Retro (Vintage?) Computers

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troj

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So, @fyrwrxz posted a For Sale thread that got a number of us squirreling off into topics regarding old computers.

Who all has collections of older systems, and what do you collect?

For me, it's TRS-80 Model 1, III and 4, along with the Apple ][, ][+, //e and //c. Of those, the Apple ][ is the only one I have yet to lay my hands on. For the others, I have at least one working system of each.

I'm delivering a Model II to Adrian Black (Adrian's Digital Basement) in the near future. At the same time, I'm also delivering a Model II disk expansion to a rocketry person.

For those who don't collect them, if you have an old computer you want to get rid of, send me the details - I'll help you find someone who wants it, to keep it from becoming e-waste and landing in a landfill. Last fall, I made a 13 hour round trip to Ness City, KS to rescue some computers from that fate. I've farmed all but the 2 I wanted out to new homes, at no cost to their new owners.

I also have a PiDP 11, which is a PDP-11/70 emulator running on a Raspberry Pi, with a replica PDP-11/70 control panel. Blinkin' lights!

I once had a crack at an Altair 8800, but couldn't offer the guy a fair price, considering that it also had a hard drive with it.

-Kevin

CC: @cwbullet, @jsdemar, @AllDigital
 
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I used each of these. Apple IIE would be my favorite but I would add to it the Commadore 64, Amiga 3000, Atari 400, 800, and 800XL. I cut my teeth as a programmer on those machines.
 
I had my old XT and my TI-99 4/a until not too long ago. My brother tossed his Amiga 1000 out of his second story window about 10 years ago.

With SBCs being the size of a credit card and orders of magnitude more powerful, the upkeep efforts ended up being too much for me.
 
Commodore 64, my first love. I spent about the same for it + disk drive + dot-matrix printer + monochrome monitor ($1200) as I did for each of the next four IBM compatibles I bought. But that C64 got me through three years of college teaching, three years of grad school, and the first year back to teaching. PaperClip was the premiere word processor for the C64; two floppy disks held a 150 page dissertation (no figures; graphics weren't high-quality enough for a dissertation, even for IBM and Apple at the time). Amazing that in 1982 it could do things that MS Word still can't do AFAIK, even with macros.
 
I used each of these. Apple IIE would be my favorite but I would add to it the Commadore 64, Amiga 3000, Atari 400, 800, and 800XL. I cut my teeth as a programmer on those machines.

I first learned to program on a TRS-80 Model 1, in 1979.
 
Long boring memory dump follows..... 😴

The first single-board computer I programmed was the MOS Technology KIM-1 in 1977. The 6502 code had to be hand-assembled and entered as HEX into a keypad each time. There was no non-volatile memory. (Coincidentally, when I went to work for GE's VLSI R&D lab in 1980, my manager was John May who had worked for MOS Technology and did the physical layout of the 6502 microprocessor... without CAD!).

When I worked for Xerox in 1979, there was one of the few first Xerox Alto computers in the office across from me. Full GUI and mouse, and connected to the "Internet" with other Xerox locations and a few universities. It felt genuinely like peering into a time machine! The old-school Xerox management (in Rochester, NY) missed an opportunity and let Steve Jobs steal it. (Coincidentally, a CS PhD I worked with later on (Clinton Parker) was the one who wrote the microcode compiler for the Alto and Smalltalk language).

At GE R&D in 1980 (Syracuse NY), there was an Apple ][ in the lab to fool around with. I stayed late and did some programming on it. The 6502 assembler was nice after having to hand assemble code on the KIM-1 in college! During the day, I designed VLSI chips for the SDI program. I started doing 'C' programming in 1981 on a VAX 11/780 as an alternative to Fortran for the utilities I was writing. (Yikes, that's 42 years as a 'C' programmer, which I still do).

Around that same time, I was getting my BSEE part time at Syracuse University. The programming class I took used an IBM 370 on a teletype terminal to program in APL. Some functions in APL require backspacing and typing over other characters to create matrix operations. I believe that's where my brain damage began! ;-) Another class I took used an early version of the VHDL language for describing VLSI hardware functionality. My final projects was a utility to exercise a model of a processor's ALU for completeness and correctness. It was used as an example in the class for several years.

