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11 posts
A computer once filled a room and required a specialized staff to operate. The path to a device that fits in a pocket wasn't one invention — it was a compounding sequence of separate breakthroughs across decades.
Priced at $1,565 with 16KB of RAM and no disk drive, the IBM 5150 didn't look like a revolution on paper. Its open architecture is what made it one anyway.
IBM built the 5150 quickly, using off-the-shelf parts and an open architecture, expecting a modest niche product. Instead it became the template every PC-compatible computer still traces back to today.
A complete walkthrough configuring a printer on Haiku using the Print Kit's transport and driver add-ons, from adding the printer through to printing a real test page.
A complete walkthrough configuring the USBASPI/ASPIDISK driver chain to give FreeDOS a working drive letter for a USB flash drive — DOS-era drivers bridging a much newer standard.
A USB flash drive doesn't show up as a drive letter under FreeDOS. Since there's no native USB support, this comes down to getting USBASPI's driver chain correctly configured, or falling back to BIOS-level access.
A Bluetooth device won't connect, keeps dropping, or macOS doesn't see it at all. Here's a systematic path through the most common causes before resorting to a full reset.
Haiku's driver model inherits BeOS's modular, hot-pluggable design — but as a much smaller, community-driven project, its hardware support has real, practical limits worth understanding upfront.
A DOS game or application reports no sound, or the wrong sound, almost always tracing back to a mismatch between the BLASTER environment variable and the card's actual jumper or Plug-and-Play settings.
A DOS program can't print, or output is garbled — usually a port configuration, IRQ, or cable-mode mismatch, all diagnosable without any special tools.
A sound card, network card, or serial device doesn't work, or the system hangs when two devices are used together. Classic IRQ conflicts, and how to actually resolve them.