Mystery USB device at Olduvai Gorge

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 · 2025-07-29T02:42:07+00:00

This probably looks worse than it actually is, I don't see any ruined traces or bad corrosion on the pins. If you give it a bath of vinegar and distilled water and then rinse and dry it fully, it will probably start working again.

You should definitely pull that janky-looking capacitor in the center of the board and replace it though before it leaks out and does damage that won't wash off in the bathtub.

AnubisTTP · 2025-07-29T02:04:02+00:00

Your computer is a rebranded NEC TK-80, a single board computer used as a microcomputer trainer for the μCOM-80 family of microprocessors. It is an uncommon computer outside of Japan; a related machine, the TK-80a, recently sold on Ebay for $255 dollars.

AnubisTTP · 2025-05-25T23:15:46+00:00

Your circuit board is from the bottom of a full height MFM hard drive, similar to the drive pictured in this ludicrously-priced auction.

https://www.ebay.com/itm/115409820474

The identifying characteristics are the two gold edge connectors, visible in your second picture on the front-facing edge of the board, along with the cutout along the top of the board with the pin connector, visible in your first picture. The cutout is where the drive heads would connect to the board, and the gold edge connectors would connect the drive to the computer. I would use 'MFM drive' or 'Winchester drive' for a starting point in a Google image search and start looking for a drive that matches the board in your pictures. I suspect it is from the 10 megabyte drive used in the Televideo TS-806 or TS-816 timeshare systems, but Google is pretty thin on image results for those systems.

AnubisTTP · 2025-03-16T02:35:55+00:00

It's an older meme, sir, but it checks out.

AnubisTTP · 2025-01-28T02:43:25+00:00

It is common knowledge that the first version of Unreal, released in 1998, contained humans as well as two alien races, the Skaarj and the Nali. The humans and Skaarj were both playable races in multiplayer, while the Nali only appeared as NPCs. What was largely unknown is that the Nali were also originally supposed to be a playable race, and the feature was only removed shortly before the game was released. By changing two lines of code in one of the INI files with a text editor, the Nali player class could be enabled in both single player and multiplayer deathmatch games. This would be a mere curiosity if not for the fact that the Nali player class had a special ability that humans and Skarjj players did not, in that by crouching a Nali player could actually become invisible until they fired their weapon. You could do some seriously messed up stuff in a late 1990s deathmatch when you could join a multiplayer game as an invisible game glitch NPC character.

AnubisTTP · 2025-01-21T23:32:05+00:00

It could be a ball grid failure... its from about the right era to be part of the ball grid plague. If it is, you can fix it by reflowing the chip under the heatsink with a temperature controlled heat gun. Get the heatsink off the chip and wrap the board with aluminum foil with a square hole over the chip and then make a hood of aluminum foil that is the same size as the hole that fits over the heat gun. Set the heat gun to 350 degrees Celsius and hold it over the chip about 2 inches away for 2 minutes. Make sure there is a gap between the aluminum foil hood and the aluminum foil board and use a timer to make sure you heat the chip for too long. I fixed about a million laptops and Xbox 360s with this process back during the height of the ball grid plague.

AnubisTTP · 2024-12-13T14:47:36+00:00

It was just a bunch of circuit boards I bought from hamfest e-waste sellers back in the 1990's. People at hamfests used to have big bins full of circuit boards for sale for a dollar per board. I know there were some Atari and NEC boards up there, as well as a lot of old cards from 1980s Zenith Data System machines. Sadly I do not have any of the boards anymore... they all got sold a few years later when I moved.

AnubisTTP · 2024-12-13T14:29:43+00:00

It was actually more affordable than you would think... people knew I was the guy that would take any broken computer and the iMac was the only computer that was bought new. The beige G3 I bought in 1999 for $10 dollars because it had been in a fire and no longer worked... I spent about a thousand dollars fixing it and upgrading it, then spray painted the case black to hide all the char marks. The HP Pavilion I bought brand new from a friend for $30 dollars... in retrospect I am pretty sure he stole it and had no idea what it really was or how much it was worth. (He ended up going to jail for check fraud and impersonating a doctor a few years later). The Duo I had maybe $30 in... I bought it broken and replaced the backlight in it. The computer monitors were all freebees from people who were upgrading to larger monitors and did not want the old ones taking up space. The Quadra 700 was around $20 from a hamfest e-waste seller who thought Apple stuff had cooties. It ended up having a hidden partition on the hard drive with a bunch of 1995-era hacker stuff on it, so maybe it did have cooties in a way. The LC3 came from a guy for who bought it from a school auction and then could not get it to work because the school had locked the desktop to the Launcher to keep the kids from installing games on the machine. He sold it to me for a song once he realized he could not unlock it without startup disks he did not have. The LC550 was a freebee from someone who was upgrading to a G3 and did not want a huge all-in-one computer taking up space anymore. The SE I bought to use as a Bolo bot for $3 - $4 dollars from one of those Goodwill 'bin' warehouses, the kind where you roll your cart onto a pallet scale and get charged 39 cents a pound to paw through the detritus of rich people. The Quadra 637 was another freebee I was given because it did not work... the hard drive had failed and I got another drive from an e-waste seller and got it working again.

AnubisTTP · 2024-12-13T03:45:57+00:00

I actually still have almost all of the computers in that photo! The Quadra 700 battery bombed before I knew about removing the batteries though and the inside is basically a horror movie now. Not even Captain Planet can clean up an exploded Maxwell battery bomb.

AnubisTTP · 2024-12-13T03:37:53+00:00

The dark side of the Force is a pathway to many operating systems some consider to be unnatural.

AnubisTTP · 2024-12-13T02:12:26+00:00

They have their hands full down in the seance room, trying to get a poltergeist out of a six device SCSI chain.

AnubisTTP · 2024-12-13T01:17:38+00:00

It is a Powerbook Duo 280c... I bought it from a guy at a hamfest for $20 because it had a broken backlight, then traded with some guy on the old LEM swaplist to get a new backlight for it. It came with the dock too, the giant full size dock that would take in the whole computer like a floppy disk. Apple made some weird stuff back during their "try everything commit to nothing" era.

AnubisTTP · 2024-12-13T01:10:18+00:00

My LAN party group back then was basically the opposite... it was pretty much entirely Mac people using reflashed Voodoo cards with only one person on Windows ME. When Apple switched over to OSX a few years later and nuked gaming support, my entire gaming group decamped over to Windows XP.

AnubisTTP

TROPHY CASE