Sharp MZ80K
When i was a boy and had a ZX81 i would read magazines and lust after other machines, the PET being one, this being the other. Not the best physical condition, one key is missing for example, but whole and complete otherwise - it came with software too.
After much hoo-haa-ing i was on my way to getting software running on it when the bloody video died. The tube still works, but the screen is filled with garbage characters. A bit pissed about that as you can imagine, especially as i didn't actually manage to load anything, not even space invaders before it died - sigh - Still i have some folk from the Sharp Users Club trying to help out - you never know.
Sniff!
Kaypro II
No we are talking!
My first Z80 desktop system running CPM - HA!
Very pleased with this i must say - on the one hand it works like a dream, the system is in excellent condition and genuinely looks like one careful owner. Sadly i think the floppy disks are a little dirty or mis-aligned. I have a couple of working disks that came with the machine which work fine and i can format and copy and so on- however disks made by another Kaypro don't work on the system, it either says the disk is blank or throws up errors.
Either way to go further i am going to have to open it up and try and fix something -the screws holding it together are kinda stuck however. Still as it stands i have a fully functional CPM 2.2 floppy disk and much fun to play with.
Trying to send stuff back and forward between the Kaypro and the PPC 640 being the main task just now. I had serial transmissions working - kinda - in one direction with the Mac SE, but really i want to try and get something working using PIP.
Yay!
LSI Octopus
Well a big ole PC thingy
Not the best condition, but here is a duel CPU machine from the early / mid eighties. It has a Z80B and a 8088 CPU. It came with the full ring-bound manual and two CP/M 80/86 master boot disks. YAY!
At this point all i can say is that it switches on and beeps at me. I dont have a suitable display as it uses TTL, but the garbage it puts out on the //c monitor suggests that the machine does in fact work.
I cant wait to find out more.
Dragon 32
Finally Mine!
One of those weird moments when the urge just took and there i was bidding on a Dragon 32, which i won, and then there was the stupid cheap Dragon auction that i only went for because there was a joystick too, and then there was the joystick auction with a book that i went for as i didnt think i would win the stupid cheap auction.
I now have two Dragon 32s, two joysticks and one book.
Ahem! - Still it has been much fun playing around with the old games i had as a lad - chucky egg, leggit, the bells, ugh and many more. I even got an original tape of Manic Miner which had the colour cryptographic anti-piracy code thing, that made me laugh. I also found a printer cable for the Dragon and i managed to hook it up to an old inkjet - golly, remember how cool it would have been to actually own a printer for a computer in the early 80s?
I also have bigger plans to try some communication through that port and perhaps to some interfacing of some sort through the joystick port. But as it stands, its just fun.
Sexy machine too, in an Apple ][ sort of way.
ZX81 (again)
I bought one that works!
I also bought an Alphacom 32 printer as the ZX Printer died on me shortly after making the video of it that is on YouTube. Its got a fancy raised keyboard overlay thing on it, which makes typing a whole lot easier. Not as nice to look at as the original, but it works and from that it can be played with.
I have had a good 6 months play out of that wee machine so far. I do like the ZX81! VIVA!
Oh as an aside, a friend came around to visit and i fired up 3D Monster Maze; guess what? after a couple of goes, he completed it. I Have waited over 20 years to see somebody get out of that maze without T-Rex getting you. Simply amazing!
ZX81 & ZX Printer
Well what can i say? A ZX81 (my first computer) and a ZX Printer! - And they work. Ok, kinda work.
The printer has a missing spindle which means the paper kinda drags off the printer rather than turning smoothly when printing. But it does print. Check out my YouTube page for a video. The computer itself also works, but the keyboard has problems. I had hoped that it was the connections inside the machine, but after pissing about for a few hours, i am pretty muched convinced that it is the membrane under the keyboard, in which case it is pretty much goosed!
Still i had much fun for a few days playing about, loading some 1K games and making a wee video for the RetroChallenge Winter Warm-Up 08.
You know i think i hear Ebay calling again.
HP 95LX
The first of the HP LX series and i suppose the weakest too. I think there is still a good market for the 200LX machines. This one runs MSDOS, has Lotus 1-2-3 in ROM, but more fun is the in-built serial comms software. I think with a simple rig, you would be able to use a modem, telnet and even get software on it.
