Many centuries ago, during my Amiga days, I started to miss my old Commodore Plus 4, which I sold during my Spectrum days, I can't remember what I needed the money for, although I remember I had originally asked for £50, but accepted the £45 on offer. Also I remember making the buyer wait while I completed the game Saboteur which I used to demonstrate it was fully working as "it would be the last time I would play it"
Younger me did not know about emulation back then!
Anyway I scoured the for-sale listings in the local papers for one, and I found one for sale for £20. This started me wondering what else I could get..
Fast forward a few years and I had collected quite a few old computers and consoles from various car boot sales and local paper listings during this time, usually for pennies. Nowadays it's more Ebay, Vinted, and Facebook Marketplace. Although the odd car boot sale still yields results
Meanwhile I had got into website development as a hobby when I found out my old ISP would allow a massive 200 megabytes of free hosting, and I had some experience with stringing a few lines of code together, from the hours I spent typing in lines of BASIC code on my Plus 4, and later my Spectrum 128.
I decided to document my collection online, mainly because my memory is non-existant and I could lookup what I had and what I didn't have when I was on the hunt for more items for my collection. I never intended to show off to the world.
The original site was very small and text based with only a few low resolution photos, it easily fitted into the tiny amount of space available, by comparison the ianwilliamhill.co.uk site is now over 3 gigabytes
Eventually the ISP closed the free webspace deal, so I had to find alternative free hosting, which I did, but upgraded to a paid plan as I wanted more space to document my growing collection
And here we are now, the old site was becoming hard to manage, adding new content took ages, I did not use separate style.css files, so updating the look of the site meant editing EVERY. SINGLE. PAGE.So a fresh start was needed...
As always, if you have any old equipment you want to donate to the museum, please don't hesitate to contact me.
H - STOP in INPUT, 131:1