31 Jan
2007
31 Jan
'07
1:50 a.m.
Even longer
than me. I started in May 1986 (yes, it'll soon be 21 years
of computer collecting here ;-))
About the same time as me. Before that I had home micros since about
1980 but usually only one at a time, and they were for day-to-day use, from new. Oh, and the MK14 that I'd had before
that, and which I'd
interfaced to homebrew porjects. Oh, and a Casio AL1000
calculator,
Teletype ASR33, and a few other bits. But not really a collection.
What started me off was an advert in Wireless World magazine. A company
in Cambridge (where I was studying at the time) was selling ASCII-encoded
keyboard for \pounds 4.00 (IIRC). I was making a homebrew machine at the
time and decided to get one (that was long before the days of cheap PC
keyboards in every computer shop).
Wanyway, when I got to said company, they also had a Philips P850
minicomputer for \pounds 25.00 (I was told it was essentially the scrap
metal value). I knew nothing about it, I didn't have any minicomputers,
etc, bnt it looked beautiful with its lights-and-switches panel. So I
bought it (complete with the user and service manuals!), and got it back
to my student room (This involved me going into the local taxi company
and saking for 'a car with a boot big enough to put a mini in'. I got
some very odd looks as they assemed I meant a Mini car...)
Anyway, after looking at it a bit, I realised that while museums (at the
time) were preserving some of the 'firsts' in computing, nobody was
bothering with the once-common minis and micros, and that unless
something was done, 20 years (then) of computer histroy would simply
vanish. So I did something. A couple of hundred machines later, I am
still doing something.
-tony