Commodore PET 8032
Ha! Proper old skool again
When i was a lad i always looked at adverts for these and wanted one, well i wanted my brother to have one; he would know what to do with it. They are exactly the way computers should look. Much better than the ZX81 that we had.
Anyway it works fine, sadly the disk drives don't, but it may be fixable, as it stands i will just have to use a tape deck from a VIC20 or C64 - they are easy enough to find. I don't have any plans for it in particular, just get a few games on there are marvel at one of the best designed machines ever. Here are a couple of pics - 8032 Drives
Ergo Elite II
A crappy old Pentium II laptop
Yeah, crap eh? But! it can run WinXP and from this it can run all the Windows disk making software that builds 720k floppy disks, and others too. It has all the usual serial ports, so connecting to old PC or similar machines becomes easier.
So far? Well i am still having problems making some CP/M floppies - kinda working, but not complete. I did get GEM on the M15 tho' so all is well in the world!
Indigo iBook
Ok i admit, not the oldest machine out there, but heck, it's a clamshell iBook. Just who doesn't want one of these?
Anyway - No great need of course and once it arrived i had no need for an OS9 machine and why would i want a slow OSX machine when everything networks fine as it is. So? Linux it is then. Currently running Fedora Core 5, and it was a pretty easy instal. It only took about 5 efforts to get it working right. It has Airport support, which was the reason i went for that distro, and the machine pretty much makes the minimum recommended hardware. It runs well enough and can do full screen video.
The sound was the big issue, but updating the kernel sorted that out. Well worth trying out if you are that way inclined.
Olivetti M15
A PC for a change!
And i have made it hard for myself again. No hard drive on this thing. Just two 720k floppy drives. At this point i have one disk with a very limited version of DOS which i cant do much with. The easy answer would of course be to make more. But have you ever tried to make PC 720k disks on a Mac, a Mac with only a USB floppy drive at that?
Bashing around on virtual PC on the ibook aint getting me anywhere either. I did find an image writer that could do 720k floppies, i stuffed everything on my USB stick and then spent an hour at work one morning failing to write a single bloody floppy as it hated all the disks i had. After trying to write to them, the floppy drive would whir non-stop and then machine would fall over. The machine would then fall over if i put the now buggered floppy disks anywhere near it upon reboot. Even my old friend RawWrite didnt work for me.
Oh the horror, the humanity! - I dont know how many times i have said it now, but i really do need a Windows laptop. A wee Pentium would do. Heck a 486 would work. Oooh! i could play with GEM if i did that.
:-D
Powerbook 160
Another Powerbook 1xx. I admit i dont need another powerbook of this series, and if i did i wouldn't have got the passive matrix screened pb160. The screen really is bloody poor. It allows greyscale, but the poor quality means that it is only usable in 1bit mode - there is just too much banding otherwise.
But really i bought it so i can take the hard drive from it and use it in the powerbook 100 that i have. The powerbook 100, is a much better machine. Its screen is also a passive, but heaps and heaps better.
I plan on using the pb100 in the 07 RetroChallenge, so its all about sorting hardware for the next few months.
The pb160 does have one interesting thing about it though, and that is where it originally came from. It seems that it was the property of the local further education college. About 20mins away from me. It has lesson plans for IT courses and so on, still on the disk. It seems that it was in use there from 1994 to 1997, judging from the document and software dates.
Apart from that, it pails compared to the pb180/c. And as such, being recycled for the pb100 seems fair.
Apple //c (again!)
Yes! Another Apple //c!!
Well as the Apple //c page explains, i didn't get the first one to work so another was bought. It has to be said that the plastics on this one are better, which is a small bonus considering how much it has all cost me in the end. It really is surprising how persistant i have been in trying to get one of these. Anyway, another shipment from the States for the machine and a super German guy for the monitor. The big challenge though is trying to figure out the whole telnet / serial transfer of software. Hmm, Could it be i just buy an external 3inch floppy and be done with it? Hmm, och! Mow where is the fun in that!
Still! The bloody thing works! I have an Apple //c!
Oh, thats loadrunner on the screen. YAY!, I even have Lemonade Stand!! My all time fav game! Double YAY!
Apple //c
Oh my! Look at me i have an old Apple //c. How exciting!!
