This British computer was one of the most popular computers in Europe in the beginning of the 80′s. It was a small computer, which was a competitor of the Sinclair Spectrum.

The two models (16 and 48) had the same technical characteristics.
A small plotter was available for this computer.

Notice that the sound chip was the same one used in the Amstrad CPC, MSX computers and Atari ST!

Its ROM was very buggy, & was later replaced with the Oric Atmos.

The text above, and photos were taken from old-computers.com

You have been warned.
The following article was taken from transistorized.org

In my early teens, access to hardcore porn was a rarity. There was a Joy of Sex on the top shelf which I used to “borrow”, and Cosmopolitan ensured my life would follow its usual route as a sitcom character. Unfortunately, I did spend time writing a BBC BASIC program which would ask for my name, and then provide random dirty responses to my one-handed tapping. This is quite possibly the saddest thing anybody has ever done ever, and I certainly won’t be digging it out of the box of discs upstairs any time soon.

You can read the complete article (and see some screenshots) at “Yeah, but what pixels (NSFW)“

• Amstrad CPC464.
• Amstrad DD1 disk drive for the 464 (Wanted one of these for ages!)
• Amstrad CPC colour monitor.
• Amstrad MP1 – Power supply and RF modulator for the CPC464 only. (No 12v for 664/6128)
• Amstrad CPC firmware manuals.
• Lots of CPC disks and tapes including business and programming software.
• 4 boxes of boxed Amiga games.
• 100s of Amiga ‘backups’.
• C64 tapes.
• Lots of various programming books.

The CPC464 and monitor work great. The DD1 disk drive will need a new drive belt.

The museum is situated in the centre of Swindon by the Wyvern theatre. There is plenty of parking nearby. It costs £2 for adults, £1 for children and a family ticket (2 adults and 2 children) costs £5.

So, which computer was best? The Atari ST or the Commodore Amiga? Clearly, the ST wins as the Amiga is broken and lacks a mouse.

I’ve not seen one of these in the flesh before – the Jupiter Ace 4000

Now, here is a machine I’ve always wanted to own – a MGT Sam Coupe.

You can see the rest of the photos in this flickr set. Museum of Computing

In 1993, Tony Sale started the Colossus Rebuild Project and in 1994 a team led by Sale began to recreate the massive machine at The National Museum of Computing at Bletchley Park in the UK. On June 6th, 1996, the recreated Colossus was first switched on, and by 2007 a fully functional replica of the Colossus Mark 2 was completed.

You can read the rest of the article at Poll: Have you ever restored a vintage computer?

I’m pretty proud of this one. The authors of Cassette 50 – a notorious collection of primitive, mostly BASIC games advertised in seemingly every single ’80s game magazine, every single month – were mostly anonymous, uncredited kids, paid just £10 for their efforts. In 2005, thanks to a name left on a title screen and a few hopeful phone calls, I tracked down one of the games’ creators, now all grown up – and able to tell the story of how he (and his dad) put his little heart into that little game. Amazingly, he’d never even heard of Cassette 50: he’d sold his game, got his £10 and thought nothing more of it. My call prompted him to fire up Galaxy Defence for the first time in years, and show it to his son. Aw.

You can read the complete article here : Cassette 50: the interview

• Commodore VC-20 with UK keyboard. (Yes, its a VC-20 not VIC-20. The VC-20 was the German version)

• Sinclair 48k ZX Spectrum in a dK’Tronics keyboard enclosure.

i also picked up an Amstrad NC200 last week. Its very similar to the NC100, but it features a 3.5″ floppy disk drive able to read/write MS-DOS-formatted double density disks, 128 KB RAM, some extra software – most notably a spread sheet and three Tetris-like games – and a larger, backlit screen.

Strike it Lucky was a popular game-show hosted by Michael Barrymore in the early 90s.

All proceeds from the sale of items from the museum shop goes directly to support the museum.

You can visit the shop here.

Last week, The Centre for Computing History added a BCL Susie to the museums collection

BCL Susie (Stock Updating Sales Invoicing Electronically) used a magnetic drum store and the Molecular18 computer system which was was an 18 bit, dual accumulator, programmable computer, with a typical minicomputer architecture. The Molecular could address up to 64K words of memory. In later models, memory extensions were made available by the use of bank switching.

The top 32K memory could be switched between four banks, giving an overall memory limit of 160K words. There was a complex (for the time) instruction set, a simple interrupt system, multiple input/output ports, and Direct Memory Access or Data Channel for high speed peripherals.Susie was primarrily a stock control machine in 1967 which used a Nickel Delay line and Magnetic Drum for storage.

The only system controls are the keys of the typewriter keyboards on the input/output writers, apart from a few switches for program selection and automatic input and output. Therefore, any reasonably intelligent typists could soon learn to operate the equipment.

The system had automatic Input and Output using either punched paper tape or edge-punched cards, a great deal of information which would otherwise have to be inserted by the typist, can be fed in automatically at far greater speed and with absolute accuracy, Susie can generate statistical information for further processing on a customers own computer or by a computer bureau as part of another operation, or for future use as standard input material. Susie can accept such items as customers’ names and addresses, account numbers and so on, on one card, and standard item descriptions and prices on another. Fed into Susie either individually or automatically by hopper, these cards make it unnecessary for the operator to type anything other than the variable information. Automatic input can increase Susie’s memory capacity to virtually limitless proportions by replenishing it in sections from stored punched tape or cards.

Independent Operation of Readers and Punches and Input/Output Printers. These two units are completely independent of each other. The ability to use them together or independently facilitates the rejection of wrong edge-punched cards or tape sequences without producing hard copy. Susie has the ability to re-generate punched paper tape without producing hard copy printout. This enables the typist to ‘dump’ data from the memory, completely by-passing the print unit. The input of fresh data or of a programme can be carried out at the same speed. Susie programmes are fed in on paper tape or typed in via the keyboard.

A hopper fed edge-punched card reader is available, capable of processing automatically up to 200 edge-punched cards without the typist’s intervention or handling.

The system is complete with a high speed GNT Model 34 Tape/Punch reader. It punches standard 1″ paper tape with 8 information channels according to one of the three standard codes namely ASCII. Fridens Flexowriter, or IBM TTC/8.

Our BCL Susie Mark 2 machine was very kindly donated and built up for us by Tony Fairhead who knew and used the machine for many years.