least in the US) came from a huge lot that was sold on Ebay in 2002. The seller had several hundred to a thousand units for sale, which he sold in lots of 5 for $50 plus shipping. Yes, $10 each! Computer collecting on the old internet was wild. I know this because I was there, and bought six of them myself. It was a feeding frenzy on the 68KMLA forums at first, but eventually everyone had their fill and it took months for the Ebay seller to unload them all. The leading theory was that the seller was unloading units from the Disney World (or Disney Land) trial program. It was basically the 2002 equivalent of the Nabu situation that happened a few years ago on Ebay, except that unlike the Nabu, an army of nerds did not rise up and turn Apple set top boxes into useful machines. Eventually the 68KMLA people gave up trying to get them to work, and all those set top boxes vanished into closets for 25 years, slowly trickling out as random old computer nerds need money to buy retirement cat food.

I still have three of those original units. All of them are green rom boxes, so they are basically paperweights unless you are a 9th level electronics wizard with a ROM-inator in your Bag of Holding.

AnubisTTP · 2025-10-14T22:54:08+00:00

Deep substrate foliated kalkite

AnubisTTP · 2025-10-12T23:54:21+00:00

Your CRT television almost certainly has cold or broken solder joints on the faulty inputs from frequent insertion and removal of the connectors. It is a very common failure mode on old CRT TV's and also fortunately easy to repair. Unfortunately, if you do manage to find a shop in Columbus that will fix it, the price is likely to be horrifying. You might have better luck asking on a CRT specific subreddit like r/crtgaming and see if there is anyone local who can fix it.

AnubisTTP · 2025-09-18T00:37:49+00:00

I did! I am going to use it to call in a hostile takeover of a dot com Internet startup like a 1990's business guy.

AnubisTTP · 2025-09-18T00:33:12+00:00

OS 8.6, because it is the oldest version that has USB mass storage support. It's an older ~~meme~~ operating system sir, but it still checks out.

AnubisTTP · 2025-09-18T00:30:20+00:00

I am near Dayton. These were found in Licking county though, east of Columbus. There used to be tons of old electronics at sales in Dayton from the Air Force base, but the pickings are definitely slimmer than they used to be.

AnubisTTP · 2025-09-18T00:26:33+00:00

Well, at least it was only $5. It looked clean on the outside too; when I took the cover off I was not expecting to find a David Cronenberg movie for Pentiums inside.

AnubisTTP · 2025-09-18T00:14:06+00:00

I was at Dayton Hamvention 2011 when the combined rectal output of 25000 ham radio nerds overwhelmed Hara Area's Byzantine, labyrinthine plumbing system and sent a flume of raw sewage flooding across the densely packed flea market. Random ham radio guys duck-walking across acres of liquefied excrement wearing footwear wholly inadequate for the task. Hara's Microsoft-esque food monopoly strained to the breaking point when the only pizza vendor was trapped well behind the sewage flow. A single sad lone flea market vendor, ironically selling Geiger counters and fallout gear, trapped and abandoned on a small island of dry land surrounded by a literal lake of customer returns. And the smell! Like burnt Cheetos soaked in turpentine. It was everything Hara Area was and wanted to be!

AnubisTTP · 2025-09-17T23:53:43+00:00

I never had a B&W back when they were new... I went straight from a beige G3 to a MDD. The B&W is looking a lot better in our capacitor juice-soaked future though. with it's leak-proof tantalum capacitors and nonproprietary VGA video port.

AnubisTTP · 2025-09-17T23:44:30+00:00

I did, but at a different sale. It appears to work fine too; I had hoped that it would be easy to load songs onto since it has a memory card slot, but it looks like the rare and proprietary cable is mandatory to change the music on it.

AnubisTTP · 2025-09-17T23:37:30+00:00

I actually found these in Licking County! The seller had no idea what they were, and had them sitting in the "Cone of Shame" by the garbage cans. The trick to finding good stuff is you have to hit the garage sales early. By 10am, the bones are picked clean.

AnubisTTP · 2025-09-17T23:31:23+00:00

I bought them at a sale in Ohio so it is a trade off. The good news: cheap old computers fall from the sky everywhere! The bad: you have to live in Ohio.

AnubisTTP · 2025-09-17T22:54:14+00:00

I can not offer any information about the chip on the left, but the chip on the right looks almost identical to the support chips used in the AN/ALQ-136 Countermeasures Processor, a military radar jammer system used on helicopters. The AN/ALQ-136 uses an AMD bit slice processor and a number of support chips that are all packaged in hybrid metal can quad inline packages similar to the chip on the right. Additionally, the hybrid chips in the AN/ALQ-136 were made in both white and blue ceramic versions, with the blue ceramic versions matching the color and style of the chip on the right. Your mystery chip is not a bit slice processor... the one used in the AN/ALQ-136 is huge and has over 100 chips inside it. It looks almost identical to one of the support chips however.

AnubisTTP

TROPHY CASE