128k ram, mono green monitor, built in 5 1/4" disk drive with Apple BASIC in ROM
How could this not be cool? Well how about if my US to UK adapter didnt step down the voltage enough, or even at all, and your power supply goes POP! and then you wonder if the computer is blown too, and then you remeber that you tried the monitor first and that may also be buggered and then you remember you have just paid £65 all in, for a machine that you may have ruined before even getting to press a key.
Yup! thats how it turned not to be as cool as it was supposed to be :-(
Still, being positive, at this point i have a cool machine and some work to do to get it working, if that is even possible. If i do get it working, then i have a steep learning curve ahead in getting it to do anything. Hmmm, i think i will give it a page of its own.
Atari Portfolio
Again one of those things that you see and want to play with. Running a mostly compatible version of MSDOS 3, it has potential for mobile DOS fun. However we come back to the lack of a PC to do some transfering of the actual files. Hmm
Still a nice wee machine all the same. The keyboard is a pain to use and does explain why the world dropped the mini keyboards and went all touch screen instead. Very fiddly to use. The built in apps are good, if inclined you can use the text editor to make batch files and other stuff too of course. But again not being able to transfer stuff in and out does limit it to being a fun thing to play with for a few hours only. The manual was very good in this regard though; i think i have another 4 or 5 hours before i am finished playing here.
Along with the manual came the connect software on both 3" and 5" floppy. I hadn't seen a 5" floppy for a while, it was - cute. Still if my recently purchased Apple IIc arrives from America, i will at least have a spare blank floppy disk to use.
The Atari Portfolio has a claim to fame too, it played a small part in The Terminator II Notice the keys in the picture, they have a slope on them running upwards. The idea being that you would type on it at an angle, it should make it easier to type on the mini keyboard, but sadly it does not.
Toshiba T2100/5
Well, well. I have went all PC; kinda.
My brother had found this so he gave it to me to play with. 8mb ram, 230mb hard drive, passive matrix screen, no OS on the hard drive, floppy disk only.
Thank god for the Os/2 floppies i have; a couple of hours later - takes its time to install - there it was happily booting in to Os/2 Warp v3
Its a stand alone OS too, so i didn't need to have DOS running underneath. Of course i can't use DOS software either this way. However i did find a big ole Os/2 FTP (ftp-os2.nmsu.edu) which should solve any problems i have there. Nice wee game of asteroids was the first thing i did.
The screen is good tho'; for a passive matirx, it is one of the best i have seen, more than just usable. That said it also works straight away with the LCD panel that i bought for the two desktop Macs - see below- hardly portable and big on space but good to have the option of a pretty colour screen when using it i suppose. I have not managed to get the sound working yet and i have an external cdrom that i might try, if that works, i could try QNX. But to be honest, it is quite nice having a Os/2 system and an FTP server full of software to play with.
HOOPLA!
Macintosh IIci
Well i approached freecycle with a wanted offer for any old (and i mean old) Mac or Apple computer. I kinda hoped for any of the compact macs or even an apple ][, i got neither. I had always said i didnt want any desktop macs as i dont have the space, the performa went for that reason, but that was before somebody offered one for free.
So someone offered this and i thought it would a nice partner to my SE FDHD; you know, kinda of the same era, both coming from the original expandable macs. So i said yes to this and the one below. My plan is to install AU/X at some point and somehow. But i dont have a monitor; so i bought a monitor; and the monitor doesnt work with this machine. Well it might, but i dont actually know as i dont know if this machine works or not, i need a monitor to find out. And so the chicken and egg problem starts. Is it the machine, the lcd panel i bought or the mac vga adapter. Thats what i am working on.
It would be very nice to have a AU/X machine, yup, yes it would. Oh i do know that it has a graphics card so it doesnt need to use the onboard graphics and all the ram banks are full. Thats about it. Sigh!
Well i bought a video adapter cable for an old powerbook, as i knew that it was outputting at 640x480 and from that, i knew that it should display on the LCD monitor i bought. And, of course, it does not. So i suppose that the mac/vga adapter is to blame. I guess i can buy another one, they are cheap after all. If that doesn't work, then i guess the monitor won't work with my set up and i will need to source an old Apple monitor. Anyone in the Edinburgh area? Anyone?...