In 1980, I bought an Atari 400. By 1981 I had published public domain software for the platform. I designed and sold both a serial interface and a 300 baud modem for the Atari 400/800/XL/XE. I made an interface and low-level software to produce "bit banged" RS232 out the joystick port with a driver that emulated Atari's $300 hardware interface. 100's of BBS's popped up overnight!
I ended up buying one of the first 32-bit Atari ST's (68000-based) and had many products for that computer. (My first Macintosh was actually an Atari ST running the MacOS ROM chips copied from a Mac). I had a booth at Comdex in Vegas. My ST-Talk software was the most popular terminal emulator for a while. I showed products within the Atari Corp booth at CES in Chicago. I had one of the first Amiga development systems and gave the company a lot of critical feedback. (Throwing it out a window sounds like a great idea!) Then I sold the company and moved on to other types of consulting... using Sun Microsystems workstations, Unix, etc. And a bunch of obscure stuff that's even more boring, if you're still reading this far!

So, I still have several Atari 8-bit and ST computers, including serial #4 of the 1040ST, spare parts, developers documentation, and weird peripherials (ATR-8000 Z80 computer which ran CP/M). I used to have a bunch of Apple ][ add-on board and S-100 bus boards, but gave those away 20+ years ago.
I have Smith-Corona PWP "Person Word Processor" hardware that I helped design the operating system for in 1990. I ported the Digital Research GEM operating system (early GUI OS) to a custom PC platform that was a Smith-Corona/Acer joint project. Much of this crap I leave off my resume (and my Linked In pages) for good reason! :cool:
 
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I have an Apple IIe (not sure of year) and a Panasonic Executive Partner - a "laptop" with a built-in printer:

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(not my photo)

I also have a 386, 486, and a Pentium III-based Thinkpad T23. Everything else is mid-2000s and newer.
 
I too had a Trash80 (TRS80) back in the early days, with an S100 expansion unit.

Prior to that I had a 2650 computer as published in Radio Electronics in 1978. Editor/assembler and Basic were loaded via cassette. I tweaked it a little, adding S100 expansion, 16k RAM card, 16k EPROM card, EPROM programmer, implemented bank switching, rewrote the OS from 1kB to 2kB to add some nice functions.

I had to modify a 12" B&W CRT TV for direct video injection to use as a monitor.

Also made a speech synthesis card (using SC01 chip) and implemented the Naval Research Laboratories text to speech algorithm.

Yes I knew all the opcodes.

Also added a 5.25" full height MPI Flipfront floppy drive.

A bit after that I added a 20MB HDD that I squeezed 30MB onto using RLL encoding.

Man, I was busy as a teenager.
 
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I still have several Atari 8-bit and ST computers, including serial #4 of the 1040ST, spare parts, developers documentation, and weird peripherials (ATR-8000 Z80 computer which ran CP/M).:cool:

There are people who'd go nuts to get their hands on that stuff!

I remember looking at the Atari 800 back in the 80s....but it was out of my budget. I did buy an Apple //c in 1984, a system which I still have.
 
Thanks @troj for starting the thread. As I posted in the other thread, I am also a collector of all my favorites from the 70's and 80's. I still keep my Apple IIe here in my office with me. It is my favorite and who doesn't like a quick game of Oregon Trail every now and then. I also have a collection in my attic (oddly, my wife doesn't like them displayed in public).

I've got a TRS-80 Model I with working cassette tape drive, an original 50 pound Osborne "lap top" with the 3" screen, an Apple II, a first generation Macintosh, a Commodore PET, C64, and Vic-20. I've also got a few vintage consoles like the Atari 2600 and some great accessories like coupler modems. Although I owned some of the first IBM PC's I just couldn't get myself to include any in my collection. I've also got a collection of old vintage "mobile phones", but I'll save that for another thread.

