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Retro Computers


Cyberpunk
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Today I went to Plymouth University with my son Reece, as he was attending an applicant day for a degree in Computer Sciences. And part of the day was a tour of the university's retro computer section. I gushed quite a bit, got very nostalgic, and took lots of pictures that I thought I'd share with you guys.

 

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Here we have a couple of early Apple computers. An Apple Macintosh of about 1993, and an early IMac. Remember these? They came in loads of colours.

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Not really a U.K. thing, but a couple of early RadioShack hobbyist computers.

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A Texas Instruments TI-99 from 1981. Note the Munchman cartridge.

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A Prism analogue acoustic modem coupled to a rotary telephone from the mid 1980's.

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Some early computerised toys. I couldn't find a Nintendo Robby though.

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A Dragon 32, and an Aquarius from 1982.

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The Osborne OCC-1 from 1981. It had a 4Mhs processor, and 64kb of Ram, lol.

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MS-Dos 4.01, Microsoft Windows 3, and two early versions of Windows Server.

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A selection of Floppy discs, and underneath, some magnetic tape storage wheels from the 1970's.

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Other old storage mediums. Note the Zip and Jazz cassettes ant the back, and the five-and-a half inch floppy disc.20170225_125700.jpg

More storage mediums. On the left is a combo 5 1/2 and 3 1/2 inch floppy drive. I think the brown square at the front is an early Ram card, that would have been hard soldered into a pc board.

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Some early hard drives. The large box on the right is a 20 Megabyte hard drive from the mid 1980's. Yes, you read that right 20Mb.

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Galaxy Invader, Invader From Space, and Fire Away from 1984.

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Grandstands Mini Munchman and Crazy Kong from 1981. Nintendo's Snoopy from 1984. And on the right is a Tandy Tank Defender.

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A Tomy Caveman. And Entex Space Invader from 1980. And a Grandstand Scramble from 1982. I had both this Scramble, and the LCD handheld version. The handheld was much harder than the larger one pictured here.

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Puck Monster, Pac Man 2, and Munchman from1982.

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Some early electronic learning tools. Logic 5 from 1977, The Little Professor from 1978, Kevin Keegans Soccer from 1978, and finally Merlin from 1978.

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The good old Amstrad CPC 464 64k

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Early 90's Amstrad Notepads.

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An Amstrad PPC512 portable computer from 1988.

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An Amstrad ALT 385SX laptop from 1988.

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An Amstrad PCW-8512 personal computer from 1988, missing it's base unit for display purposes.

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The classic! an 1992 Amiga 1200.

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The business model Commodore 64.

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The home model Commodore 64.

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The Commodore 16 for the poorer gamer.

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And the 1980 Commodore VIC-20.

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This is a 1979 Atari 600XL with a PC-Man cartridge.

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1979 Atari 400

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An Atari Falcon 030 from 1992.

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An Acorn Electron 3000. Interesting thing to note is the computer company Acorn invented the Risc chip. It developed into the Acorn Risc Machine chip. Now, Acorn is defunct, the ARM chips are still present in everything from washing machines to mobile phones.

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Sorry it's blurred but this is a 1982 BBC micro, made by Acorn. It was part of an early 80's government incentive to a computer in every school.

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The original Acorn Electron. Identical to the BBC Micro in every way internally. But this model was sold to the public.

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The Sinclair Spectrum+3 128K with floppy disc drive.

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A murder of spectrums.

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And the original ZX Spectrum, and the 1981 ZX81, with ram pack on the back. I hated this machine because of the keyboard.

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Before we could play Chess on our phones, there were personal Chess computers. Also, we have a Yamaha music personal computer, and an early home pinball game. On the bottom is an Atari ST.

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A game of Simon anyone? Remember this follow the music game?

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Mastermind from 1977, and some Tomy 3-D games.

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One of the more popular Chess computers. Boris, from 1980.

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The BBC Micro's more expensive big brother, The BBC Master.

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Some Palm personal assistant computers.

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And some others from HP, Casio, et-al.

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An Apple IBook G4 from 2003.

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The fore-runner of the Apple IPad. The Apple Newton personal assistant from 1997.

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A 1993 Macintosh PowerBook laptop.

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Early touch screen tablet here. a 2002 Itronix Duo-Touch, running Windows Xp.

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The Original IPad.

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And a few IPad competitors. A Blackberry tablet, A Windows CE tablet, and a Psion Series 5.

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1996 Psion Series 3.

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22 minutes ago, DANGERMAN said:

something about seeing 3.5" floppy discs as museum pieces made me prey for death

 

It's a sign o' the times Dangerman. There's only two ways of putting a program on my gaming pc, or my windows tablet. The internet, or a usb stick. My gaming pc has no disc drives. Although I've been toying with getting a blu-ray drive for watching movies.

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cool pics and info there, i really like stuff like this.

 

went to bletchley park some years ago and they had a old computer museum section including washing machine size hard drives.

 

3 hours ago, Cyberpunk said:

Although I've been toying with getting a blu-ray drive for watching movies.

unfortunately watching blu rays on pc is a pain in the back side, you're better off buying a separate blu ray player, or using a console.

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