Jonathan Pallant

@thejpster.org.uk

1046 Followers 178 Following

Rust Trainer and Developer, retrocomputing enthusiast

A man with a beard walks down a suburban street in the sun wearing a tan hat and sunglasses
A photo of a CRT. It’s showing some white on black text in the MS-DOS style. It’s asking you to pick a synthesiser, from PC Speaker Tandy 1000 Ad-lib Sound Blaster Roland MT-32 Gravis Ultrasound Sound Blaster AWE32 Roland SC55
A table at an exhibition. It has a table cloth. It has six computers and three monitors on it.
the waxwork from before but zoomed into her pained face
A waxwork of a victoria tea lady, at the STEAM museum
A black tower PC with a window and blue LED fans sits in a messy office. Inside the case the mainboard has a passive heatsink on the CPU, a lot of Sun ASICs and a bunch of PCI cards, one of which is very long. On top of the computer is a Sun LCD monitor showing the Windows 98 installer. Further back is a PC LCD monitor showing the Solaris 8 desktop and a copy of the SunPCI software.
A screen shot showing a CDE desktop. The wallpaper is the Sun logo, tiled. There's a filemanager window showing my home directory, and two applications. One application is titled Macintosh Application Environment and is showing a System 7 desktop, with Finder showing the same home directory. The other application is SunPCI and the screen is white on black text looking a lot like MS-DOS (it's Caldera DR-DOS I believe). A DIR command was executed in R:\EXPORTS\HOME\JONATHAN, showing the same directory listing again, but with DOS 8.3 filenames.
A movie of a TFT monitor showing a RISC OS desktop. The width of the desktop shown on the monitor oscillates wildly, at varying frequencies.
A book cover. It has green borders and a blue centre. There’s a vector plane with 3D shapes and lens flare. It’s called Disk and File Management tasks on HP-UX, but HO-UX looks like the logo of a heavy metal band.
A map of the British Isles. Great Britain is labelled The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland (British Rail and Northern Ireland Railways) with a pin somewhere near Wrexham. The island of Ireland is labelled Ireland (Coras Iompair Eireann), with a pin somewhere north of Belfast. The Irish border is not shown.
An iPhone screenshot of posting a comment in a GitHub issued in portrait mode. There are multiple overlapping GUI elements leaving it largely unreadable. I’m typing a comment but the text is appearing almost entirely off the top of the screen so you can’t read it.
A screenshot of a terminal running top. The terminal has 60 lines. Every single process listed by top is cc1plus.
It's the Github Unicorn themed error page. The error message is "No server is currently available to service your request".
It’s a screenshot of a Pull Request on github.com taken in Safari on iOS 26. The top section is narrow, filling a fraction of the screen. The first comment is rendered full width, comically wider than the area above it. It’s basically impossible to use on a phone in portrait mode.
A screen shot of the Mac App store. I searched for "Zoom" and the top five entries are apps with Zoom in the name that are not Zoom. The sixth is WhatsApp. None of the entries list their official publisher.
A screenshot of NetBSD 10.1, showing Dillo and a terminal. The Dillo browser is open at frogfind.com, running a search for "sparcengine".
A photo of a messy workbench. On it is a tall black tower case (a Gigabyte 3D Aurora from the mid-2000s) with a window. Through the window you can see the glow of blue LEDs, and an ATX mainboard (the SPARCengine Ultra AXi). On the right is a 17" TFT showing the Solaris 7 installer. Further right is an HP 9000 B-class, covered in DDS2 tapes and random 72-pin SIMMs. There's an Atari ST poking out from under some junk too, and a spare SGI O2 power supply.
A very mid-2000s PC case with a window, through which we can see an ATX motherboard lit with blue LEDs. But the board is weird. Is that a Sun UPA slot? Is that the Sun UltraSPARC IIi module from a Sun Ultra 5? In an ATX case?
A Skoda Auto marked photo of the "RADIO NAVIGATION SYSTEM DX" (the same as a Volkswagen MDF), a double-DIN LCD navigation system with a low-res map that looks a lot like AutoRoute for DOS.
A photo of an ATX mainboard. It has a comedically large 120mm case fan sat on top of the cpu heatsink, and a large graphics card in the UPA slot.
A photo of a monitor showing the Adaptec AHA-2940UW BIOS scanning the SCSI bus on boot up. Target ID 1 has six LUNs and Target ID2 has another six. All are marked PIONEER CD-ROM DRM-6324X.
A monitor showing the “Welcome to O2” boot screen
It’s a screenshot of my YouTube 2025 round up video. My top song is Super Love Me. My second is the HP promo video for the HP 9000 700-series featuring the rapper in the yellow blazer. The fourth biggest “song” of the year is blahaj at the waffle house.
A photo of my table at RCF25. There are three HPs, two Sun SPARCstations and an Indigo 2. The three monitors show two foots of NEXTSTEP and a copy of HP VUE playing Columns.
The image says "thejpster.org.uk for old unix computers", but like the "Zohran for New York City logo", in yellow on blue with red drop-shadow.