Performa / LC 475
One of two machines that i got on freecycle. I didn't actually want it as such, he just threw it in for free. He said that it was no longer displaying video. I have since discovered that these machines can do that when the pram battery dies. It has a network card which could be handy. However as i dont have a monitor at this point (as above) i can't say much more about it.
It would be nice to play with linux on it, but i may need to find a full 040 as linux needs the FPU. But again, who knows. Its sitting there as part of a longer term project. Sigh!
Z88
When i was playing with the NC100 i said i wanted one of these and now i do. Good old Clive Sinclair, where would we computing Brits have been without him?
Anyway, its like the NC100 but a few years older, its also like the Tandy100/102 but newer. Its also quite difficult to get the hang of. Even after playing with it for a while i can still have problems moving around the menus. It really is a 'bigger' machine than the NC100.
It really does feel more like a computer rather than a diary/word processor and with that the learning curve dealing with a weird OS. Still i like it, i should think the rubber keyboard is rubbish, but i find it, erm, charming, weird i know. It is a bit like the keyboard on the spectrum2 but rubber. A weird choice.
What else does it do, well it has a competant range of built in apps and also has BBC basic, or a version anyway. It does not however have a line editor in basic which is a bit amiss if you ask me. You are supposed to be able to edit Basic progs in the word processor app Pipedream, but i have failed in that simple task.It came witha 32k EPROM and it took me a few days to figure out how to even access it. Turns out i cant use it without an EPROM erasre, which is a shame
As said this proved to be a much harder nut to crack than i imagined, and don't get me started on dealing with the script error i had on line 250 in the Z88 BBC basic version of PacMan that i spent bloody hours typing in, all hunched over and sore, squinting at the wee screen.
Ah! What Fun!
But you know what, the thing it has made me think most of all, is that i really need a PC, it is just sometimes so much easier to link old kit to the old IBM PC standard. Its a shame, but a fact. If i could link them up usinf a standard serial cable, then i could actually get Manic Miner on it, how cool would that be? You can get Mac serial cables, but a guy is selling them for over £20!: i think not.
I think i may need to get an old PII laptop or similar. Not sure if i can really stand Win98 mind. Oooer, i have came over all queer just thinking about it!
Powerbook 180c
I admit that since i sold the pb180 i have kinda missed the old gal. I had been looking for a while to buy one again and since i had the regular vanilla 180 the first time i thought i would go for the 180c. And i have to say the screen is excellent too! I think i may like it more than the 540c, it has less shine to it. The keyboard is great as well, dare i say better than the pb1400?
It is of course built like a tank which is comforting with a powerbook about 13years or so old. Although it is sturdy, not quite sturdy enough to travel without packing materials from Austria where i bought it. Sadly it has damage to the hinges which is a shame as the rest of the plastics are great. Still it works and with 14mb ram and a 180mb drive i cant complain. It even has a modem built in.
I also needed a machine for my daughter, she may only be 18months old but she often wants to play with 'dadas' ibook which i can say 'aint gonna happen'! This machine does the trick. What would an 18month old do with an old apple laptop? Well a wee prog called Key Whack sums it up. Mash away at the keyboard and sounds and pictures appear. I actually quite like it too.
Powerbook 520c
What, a 520c? Is this web page not served from a 540c? Is the 520c not the same but with a passive matrix screen and a slower CPU?
Yup, all of that. So why then?
Well I like the 540c it works well has a nice screen and runs all the old software that I want it too, and I can sit with it on my lap and watch tv while I play. I can also string an ethernet cable to my iBook and use its net connection too. All round a nice plan and without too many wires. I couldn't do this of course if it was also serving a web site, too many re-boots and crashes playing with stuff, and so a plan was born! The advantage of a 520c over a PB190 or going powerPC with a PB1400 or PB5300 is that as this machine boots off a pcmcia flash card and this website is on this too and all this is served using wifi, I can just remove the pcmcia module stick it in the 520c, re-boot, and bingo! OS and WebSite all running on a different machine. I don't think it could have been easier than that, well I could have just removed the cards and used them I suppose in a PB190 or a..., hmm. Heck this works too!
So in short this page may be served by the 540c or the 520c, I don't suppose you will ever know.
