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We had (and still have) a Zorba. Same Z80 4Mhz deal, but a much larger 7" screen. Zorba info.
Personally, I think the Kaypro II looks pretty sweet.

We had (and still have) a Zorba. Same Z80 4Mhz deal, but a much larger 7" screen. Zorba info.
Personally, I think the Kaypro II looks pretty sweet.

Wow! A keyboard with all of the feel of the famous Atari 400 keyboard!

http://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?c =90

In the early 80's, there were a lot of home computers. A Japanese company called ASCII corporation (directed by Kay Nishi) decided to create an industry standard for home computers: MSX was born. MSX means Machines with Software eXchangeability. This is the true and only meaning, stop spreading the word about another explanation please.

The new standard was based on an existing computer: The Spectravideo SV 318 which can be considered as a beta version of MSX1 computers. Microsoft designed then MSX1 computers and the first version of the OS: MSX DOS 1 (which looks like early versions of MS-DOS).

Almost every Japanese and Korean computer companies made their own MSX computers (except maybe NEC). Bill Gates was then very confident about the future of the MSX standard.

Somebody mod this up - the link is great...

I mean, you want obscure consoles? WTF is a Loopy My Seal Console!!?

I also seem to remember a C64-based console

Indeed you do, and it was called the C64GS. You can read about it (and a whole host of other old consoles and computers) here.

There was essentially no point in buying a C64GS since it did nothing that an ordinary C64 couldn't do, and the GS didn't have a datasette port either, which cut out the vast amount of cassette-based games already available.

"....hmmmm, yea, and can we turn this thing into a cube too? I happen to like cubes..."

Check this out from Old-computers.com: VCS-2600 Bike. It is obvious that this is not a new idea at all...

Check this out from Old-computers.com: VCS-2600 Bike. It is obvious that this is not a new idea at all...

• A mercury delay line driver and receiver from LEO 2
• A PSU from LEO 3
• Acorns, all working:
  • Atom with econet
  • BBC model A serial no 509, with documentation and software
  • BBC model B with econet
  • 6502 second processor for BBC
  • Electron
  • R140
  • R260, with documentation and software (power supply unit dead)
• Sinclairs, all working
  • 6 assorted early Sinclair calculators
  • ZX80
  • ZX81
  • QL, with documentation and software
  • ICL OPD - original designer's prototype, with documentation and software
  • Z88, with documentation and software
• Two Jupiter Aces, including one which was unfinished when the company went bankrupt (ir works, but has no case)
• Memotech keyboard for Jupiter Ace (manufacturer's prototype, nicely badged but doesn't and probably never did work, never went into production)
• Memotech MTX 512, working
• Newbrain AD, with documentation still in shrink-wrap, working
• Enterprise 64, working
• Oric 1, working
• Psion Organiser II
• Microwriter, working, with documentation
• Apricot PC, (charcoal, with 10MB hard disk!), working, with software and some documentation
• Dragon 32, working
• IBM badged Tadpole RS6000 laptop, hard disk is dodgy.

I've also got a late model 32k Commodore PET with dual disk drives, but as it isn't British made I don't think of it as part of my collection and will happily swap it for an interesting early British machine.

Yes, I know this is all pretty ggeky. But this is part of our history - in my opinion an important part of our history - and these machines are being thrown into dustbins all the time. Somebody needs to preserve them. So if anyon'e got a Nascom, or an Acorn Model 1 or Acorn Cambridge Workstation that they don't want, let me know.