I grew up in Seattle and hung out in all the first BBS's and even hosted a few. Good times.

IMG_3960.JPGIMG_3959.JPG
 
I've had a Micro-Ace (a kit version of the original Sinclair ZX80), several Radio Shack/Tandy Color Computers, an Amiga 1000, an Amiga 2000, and a Micro-VAX 3100-10e that was surplus from an old job that they let me take home. Don't have any of them anymore, gave them away when I moved about 10 years ago. Didn't want to clutter up the new garage... none of them had been touched in years.
 
All of the computers I once used have long gone away sometime in the distant past.

I had a Vic-20, a Commodore 64, an Atari 800 (with cassette, disk drive and tractor feed printer) and then I worked on PET computers and old Apples, including an old IIe in various circumstances. By the time I joined the Windows 3.1 workforce (when the main server would crash at least once a week), computers were so familiar to me I adjusted far faster than the majority of my co-workers.

Sadly, I never saved any of those computers. I once had about 6 old PCs in a room, each with a different version of Japanese Windows installed. I still have the IBM Japanese DOS I bought years ago. I did actually load and run it, along with Japanese Windows 3.1. That took a lot more effort 20 years ago.

So, though I don't have any old computers, I do have some old disks and software that would have run on them. Here are a few for the interested.

For some reason I have a shrink-wrapped copy of Windows 3.0. I've had it for years and it's moved with me a few times. Now I've had it for so long that I can't part with it.
IMG_1003.JPG

An old Zork II with the original 4.5" floppy
IMG_1002.JPG

IBM Japanese DOS:
IMG_0998.JPG

IMG_1001.JPG
 
For some reason I have a shrink-wrapped copy of Windows 3.0. I've had it for years and it's moved with me a few times. Now I've had it for so long that I can't part with it.

There are people who'd go crazy over that. I've seen pictures of people's collections of boxed old software. One of these days, I'm going to pass on the few remaining PC floppies I have to someone who will use them. I just keep Apple II and some TRS-80 stuff.
 

Yeah, I knew the guy that wrote the CoCo version of Zaxxon. He had something that I made for the CoCo... a 256K memory expansion, it let you either split your computer into four 64K "pages" (early task switching) or use the extra 192K as a very fast floppy disk emulator. It made his developments a lot faster... you weren't waiting for the floppy to load stuff when you compiled.
 
I learned to program on a TRS-80 also in the computer lab in high school. In college, I helped wire Deliver Plus - the first pizza delivery software on the market.

http://www.deliverplus.com/index.html
It did coding for beer money. Hard to believe it is still out there!
 
The first computer in this house was a VIC-20. It was soon joined by one, then two, and I think for awhile we had three C-64 systems running at the same time including both 1541 and 1581 drives and with the memory expansion cards. We used (and did a little beta testing on) GEOS, the Graphic Environment Operating System for 8-bit Commodore machines from an outfit called Berkeley Softworks. If one was patient, it really did work very nicely. We drove a Star Gemini-10X dot matrix printer from these and eventually added a Star NX-10 as well.

The C-64s were later joined by and then supplanted by Amigas, first an A1000, then an A500 with the hard drive sidecar and then an A2000, which eventually got the 68030 accelerator card from Great Valley Products and had a huge-at-the-time 20Mb hard drive. The A2000 also gained an external floppy drive that would read and write Macintosh disks, which made it possible to sneaker-net some things to and from work (where we had Mac SEs at the time). I really miss playing Lemmings! on the Amiga.

The A1000 (with the Spirit Technologies internal memory expander card) and the A2000 are still in our possession, though neither system has been run for a very long time. The only things we still have from the 8-bit Commodore days are a working-when-last-powered-up Commodore 1702 monitor. I need two eBay that and would entertain the idea of new homes for the A2000 and its monitor and external drives.

With five kids, we sometimes had all the systems in the house in use at once.

Also currently in storage, but functional when last powered-up is a frost white iMac of the original form factor (Power PC G2 processor, I think).

