RetroTech.


I have something of a nostalgic fascination with elderly technology, particularly PDAs though other bits and bobs make it through the filters.

This year I've decided to have a go at the "Retrochallenge Winter Warm-up 2010" which, in the words of the organizers is

"In a nutshell, the RetroChallenge is a loosely disorganised gathering of RetroComputing enthusiasts who collectively do stuff with old computers for a month."



My plan is to try and find enough time to turn My Apple Newton PDA into a web server and see how well it works.

Watch this space...

2nd Feb 2010.


Well, the month is over as is the Winter Warm-up. How did it go? Not too well. I got NPDS running but its reliability wasn't good. I had to re-start the server every couple of days until I loaded some monitoring software that did it for me. That seemed to make matters worse :-(. I wonder if the Newton Y2k01 bug has struck. There is a patch but too much "real-life" has stopped me from trying it. Ah well, it was fun while it lasted and that's the point really.

Better luck next time.


18th Jan 2010.


Hmmm. It seems to be a bit uppy/downy and that is not good. It wasn't helped by someone knocking the power switch on the router and turning it off, but apart from that it's a bit temperamental. By all means give it a go.

16th Jan 2010.


Tadaaa.. It's alive, though techniclly not finished. The Newton is up and running on the well weird web and you can prove it to yourself by visiting http://randomorbit.dyndns.ws. To be fair though it doesn't have anything interesting though hopefully, more will follow.

9th Jan 2010.


SDC10535

I now have NPDS installed and working. It's possible to surf to the Newt and see a home page. I've not gone public yet and won't until there's a bit more on it. I need to understand a bit more about it. I'm staggered how many modules there are and the option available. So far I just have the Notepad server installed.

2nd Jan 2010.


SDC10537
So far I've found and installed the network drivers on the PowerBook so now I can surf using a 3com PCMCIA ethernet card. The card is a 3Com EtherLink III (3C589D-TP). The driver was written by Cameron Kaiser and can be found here. I've used iCab to get the Newton network drivers (again for a 3com card) from UNNA. I've not got the Newton doing anything over its network card yet as I need to do a bit of rewiring to get it a network port. You'd think 12 network ports in one room would be enough but where did I put the spare cables and how can I get a port in the right place?

All will be revealed next time.

30th Dec 2009.


As a preamble to the Retrochallenge I've dusted off my aged and battered Newton 2100, fired up my PowerBook 1400cs (133mhz, non of your rubbish :-) ) and got the pair taking using the Newton Connection Utilities. I thought it was worth checking they were both still working. All is well.

Jobs to do:-


  • Find and install network drivers on the Newton for the 3com card I've got. I know they exist but where did I put them?
  • Find and install the Web server.
  • Knock up some pages in the note pad and check locally.
  • Set up my firewall and port forwarding and see if the world can see me... Scary.