• A mercury delay line driver and receiver from LEO 2
• A PSU from LEO 3
• Acorns, all working:
  • Atom with econet
  • BBC model A serial no 509, with documentation and software
  • BBC model B with econet
  • 6502 second processor for BBC
  • Electron
  • R140
  • R260, with documentation and software (power supply unit dead)
• Sinclairs, all working
  • 6 assorted early Sinclair calculators
  • ZX80
  • ZX81
  • QL, with documentation and software
  • ICL OPD - original designer's prototype, with documentation and software
  • Z88, with documentation and software
• Two Jupiter Aces, including one which was unfinished when the company went bankrupt (ir works, but has no case)
• Memotech keyboard for Jupiter Ace (manufacturer's prototype, nicely badged but doesn't and probably never did work, never went into production)
• Memotech MTX 512, working
• Newbrain AD, with documentation still in shrink-wrap, working
• Enterprise 64, working
• Oric 1, working
• Psion Organiser II
• Microwriter, working, with documentation
• Apricot PC, (charcoal, with 10MB hard disk!), working, with software and some documentation
• Dragon 32, working
• IBM badged Tadpole RS6000 laptop, hard disk is dodgy.

I've also got a late model 32k Commodore PET with dual disk drives, but as it isn't British made I don't think of it as part of my collection and will happily swap it for an interesting early British machine.

Yes, I know this is all pretty ggeky. But this is part of our history - in my opinion an important part of our history - and these machines are being thrown into dustbins all the time. Somebody needs to preserve them. So if anyon'e got a Nascom, or an Acorn Model 1 or Acorn Cambridge Workstation that they don't want, let me know.

This has already been done. I'm surprised that more Slashdotters don't know about www.old-computers.com. Those folks have a big and impressive database full of photos and stats.

old-computer.com. Extremely well done.

came across this today, the old computer museum. http://www.old-computers.com/museum ah it brings back happy memories of a bygone age.
days when the Mattel Aquarius, Oric Atmos Spectrums and MSXs were the pinnacle of home computing.

When I want to search for an old or odd computer I always start searching in old-computers.com.

This kind of reminds me of the Agat.

Back in the mid-80's the Soviets cloned the Apple ][, probably as proof of the worthiness of their technology. I'm sure the Chinese are doing a better job. The Agat still had Woz' name burned in the ROM.

Now if only computer manufacturers could make equipment even remotely this sturdy.

I'd argue that a CTC Datapoint 2200 is just as usable today as a P4 will be in 30 years.

Sorry, the best I could come up with:
Apple releases Mac II with synth chip

The result of the lawsuit? Even today, no Mac ships with onboard sound hardware.

Then there's this crappy tidbit:
Pete Dicks which I found because of Apple's Grammy.

ZDNet says Apple Computer paid Apple Records.

Now of course this is all hearsay since I was never involved.

But think of this logic:
Apple Records sues Apple Computer.
Three possible outcomes: They settle. Apple Records win. Apple Records lose.

They didn't win, since Apple computing still exist.
I do not believe they lost.

Yea, and it doesnt look cool. It looks like someone put todays tech into an 80s series vision of the future. And can it be called a palm anymway?

Next time i buy a PDA it will play Mp3s and answer calls in my teeth, display right on my retina and take input via a projected keyboard. Until then ill stay with my atari portfolio...

cu,
Lispy

They're high on nostalgia, and host the website of an Atari 130-XE... it just takes some time to get the pages... ;)

Not everyone spends 100% of his or her PC time staring at the monitor, you insensitive clod! I personally prefer the warm glow of the LEDs on my ALTAIR 8800.

Sometimes I can't figure out WHY people refuse to research themselves.

This might be a good question, "Where did all the hand-held scanners go", but, you can learn about the whole history in a few hours of seraching on the net.

Wine is based upon a preexisting work

Wine is a piece of code. No code from any Microsoft implementation of the Windows API has entered the Wine CVS repository.

Wine is based upon a preexisting work

Define "based upon". The statute fails to define based upon; can you provide any elaboration in case law that supports your position?

specifically the Windows APIs, which are protected by copyright.

"In no case does copyright protection for an original work of authorship extend to any idea, procedure, process, system, method of operation, concept, principle, or discovery, regardless of the form in which it is described, explained, illustrated, or embodied in such work" (17 USC 102).

If re-implementation of a standard were forbidden by copyright law, then every BIOS publisher would be in violation, all the way back to the first PC clone, and the International Organization for Standardization would control all implementations of its standards.

