A modern 3D printer being controlled by an ancient KayPro II. It's printing a G-Code file saved on the floppy disk!

@SamTornado and I did an incredible amount of work to get this going. It's connected to the printer via the serial. We also had to figure out how to connect the KayPro to a PC to copy the G-Code over.

Also wrote a custom program in Z80 assembly to stream the file to the printer.

All this to prove that we could have had home 3D printers in the 80s!

#3dprinting #retrocomputing

Still trying to find my people on Mastodon. Please boost if you:

-Like pizza.

-Enjoy watching movies.

-Have recurring dreams that you are a frog.

-Feel distraught when you wake up and realize that you are in fact not a frog.

-Spend your days studying ancient texts in search of a forbidden incantation that transforms humans into amphibians.

@kiwa pretty short log. Gotta pump those numbers up, those are rookie numbers.

@xodium Gatekeeping is dumb.

Set a number, make it rolling, and all problems disappear.

Is retro 15 years for you? 20? Either way, Intel is there.

Graybeards are gonna graybeard though, and I'm glad even at my age of 42 I welcome all the young folks trying to relive their childhoods in the community.

@textfiles I find it interesting that the only mentions of the 386 are in a story about Comdex and an advertisement for a solid state storage system.

The Compaq Deskpro 386 came out 4 months before this issue, and I know there were other models on the market by the new year, yet none showing up here.

Must be publishing lag time.

It seems that some parents worry about how to explain the existence of gay and trans people to their kids.

It’s trivially easy.

“Sometimes, men love men. Sometimes, women love women. Sometimes, people find out that although they have a man’s body, they’d be happier living as a woman - or the other way around.

All these people deserve to be happy and respected, just like you.”

And that’s really all there is to it.

#pridemonth #pride

@polpo I've made flux once or twice in an emergency from bow rosin from my kid's violin lol.

@ulidig @IAmDannyBoling Modern Brother Lasers are excellent in my opinion. No bullshit, just work.

@IAmDannyBoling
I disagree. You should buy HP printers.

Specifically Laserjets from the 90s. They will outlive your grandchildren and still have parts and toner available for peanuts.

HP since 2002 or so has become evil incarnate though, so avoid anything newer than the LaserJet 6 era or so.

@cypnk Improperly... Lol.

Generally in a ziplock, or sometimes just leave it on the printer. Probably part of my issue.

@cypnk I go in cycles. I'll have a month I print 15 things, then 6 months or more without. Mostly because I think of how long it's going to take to get the damn thing dialed in again, so I just start making a list of things I need to print until I have enough to justify the 12 hours of tinkering.

@retrotechtive There's a person on a discord server I spend a lot of time on that has a fair collection of these "SMT Cap in a glass tube" caps. I could reach out if you want to try to keep it looking original.

@DigitalStefan I guess I was just very lucky. My house used to be a radio station in the 80s, 90, and into the 00's. Every single room was wired with Cat5e *and* Cat3 for telephony.

I was doubtful the Cat5e stuff would handle gigabit, but haven't had any issues yet, and the whole house is using gigabit without issue.

@DigitalStefan Reading that story just tells me that I'm well outside the norm in terms of my home networking lol.

"Outside of performance hungry gamers, plugging devices into ethernet ports at home is probably quite a rare thing, so..."

Nearly all the machines in my house are wired. The only real devices that use wifi are mobiles and the wife's laptop.

I own all my own hardware (including modem), and deployed a mesh network.

I once tried to create a program in Atari GFA BASIC that would randomly generate a pleasant on screen pattern. All I managed to do is randomly generate a series of butts and boobs. It wasn't a success.

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YesterGearPC's Retrotech Mastodon Server

Welcome to YesterGearPCs Retrotech Mastodon! We hope you enjoy your stay. This server serves the purpose of discussing retro & vintage technology, primarily computing devices.