A look at the computers I have in my collection From the first blinking cursor of the Sinclair ZX80 through to the glory days of the Amiga 500 and Atari ST with their floppy disk based operating systems. The home computer was, for us at least, a portal to another world We were the nerds who wanted just that little bit more from their games machines, and these home computers provided that, and more for us. Games, of course were still hugely important, but typing in commands in BASIC was every bit as cool to us. I expect most people started here... 10 PRINT "HELLO WORLD" 20 GOTO 10 RUN I know I did. There are 26 home computers in the museum
One of these Plus 4's was used to house a Raspberry Pi Zero and a Keyrah V2
This was my very first proper computer, I previously had a Binatone TV Pong game which came from my parents.The Commodore Plus4 was a bit of an oddball, it was never as popular as the C64, lacked the SID sound chip but had slightly better graphics with 121 available colours (16 base colours with 8 luminence levels, but black is always black) but the machine didn't have hardware sprites, and compatibility with the memory lacking Commodore C16 meant cut-down games. It was common practice to develop for the least capable machine first, meaning ports to other platforms were much easier and quicker to complete.An extremely basic office suite called 3-plus-1 by Tri-Micro was built in which could only be used with a floppy disk drive, which wasn't included as standard, and you couldn't save any work to cassette which made the software completely pointless. But I loved my Plus4 anyway.I think I must of had nearly every game ever released and would spend hours playing games like Mercenary, Winter Events, Exorcist, Monty on the Run and Treasure Island firstly on an old black and white TV with varicap tuning, then a monster 24 inch colour TV with a dodgy volume control. Happy days.My original Plus4 was sold years ago, but since then I've picked up three of them. The first one stopped working years ago, the second one was found in a job-lot box and just booted to a black screen, so I put a Pi0 in it, but the third works perfectly
Following on from the Plus4, I 'upgraded' to a Sinclair ZX Spectrum 128, this was the model with the large heat sink down the side that burned your hand. This was also sold and was eventually replaced with the +2 version from Amstrad, The main reason for swapping from Commodore to Sinclair was everybody I knew had a Spectrum, so games and other software was easier to get.At the time I was impressed with the sound output from the new sound chip in the 128K Spectrum and spent many happy hours playing games like Dizzy and programming in BASIC.
Things are starting to get serious now with the Commodore Amiga A500 Plus, a machine that was so far ahead of it's time when the original Amiga 1000 was released in 1985, it made the competition look like pocket calculators. I had the Cartoon Classics pack, the intro animation to Bart vs the Space Mutants was something else, I would spend most of my teenage years doodling in Deluxe Paint II, creating music with real sound samples in OctaMED and playing as many games as possible. Noteworthy games include, Monkey Island, Fire and Ice, Turrican 3, Xenon 2, Cannon Fodder (with that intro music) Shadow of the Beast 3 and Lemmings. Also spent lots of time watching the many public domain demos like State of the art, hardwired and Jesus on E's.I upgraded my Amiga to 2MB of chip RAM and added an external floppy disk drive.I collected both Amiga Format and CU Amiga magazines and still have all the cover disks. Happy days! However no-one told me about death from Varta, so it's dead, but the case lives on in the A500 that I bought which got destroyed by UPS
I saw one of these at a car boot sale for not much money, so I bought it. Some time later I was given another one. The Amiga was better, no need to cry about it Atari fan-boys, it's true. Although I'll concede that the ability to read PC formatted discs natively and on board MIDI ports were a key selling point.Eagle-eyed readers will notice an Amiga mouse in the box with one of the Atari STe's, I don't know how that got in there, honest!