Perorma 5260
This is my very first free Mac. Didn't cost nowt! Of course i have no need for it, no space for it and no great idea what to do with it. Still even though it is a 1994 machine it plays MP3s, my 1997 PC couldn't do that. And it has an expansion slot so ethernet and such can be added. In only has 20mb ram, so only Os8.1 and a 750mb drive, but these can be sorted easily. Still, what shall i do with it? It was suggested that a music server would be an option, and it may still be, but i did just buy an airport express. Hmmm!
Well in the end i took out of it what i could and dumped the rest, it was just too damm big. Sad when it was working, just old. Alas!
Newton Message Pad 2000
I like the Newton, at least i like my one. It is a limited device, and i think i would have difficulty using one of the earlier models, but as an ebook store for manuals and so forth, it works quite well. I eventually got the Newton online and even connected to iTunes in Os9 so it could play mp3's, but as it stands it is nice to read on and as always it has a Star Trek game! It also feels very nice in the hand. Sometimes with smaller computers and gizmos you want weight in this hand, this is one of those times, very nice to hold: solid.
Actually, i bet i eventually buy an Original Message Pad, once i figure a reason too.
Powerbook 100
Ah! I was very happy to get hold of one of these, it's not the best condition, it has a few dead pixles on the screen, but hey i can cope with that. I bought it as a birthday present for myself, It came with it's floppy drive which was very handy and it works well. A nice portable 'Compact Mac'. 4mb ram with a 40mb drive, i got the networking going without a hitch and it proved to be a good machine to use to download the files i would later transfer to the SE.
The size is good and it is very light, so it came on holiday with me. It obviously can't do much by todays standards but i stuck on a few old games, some hypercard books and with an astronomy program i could place myself in the world and make the most of the dark rainy nights. It was good. Should i have been robbed or my stuff damaged, well far better to loose £20 rather than £200 that a cheap laptop would cost. Does well using sys6 but also surfs happily enough in sys7. However it does seem to be a pig to get talking with all the rest of my machines in sys6, a couple of system installs later and I am still not sure what the issue is.
UPDATE: The hard drive has died, i had a spare that i was given by a guy from 68kMLA but after much phaffing, it was dead too. I have however bought a non-booting machine off of another guy and after swaping the screen, track ball, palm rest and also installing an internal modem, i now have a very nice machine. I also took the CPU and the ram just in case. It has to be said that it was the easiest machine i have ever had to got into. Three screws and the entire machine is open. It goes goes together more like lego; things just fit into place: well designed.
It still does not have a hard drive that works, but i guess i can salvage one from a busted PB1xx off ebay at some point. It still boots to sys6 from floppy and since it has a 1.4mb drive there is more then enough usable space left on the floppy disk for ftp and networking or even a game or two; just not as portable or neat.
Amstrad NC100
I actually bought this for a present for someone, but i had a few months to play around with it before i handed it over. I liked it, light and a good keyboard. I have no intention of getting one but i think i may go for Sinclair's Z88 at another time which is similar.
Anyways, it has a range of basic features ,but it also has BBC basic built in, which was fun, it had been a very log time since i typed in a basic game. If you are PC orientated then you can load CP/M in to it which would have been my prefered retro fun as i have never used that OS. Hey you never know, i may buy one after all, less than a tenner on ebay.
I broke it almost the same day it aririved, as I tried to use a power adapter with a slightly different voltage, and it blew the internal fuse. Still much fun later, I got it working but wrapping a wee bit of tin foil around the pins of the fuse on the motherboard. And it worked again. This was a good thing of course as I did buy it as a present!
Powerbook 180
Sadly i don't have this anymore, i needed the space and there are only so many machines i can fit in to a flat with a baby daughter. I bought this off an American pastor. Thanks to Bush, the exchange rate was excellent at the time, not far off $2 to £1. So the Powerbook plus postage from America cost less than £30. With postage you can pay more than that getting one off ebay here in the UK. I eventually sold this to a guy in Switzerland. One of the nicest ebayers i have ever dealt with. Anyway, this was the machine i used originally to download files and write them to 800k floppies. Or rather 1.4mb floppies covered in tape so the powerbook thought they were 800k floppies. Apart from that it's main use was teaching me all about system7 and the basic ins and outs of old Mac software. Oh, i sold it to the Swiss guy for £27 not including postage, so i made a wee profit too. I must say though as the time has went on I wish I had kept it around, I liked the form factor - solid, like a tank, felt more robust compared to the 540c, which just feels heavy.