Well, I wrote one for Amstrad Schneider 6128 in assembler (CPU: Zilog Z80 , Speed: 4MHz)

Roman

The CompuColor. This was a great machine. It only had an 8080 processor but was one of the very first "off the shelf" machines to come with amazing (from memory) 128x128 8-color graphics. It also had the disk-drive built into the color screen with a whole 84Kbytes of formatted storage.

• Very poorly put together (I worked in a computer store at the time, and clearly recall the owner/technician/salesman cursing the unreliability of the thing. It was hard to keep the display model working, let alone the one's he'd sold...
• You had to buy pre-formatted floppies from the manufacturer. The "format floppy" command was really justan "erase" command. The OS couldn't (wouldn't) format floppies on its own.
• The pixel-addresssible graphics mode was really broken up into little regions that (coincidentally?) were about the same size/shape as a character cell (my recollection: 384x256, which would be 64x32 character cells at 6x8 pixels each, but I may be wrong). You could only have two colors in any one cell: foreground and background. If you drew two lines that crossed in a cell, the color of the pixels from the first line would coerce the pixels from the first line into the new color. So, while you could individually address all those pixels, you couldn't really control the colors properly.

I'm not even going to get started on the NorthStar Horizon (64K of RAM!, dual floppies!, case made of WOOD!), or I'll start showing my age.

Whoops, too late.

I love old computers and over the years i've visited more than a few of these museum-site's.

These are my two favorites:

- old-computers.com : a fairly new, well maintained site. They already have a big database and it's growing day by day.

- obsolete computer museum: One of the first really good site's.

P.

Is Fading Suns still going?

My last job as a convention troll was to demo it at EuroGenCon '97. I seem to remember it had some really nice background, but the system required buckets of D20.

Then again, I actually like and occasionally run Deadlands, an rpg that uses 6 types of dice, numerous packs of playing cards and poker chips to randomise stuff. It seemed pretty complex but it worked, I especially liked the way magic was dependant on the magician getting a good poker hand.

And if we're talking obscure games, what about SLA Industries? A very cool sci-fi/horror rpg with a unique setting, plus it was produced and typeset on an Atari Falcon.

Around when IBM sold Business Machines?. Yes

Even managed to kludge some hardware together to drive an IBM Golfball typewriter from my Exidy Sorcerer , which at 2.1 Mhz clockrate was the fastest gun in the west. In 1978 that is. Pre-IBM-PC. Pre-Mac. Contemporary with the TRS-80 Model 1 , the Commodore PET and the Apple II. Just have a look at the Old Computer Museum reference.

So just remember that one day, arguments about RedHat vs Debian will be considered "quaint", as the newest alphageek-wannabes argue shrilly about direct-neural-induction vs alphawave-heterodyning on the new Petaflop quantum-Beowulf-cluster-wearables.

While old codgers like me will still be trying to stop said wearables from having the usual code bloat and buffer overflows caused by AOL-Time-Warner-CNN-MicroSoft-General Motors-Unilever-Bell-Boeing-PepsiCo 31337 hackers rather than Software Engineers.

These were extremely high performance machines for their day - when I bought my first Archimedes, it could outperform every computer that the University where I then worked owned, and could run MS-DOS in a window under software emulation faster than many contemporary PCs. The architecture was entirely proprietary, with non PC compatible bus and expansion cards. The machines were moderately successful in the UK and Europe during the nineties - expensive, but you got a lot of bang for your buck. Towards the end, the 'RISC PC' was introduced which had PC-style components and had both Pentium and ARM processors.

Ultimately Acorn found they could no longer compete with the Microsoft hegemony and gave up manufacturing general purpose computers. A number of smaller UK companies are still manucaturing clones.

So, quick answers:

• No, you can't walk into CompUSA and buy a machine that will run this stuff - and you probably never will be able to.
• Sadly, the ARM as a mass market personal computer is now probably history.
• The RISC-OS GUI was one of the best ever, certainly more intuitive that anything from Apple and than any X Window Manager; a project called ROX to build a RISC-OS like window manager is out there.