Again I saw one of these at a carboot sale for not much money (£8 I think), so I bought it. This came with a small green screen monitor which I sold almost immediately. This Beeb has custom ROM chips in it. I don't know what they do as I never got any documentation with it, although I got an external 5 1/4 inch floppy with loads of blank disks and some unrelated cables.The BBC Micro was manufactured for the BBC's Computer Literacy project by Acorn. It was an expensive system and wasn't popular with home users, but was used widely within schools and colleges, it even had a rudimentary LAN called ECONET (*bye) with network attached storage know as the filestore. It's DNA lives on as these machines were used to simulate and develop the ARM architecture which is used in the vast majority of mobile devices (including phones and tablets) in use today. I loved being in the BBC computer room at school, and I can remember the large screen B&W monitor on metal stilts in the corner that showed what each BBC was doing
Another car boot sale find, a boxed Toshiba MSX HX-10 with all the manuals and three Konami games on cartridge. These were rare in the UK, I only ever knew of one other, compared to the 100's of Sinclair's, Commodore's and Amstrad's out there.MSX stands for MicroSoft eXtended, although some would argue it stands for Machines with Software eXchangeability. It was an attempt to create a standardized computing platform inspired by the success of the VHS video cassette format, there were several manufacturers producing MSX clones and the hardware was upgraded throughout it's lifetime, ending with the MSX TurboR.10 MOTOR ON20 MOTOR OFF30 GOTO 10RUN (Don't do that!)
You know that feeling when someone posts a for sale advert in a Facebook group and you see it first? Well here we areThis one is not working at the moment, it looks like one of the CIA chips has blown meaning the 5V rail is shorted to ground causing the lack of output shown, but they're all soldered to the board. I have since acquired a C64c and a C128 to ease my C64 hunger pangs. I have also bought another working C64 breadbin, I thought it may be a C64G as it has the later C64c keyboard, but it wasn't
Yep, I bought one, the third player in the playground wars of the mid 80's, I don't have the monitor, but I do have the active SCART lead. One of my childhood friends had one of these, and I can remember playing all the versions of Dizzy on it between rage quitting then immediately loading it straight back up, then later coming back to my Spectrum 128 to play the same game
Took a chance on an untested ZX81, and as expected it doesn't work, but shouldn't take much to get working...However, I bought another one instead, and that one works great, I just need a 16K RAM pack now...
And now I have a third ZX81, and a 16K RAM pack, and a ZX Printer, and a user manual, and some games
Saw this on ebay, immediately placed a bid and won, it all works, came with one game and a cassette recorder and all the leads needed to connect it up. It's the little sister to the mighty BBC Micro, and is somewhat compatible but not with gamesFunny story, this was local to me, and I sent a message to the seller to say where I was and I'll come pick it up, and autocorrect changed the town where I live to lingerie, that was embarrassing
I have three of these, The first one was an empty shell, so again, I put a Pi0 in it, the second was sold as not working, and it doesn't, but it was cheap and came with accessories, it looks like a RAM problem, and the third one works, but the case has seen better days, these were everywhere when I was little, I wanted one, but got a Commodore Plus 4 instead, which I loved
I had been left unsupervised, and somehow managed to buy two untested C16's, one looks like it has a faulty TED (surprise surprise), but the other one works most of the time, and has been upgraded to 64K, it however occasionally fails to boot, I don't know why, however a power cycle makes it boot properly
Philips Videopac G7000 (Magnavox Odyssey 2) X2
I wanted one of these when I was a child, I remember seeing them in the John Noble catalogue. This is an earlier version with the joysticks, video, and power cables permanently attached
Texas Instruments TI99/4A (X2)
I managed to get two of these for some reason, This is the first one I've ever seen in real life, and it looks very good, one of them is in its original box. They are different revisions of the same machine, only one has the solid state software badge
Tangerine Computer Systems Oric-1
Been after one of these for a while, it's a bit like the original Sinclair Spectrum, but with a 6502 and proper sound chip. And also includes BASIC commands ZAP, PING, SHOOT, and EXPLODE to produce sound effects
The dark area
I hope you all find this as interesting and as nostalgic as I do.
And if you do, why not check out the next page in my retro museum... Consoles
Or to quicky jump to another room of the museum, click or tap on Rooms at the bottom of this screen
Special thanks to my long-suffering partner Denise for putting up with all this "nonsense".
No cats were unnecessarily annoyed during the creation of this site
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