A photo of some old computers. At the top is a mid 2000s LCD showing the HP VUE desktop at native 1280x1024 resolution. It’s sitting on a HP 9000 Model 340, and we can see the connectors at the rear, including 3 BNCs for video and a BNC for 10base2 Ethernet. It is sitting on an HP Apollo 9000 Model 705, which is on the other end of the comically long 10base2 cable.
The inside of an HP 9000 Model 340. You can see a PSU, some RAM sticks unlike anything from a PC, and a big graphics card with just three BNC outputs
A photo through a very German metal framed and highly energy efficient window. Through it we can see the River Spree, a big lock, and the Alexanderplatz TV tower behind.
It's the SEGA logo with blue stripes, except it says SAGA.
A photo of my wooden TV cabinet. It contains a lot of consoles.
The inside of a very grubby sparcstation 10. It’s full of bugs and spider nests and nuts.
Sun fitted the SPARCstation with DB25F ports, and my null modem cable has a DB25F, so some absolute hooligan has joined the cable to the port with three dupont jumper wires on pins 2, 3 and 7.
The inside of one of the sparcstation 2 units. It has two black Maxtor SCSI hard drives, a network/SCSI card, and is fully stacked with sixteen 30-pin SIMMs
It’s a car boot full of sparcstations. My car boot. My new sparc stations.
A parcel I’m only half way done unwrapping. A big cuboid covered in bubble wrap sits next to a pile of cardboard and bubble wrap.
An HP 9000 Model 712 with no lid on. You can see the polystyrene drive trays, a big black PSU and a remarkably small main board.
A photo of a big CRT sitting in top of a PowerMac 7200/90. The monitor is showing the MacOS 7.6 desktop.
A scanned photo from 2002. An Iiyama VisionMaster 454, a Yeong Yang 0221B case in black, with the front removed extra fans and a side window, and a Canon BJC-4100 printer. And terrible student digs carpet.
This time we have the same blue header and footer, but the header says "Oh no" and the page is just the yellow text "There has been a problem"
It looks like like the powerpoint slide from the previous post, except the formatting is slightly different, and all the destinations are "London Marylebone" because I didn't want to type them all out again, and one train is Delayed (in yellow) and one is Cancelled (in red)
It is an image that looks like an old UK railway station platform information display, circa late 1990s. The heading is "Departures" and underneath are a series of locations and departure times. It uses the font ModeSeven.
A screenshot of an estate agent listing for a house. There’s a photo of a room with a bed. With a TV above it that no one could see from the bed. There’s a bath at the foot of the bed. There are no taps. There is no sink.
A vga cable has been cut and the outer insulation stripped, to reveal three audio grade unshielded wires where the three RGB co-ax lines should be.
A photo of a table. On the table are several desktop computers with LCD screens, keyboards and mice. Under the table are more computers.
A photo of an LCD monitor next to a grey desktop computer (mostly out of shot). The text on the monitor starts: Software in the Public Interest presents Debian GNU/Linux 2.2.
A photo of a slate coloured worktop covered in cut out pieces of paper with hand written labels. They are labelled with things like “Dell 1908 SOG” (a monitor), “Indigo 2” (a computer) and “Intellimouse PS/2” (a mouse).
A CRT monitor from Sun showing the Open Windows desktop
An article in Apple News. The logo is the regular The Guardian logo, not the one for The Guardian Australia. But the headline talks about the “coalition” which refers to the Aussie Government not the UK government.
It’s a photo of a cpu. It says VLSI-ARM. ARM710a. ARM Ltd. The date code is October 1996.
It's a screenshot of the HP Vue desktop, from HP-UX 10.20. It's 1280x1024 but only on 256 colours. The windows have classic Motif window decorations. The system bar at the bottom has delightlyfully retro stripes which actually echo the case design of the Visualize B132L+ desktop it is running on.
It’s a block diagram of the chip showing ask the things I mentioned and a lot more.
It's a screen clipping showing a window. At the top of the window is a title bar with the name "main" and some unusual window controls (because I'm using the FVWM UNIX window manager). The main part of the window is just one giant button, in a bitmap font. It says "Hello, world!".
It’s a really wide PC case with a door revealing seven 5.25” bays and two 3.5” and that’s only about half the frontage. Photographed on a wooden floor it sorts to be floating - but it’s on castors you cannot see. It’s beige though.
A screenshot of pc.js running Windows 95 showing the Alphastation 500 Service Guide, which is a classic Windows Help file. Actually for hypertext media with graphics, it’s not a bad choice. For 1995.
A picture of Luke Wren giving a talk. The slide in the background says Design on RP2350 - Raspberry Pi Technical Talk.
It’s a table showing that the region at 40000000 is Normal, Non-Shareable, Write-Through Cacheable. Device memory doesn’t start until 80000000
A picture of a green microATX PCB in a case. There’s a Pi Pico on the board and no obvious CPU.
It’s a pile of old computers. One says Sun. One says Indigo 2. One says Commodore 128D. The other two have no visible labels but one is beige with a black keyboard.