But recently i discovered http://www.old-computers.com and now i'm addicted.

This site is like a community. Everybody can add a piece to the museum, write reviews,... There are polls, links et. It's just a great site and it's al lot more updated and lively than the (olso great!) obsolutecomputermuseum.

Here's some info on the Agat - a clone of an Apple II.

If you want to buy an old Russian computer, try here (has many pictures!). I don't know if this guy's stock is representative of 1980's Russian computing, but it contains a lot (31) of Sinclair clones, and information on other computers, including IBM PC-compatibles. If nothing, the names listed should help searches.

My 8201-A has over 25,000 hours of runtime and has never needed repairs. The usual bumps and shakes, plus 2 auto accidents and a housefire. (The Mac Centris 650 also survived, tho several connectors needed replaced.) The laptop survived umerous camping trips, including both desert, and winter in the Northwoods. 12-14 hours on 4 AA batteries

Downsides: Text only display, maximum 1200 baud modem, 128 K RAM (upgraded from 16.)

These days I only use it for particularly hazardous duty, ie Rainbow Gatherings

Actaully, it was a 6510, not 8502 (or 6502)

Vic-20 = 6502
C-64 = 6510
C-128 = 8502 + Z80

I spent many hours working on my C-128 with a soldering iron, and I don't recall seeing any 6510s in there. If you want a second opinion you can also look here or hier.

But thanks for playing. We have some lovely parting gifts for you.

Intertec's Superbrain, built around 1979, had dual Z80s (one for diskette I/O and booting, the other for everything else). 16k of DRAM - expandable to 64k with a soldering iron. It ran CP/M 2.2. I last used it in 1989 for a college project.

The first computer I used at school (I think it was around 85 or 86) was an Axel AX-25 computer. We used that with a monochrome monitor. I remember learning BASIC on this machine.

When the teacher wanted to teach us about colour, he used to hookup another computer (can't rememeber what) to a TV, and also hook a tape recorder to it to retrieve stored programs from standard cassette tapes.

After we started learning programming, some of my rich friends bought Ataris that hook up to their TV. We used to play heaps of games on them.

Another thing I remember about my computer studies at school, was my computing teacher actually brought in his university thesis to show us what computer paper looks like. I remember ho amazed we were that you could put rolls of paper and then you rip them apart and they look typed!

It was a great deal of fun sitting down with the manual and a copy of creative computing typing in the programs and learning at the same time. My favorite games that came with it were Trek-80 and target (a shooting gallery type game).

For some links to PT stuff try out the following:
http://www.geocities.com/~compcloset/ProcessorTech Sol20.htm
http://www.corestack.com/machines/sol.html
http://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?c =344
and for an SOL-20 emulator: http://thebattles.net/sol20/sol.html

I also learned to program in 8080 assember, and played with focal and anything else I could find included with it.

The one we had had a dual drive Helios II 8" floppy drive.
These things were the oddest drives I've seen. They had motorized eject and loading ... you slide the disk most the way in and it would "suck it in", and you would push a button and it would whirr and eject the disk. A bad think to do with these was to was to grab the disk as it was still being ejected ... would as often as not cause the drive to jamb.
The other odd thing about the drives is that both drives had their heads mounted to a single voice-coil positioner ... the drives sounded like somebody bouncing on an old bed when they were busy seeking.

Enough reminicing from an old fart computer geek!

- subsolar

But of course the main use the ARM found in the '80s was the Acorn Archimedes line of computers, which were for a while the fastest desktop computers in the world.

The Archimedes, with the neat RiscOS operating system, continued to be built in the '90s, later under the name of RiscPC until Acorn folded in 1998 (just as they were poised to release their Phoebe prototype as a successor to the RiscPC).

However the architecture and OS lives on (as a minority in the soon-to-be released MicroDigital Omega. They have the benefit that the (Strong)ARM processor found other use in PDA's and the like and soon they will also be able to use the Intel XScale chip with RiscOS.