Ian's Retro Museum
Personal Computing

A look at the desktop computers I have in my collection

Soon computers started to become useful for business. More advanced computers like the IBM 5150 started to appear in offices across the world, and they brought those new fancy hard disc drives with them. Ten to twenty megabytes of storage, who needs that much storage space?

Being as beige and expensive as they were, they didn't immediately appeal to us gamers at first, until we worked out they could indeed run games, and they did a damn fine job at it as well!

Where would Call of Duty be now without Wolfenstien 3D and Doom all those years ago?

There are 20 desktop computers in the museum

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Dell Optiplex 433s/l



I acquired this a while ago, It had Windows 3.1 installed on it's huge 300MB hard disc, I upgraded the PC with a CDROM drive, a 16 bit SoundBlaster sound card and installed many games. It's since been upgraded with a smart card hard drive

Apple eMac



Donated to the museum by Trevor Smith. Originally a Mac for the educational market (hence the e in eMac) but eventually available to all. This one has OSX10 or something like that, 640MB's of RAM and a 700MHz processor.
It's very heavy and noisy, and I don't understand the appeal of Apple products. But all donations are gratefully received

Apple Macintosh SE FDHD



A punt bid on this, and nobody else took the chance, so it's now mine, it came with a carrying case and an Apple StyleWriter ink jet printer

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Western Systems WS340



A recent donation, it's a 386 PC with monitor and printer

Apple Power Mac G4



A surprising, but grubby local car boot sale find

Compaq Presario 5113EA



A recent donation

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Dell Inspiron 530



Carboot sale find, complete with a bag of spare parts

eMachines E4264



Free from FB Marketplace, no hard disc

Apple iMac



Destined to be a cat bed until I saved it, does not work at the moment

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Medion PC MT14



Another free FB Marketplace find

Dell DXP051 Dimension 9150



£35 from a charity shop, a pretty solid XP machine with two hard discs and two optical drives

Generic Gigabyte PC



Free from FB Marketplace, not too bad a spec, I'll probably put this into active use

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Hewlett Packard HP Pro 3405 MT



I bought this from FB Marketplace for £5 because it has an SSD installed

HP 8000 Elite



Free from FB Marketplace as part of a job lot of desktop PC's. I had a PC that looked like this at work

HP Compaq DC5100



Free from FB Marketplace as part of a job lot of desktop PC's. Feels familiar to anyone who's ever been near an office at least once in their life

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HP DC8500 Microtower



Free from FB Marketplace as part of a job lot of desktop PC's. It says Microtower in the Bios, but there's nothing micro about this as it is a C H O N K Y B O I

HP Elitedesk 705 G1



Free from FB Marketplace as part of a job lot of desktop PC's. I already have a later version of this, but as it's in active use running my Home Assistant server, it's not included in the museum, yet

HP Pavillion P62115EA



Free from FB Marketplace as part of a job lot of desktop PC's. Seems familiar?

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Hewlett Packard HP Pro 3515



Free from FB Marketplace as part of a job lot of desktop PC's. Looks similar to the Pavillion and HP Pro 3405 MT above

Packard Bell IMedia 1402



Free from FB Marketplace as part of a job lot of desktop PC's. Badged as containing an Intel Celeron, but actually contains a Pentium IV

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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... Displays

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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