Mac SE FDHD
This is a bit of a pet for me i must confess. Practically speaking it is a fine machine, with 4mb ram and a 40mb drive its capable for what it is. I was lucky to find a network card on ebay, it was actually a lot and i got a newtwork card for an SE30 too. I don't have an SE30, but you know, i might!
Anyway once the card was installed i spent a very long time trying to get it to work. Firstly i misunderstood how to actually remove the SE motherboard, i was actually forcing everything down the wee slots on the case instead of swinging it in. I actually covered parts of the card in oil so it would slide in better. Once i figured it out i was surprised that it still worked. After this i had the problem of trying to get it to connect to my network, after much huffing and puffing i bought on old netgear hub which sorted the problem. Old Mac networkcard going to old hub going to new router. Worked a trick and i now had broadband on my Mac SE. I was a happy puppy i can tell you. Watching my copy of fetch list the directory of another machine in the house made my heart skip a beat. Sad i know, but i was very pleased.
The next obvious step was to set it up as a webserver (here) which was easy after the connection was sorted. And it worked well enough, slow, but it worked. It was running for a few days.
It sits happily now under the 540c server doing its bit now and then. It networks well in sys7 and sys6 which is something the PB100 seems to have issue with, so it often has to mount the disks which the PB100 can then access when using ethertalk. I think only a 512k Mac would make me get rid of it. Would I swap for a SE/30 or Colour Classic? Nope! I would however like them both too.
One day when i was sick and off my work i made a video of the SE surfing the web which is on the pic/vid page. I thought i was being very geeky when i was doing this. It was nice to know i was not alone in this geekyness!
YourTube recorded over 250 views in the first two weeks it was posted. So many geeks out there :-)
Mac Plus
I only had this for a couple of weeks before the screen went. But what floppy driven fun. I nearly got this online. My problem was finding an ISP that supported 33k modems and below. In todays world this proved to be a problem. I did get it to dial out which was some measure of success. Coming originally from WinXP it was a marvel to see what could be done and run from an 800k floppy. I have no room, but if a Plus came my way, i could give it a home. Perhaps turn it into a clock. Prices do seem to be weird for it mind you, generally around £10 with £15 for postage, but ebay had one going for over £50 at the end. Hmm £50 for a common as muck compact? Seemed weird to me.
Powerbook 1400
This was my first Mac and was the start of my eventual switch from Windows. It was hardly a speed demon even with the PPC upgrade, but again i had a soft spot for it and i kept it around for nearly a year. In the end i sold it on ebay. I split everything i had up and sold them as individual lots and scored £250 for the lot. More than respectable for a machine such as it was, did i say the screen was damaged? Heck new ebayers, you got to love them.
By the time i sold it i had upgraded the ram the hard disk and the CPU and it was using a WiFi card for surfing so it was a nice, if old wee machine. I have thought about buying another, but i was lucky to find a RevC PCMCIA module for the 540c, so i didn't need to in the end. That said a great and small machine, well worth owning. Well...
If your into that sort of thing of course.
G3 ibook
My first 'proper' Mac, it was running OsX had WiFi built in and it ran most of the stuff i needed it too, and well, it was my first proper Mac, I properly started the 'switch'. If your not there yet then let me say, 'just do it!' - No wait that is another company altogether, anyway, I eventually bought a G4 iBook to replace it, but i kept the G3, partly because it was 12" but mostly because it could boot Os9. This turned out to be handy when playing with the Newton.
A word for the little guys!
Asante EN/SC
Where would it have all stopped had i not been able to get these old Macs online in one fashion or another. The EN/SC meant i was able to get the powerbook 100 / 180 and 540c online, and networked: very handy. As a matter of fact there is much to be said about just buying various network adapters 'just in case' - a machine is so much less if it can't be networked
Orinnoco Silver
Without this i couldn't have connected the Newton to the ibook running Os9. Package instals over WiFi with the Newton, Geeky but cool. And it is the very card that is in the 540c that is serving this page.Still I paid too much for it, I sold one a year or so previously for £15, this one I bought for £25, well in my defence I really wanted one that was going to work with the newton, and I only knew, that this one would.
External //c Floppy Drive
One drive works, but when you are trying to do disk copys, disk transfers and simple make life easy for yourself. Two disks are better.