I had now successfully tested and verified that my recently purchased Surf Squirrel SCSI PCMCIA device from HiSoft are fully working with my old 1996 CD-ROM and also a 52MB Quantum HDD.

Read more on this collective post (Surf Squirrel SCSI via PCMCIA for Amiga 1200 by HiSoft)



I finally got around to name and produce an offical logo for my "retro basement", now carefully called the "Oakvalley RetroLab" EST.1981 (A nod to my first encounter with any digital device on CRT, back in 1981 and Atari 2600!).
Slogan became "PRESERVE. RESTORE. EXPLORE" which sums up what this is all about, my collection, my history and everything else thereafter and beyond. See the logo below!



During 15th of June 2026, pretty close to dinner time after work, an local retired business man called me and said he heard that I love old computers and tinker with them, collects them and kind-of has a museum of sorts (yes, all packed into boxes, but supposed to be part of the Oakvalley RetroLab in future). He said that he was about to throw it into an nearby e-waste, but somebody around him said "stop, talk to Stein". We are locals here and everybody knows about eachother, which in this case was quite handy.

So, what was it? Well, it was an locally bought PC from a computer company way back in 1988 called Futura Datasenter AS where he bought it store-new to take to his business and office. I'm not sure how many years it was in use, but at least last trace of a dated filename was in 1992. After that or some years later, he simply put it in his storage stock, and here we are at least 34 years later.

The PC was not a typical IBM computer, no, it was Atari PC1 Desktop Computer with Atari PCM124 12" monochrome monitor and matching keyboard! It is such a fantastic retro thing to power up and play with. Only thing missing was the actual mouse. Luckily my mouse from an Atari 1040STFM that worked on that computer also worked for this old one. I added a wealth of photos below of this true "Indiana Jones" type of artifact. It found a perfect new preservation home, in my home, in my RetroLab museum. What a fantastic day - and the machine worked straight away. I will take a backup copy of the HDD (just in case), clean it up inside and outside. It runs on MS-DOS 3.30.

Crazy to think about that I recently managed to re-build myself an working old-school PC with an Hercules Card and IBM 5151 CRT ([1997] Aopen AP5T 3.1 + MS-DOS 3.30 + Hercules graphics!) - if I had waited just a couple of months, this Atari PC1 would give me the exact 100% authentic CRT amber monochrome experience anyway. Well, two options is better than one!

To be honest, I did not even know about this one. There's a reason for that as history tells us Atari tried to eat their way into the business world and standard office PC's for serious work this machine did not last long in production world-wide as it basically got lost in the competition. In fact, ChatGPT mentions there might only have been sold either in 2 or 3 digits here in Norway, which makes this machine extremely rare and unique. I really want to extend a big thank you to the local retired business man that took his time to deliver this to me. To be able to continue preserving Norwegian computer history, and in this case, extremely local to me is just priceless to be part of!



I've been collecting and repairing all my Commodore 64's (14+) from all the way back in 2003 and beyond. During those years, I always had a spare board (NTSC, C64 breadbin, 250407) that I simply took components from and would just scuffle it around in my pile of electronics. It was supposed to be just that. Problem is that when all the other Commodore 64's was all repaired, well, the last board was the actual spare board!

So, way back in 2023 I went through all my machines and 1 year later-ish, I started repairing also this spare board with left-over parts of decades worth and it became a long-winded project that took years. But, in late 2025 it showed a timing symptom that I had never seen before, and I tried for months to figure out of it. It really broke my mind and brain!

Then during March 2026, I attended a local computer gathering party locally in Bryne, Stavanger (Lowres #4) with the intention of getting help from other people that actually know how to use and interpret an scope to try and pinpoint the error and here's where the long-winded story had to be documented in form of an hour+ long video to be released during June onto my YouTube channel named "Old-school Computer Stuff".

I correctly named it "FrankenStone64" as a nod to a mad doctor creating a monster in his own lab (Frankenstein). Which means that I'm that mad doctor/scientist/preservationist in my RetroLab creating this monster!

For now, I have added the poster screen below, so look out for that video in near June 2026 history as of this date.



So, after my 27 episode worth of "Unpacking My Treasures" series launched back in November 2025 it would give me idle time to prepare (and shoot) my next TV-Series called "TimePod", where I will re-create my own childhood, teenager and young adult years of every digital devices connected to CRT's, also known as Handheld LCD-Games, TV Game Consoles and old computers spanning from 1981 and beyond.

Well, to be honest, that project is insane and it requires me not only to source, rebuild, setup and rewind myself to every bit of history either lost or found to prepare digital assets, physical assets but also work on improvements for my own presentation system (SOPSVR) where everything have for the past years been edited in, I will just have to say I didn't make that in time for Summer 2026 - as I'm still working on building and planning every episode - and keep finding related material during extensive research and digging - so much fun!

Come to think of it, everything above is really connected to my computer history, so at least a proof that related "TimePod" information is still on-going, which is basically not negative but purely positive. Negative was because I took more time that I had planned, but in the process making it even more richer for recording content and "telling my complete computer history" once and for all.

I will leave you with a teaser screenshot from Episode #1 of TimePod below!



Since I do a lot of creative work (not just Old-School computer stuff), I felt the need to re-visit my old music albums composed on either PC-Trackers or on my real physical studio equipment setup back in the early 2000's. My two official albums are really on iTunes and Spotify for decades already, so I should do some additional marketing to boost sales, hehe.

Anyway, since I recently bought myself for my upcoming birthday a "NVidia RTX 4060 TI, 16GB" graphics card for AI local use (not gaming) I got an spark of creativity to let a bunch of local AI models including ChatGPT 5.5 and Codex to make me FULLY automated with creative freedom as created by AI itself to render my own music tracks and produce music videos - of just a technical analysis of each track and with only the Song Title to create an creative music video script automatically!

Now, that is quite an undertaking and for the past 2 weeks I have been instructing CODEX and ChatGPT like a zillion times to tweak the workflow and to control LLM and ComfyUI to produce it all. Now, yes, text to video AI local models are a bit behind the professional paid solutions, but that in itself brings a surreal artifact of glitching people, wierd constructed non real world clips that gives the production an quite unique and wierd end result, so I just went ahead with it and call it an "experimental artsy" type of project that are similar to other alternative, off world artists out there. I have no idea when its done, but an entire track takes about 5-6 hours to render out. Currently I have 3 albums planned, total of 92 songs, so if we do the math = 6 x 92 = 552 hours, 23 days.

Whatever comes out of this insane and artsy project will be posted to my Stone Oakvalley Studios Youtube channel when its done!

My music are within these genres:
Electronica, Trance, Dance, Acid, Techno, Melodic, Funky, Breaks, Tracked Music, Remix, Raw Mix and Fusion.


Phew, that sums it all up in a 2-hour long freestyle post writing. "All work and no play makes Stone a dull boy"? Nope, this isn't the case for me!