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 10 desktop computers in the museum

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

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

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

Medion PC MT14



Another free FB Marketplace find

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

Did I just see a dog outside?



1 - NEXT without FOR, 346:1

ianwilliamhill.co.uk
Legal and privacy policies
© 2025 IWH Software (Ian Hill)

Museum rooms
• Cassettes
• Collections
• Computers
• Consoles
• Controllers
Desktops
• Displays
• Handheld
• Laptops
• Mobiles
• Other
• Places
• Plugandplay
• Pong
• Printers
• Projects
• Recreations
• Upgrades

• Homepage
Share this page
• Share page to Facebook • Share page to Threads • Submit page to Reddit • Copy page URL to clipboard
• My social media pages • Feedback about this page (via email)
Copied!