I've never been much of a programmer, but did do some for engineering classes in college (IBM System 360 and later an Amdahl 470). Some of that was in FORTRAN and entered by keypunch cards, but later there was an interactive system set up that used CRT terminals. From those we could create and edit our FORTRAN jobs without going to a keypunch machine, That's when my then-girlfriend, now wife and I got exposed to APL, which as @jsdemar suggests was a very dense but incredibly powerful language. I still have the book APL: An Interactive Approach up on the shelf along with other college texts.
 
Rangdangnabbit! Fer cryin out loud, give a poor sod a break, will ya? First, it's Cris reminding me to dive into a closet to make sure I chucked a computer ( slim to no chance) then it's the unpleasant
reminder of Amigas nesting and possibly reproducing in the dark corner of what is ostensibly a rocket shed. I hate technology. What was wrong with the abacus ( of which I have and also don't know where it's lurking, waiting to jump out and pinch my fingers)? I'm prolly on what is known now as "the spectrum" in the zone all the way to the right with the needle bent over the peg. Or just a lazy packrat with faulty logic circuits. I need help. or another beer. Carry on. I'll be in the corner, jonesing the web for cheap lobotomies.
 
Who here has ever made wind chimes from hard drive platters? Asking for a friend. and no don't drive by my house. I decided it's a private street for only people with wind chimes in their front yards. or hummingbird feeders, or a rack for drying parachutes. My property value is much less than surrounding houses.
 
Who here has ever made wind chimes from hard drive platters? Asking for a friend. and no don't drive by my house. I decided it's a private street for only people with wind chimes in their front yards. or hummingbird feeders, or a rack for drying parachutes. My property value is much less than surrounding houses.
I had a few "wind chimes" made from old MFM full height drive platters.
 
Did you put the magnets on your fridge?

Not the fridge, but these guys are from hard drive 'disabling' I did for my sister on the side of a toolbox in the garage. She got a couple of new computers years ago and asked me if I could destroy her hard drives, as they already wiped them with Norton, but wanted mechanical destruction. She said they drove the Camry over them a few times, but "they didn't look that bad."

For fun, I said 'sure, I can do that' and she mailed them to me (ironic. . . concerned about personal data, then mail to brother where 2-200 people were holding said personal data somewhere along the way. . .). I made a video of 'repairing' one of them and got her to download it. The response was that I was an 'intelligent gluteus maximus' (to keep it clean). I hammed it up during the video and it was almost funny enough to upload somewhere, but I did mention a lot of trade names, made some derogatory inflections to Southerners (which I am) and chose not to. I showed it to a few people and they thought it was 'funny' but not FUNNY, so I left it alone. Having said that, I watched it again because of this thread and I laughed to tears at times. I guess I have a weird sense of humor and think I'm funnier than I am. . .

The custom electrical warning triangle was for a buddy who though the spec skull didn't look evil enough. This one was a fail, the one he wanted had horns. . .

Sandy.
 

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TRS-80 Color Computer 2 (Coco) here! My original gear and all my programs I wrote got tossed by my parents sometime during college days. I learned how to program on it. The thing that bums me out the most was the loss of my computer programs. When I received the floppy drive as a gift, the book did a great job teaching you the new programming commands available to you. They walked you through creating a database. Of course, I made a database to track all my rockets. I sure wish I still had that program....

I've since re-bought all the gear I used to have so that I can play around and relive the good-ole-days.

For the CoCo, the greatest modern day peripheral for it is the CoCo SDC. This is basically a replacement for the floppy drive, which uses an SD card for file storage. It completely emulates the disk drive and the Disk Extended Color Basic command set (and then some). It is possible to fit an incredible number of programs on the one SD card, especially since floppy disks of the day were so tiny (storage-wise).

FUN STUFF!!
 
In Seattle, before Covid, we would go to the Living Computer Museum,

https://www.livingcomputers.org/

They had quite a few of the older PCs, a few of which you could use hands on. I remember playing a version of the Pong game on something like an oscilloscope...
 
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