Retro Computers

The following article was taken from http://www.number10.gov.uk/page20409

I personally believe Bletchley Park should be in the same league as the Science and Natural History Museums.

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I now have a RM Nimbus PC-186. Not had a chance to test yet as it did not come with a monitor. Its slightly different to the one in the picture to the left.

More info on this machine, and a link to a TOSEC disc collection can be found at retro-roms.blogspot.com

Anither addition to my collection – a Toshiba T1200 8086 CPU based machine. Not had a chance to check it out yet.

Here is some info on the mahcine from old-computers.com

The Toshiba T1200 was a very advanced laptop for it’s time, being able to run many powerful programs only a proper PC could use at the time. It has an 8 Inch screen that can only use scales of Green and Blue.

Another Feature was the first “Resume” Feature, kind of like suspend or Standby on today’s computers. This laptop was the first ever to use this feature.

It outclassed the other laptops, like the Datavue spark because of it’s competitive price and lower weight. The buyer could choose between a standard and backlit LCD Screen.

Their were 2 Main Models available at the time, 1 With two 720K 3 ½ Floppy Drives (T 1200FB) and the other one with 1 720K 3 ½ Floppy and a 20MB Hard Drive (T 1200HB). It came with an official MS-DOS 3.3 floppy disk or with MS-DOS loaded onto the hard drive for hard disc versions.

RAM above 640 KB can be used as a fast, battery-backed RAM disk drive (Toshiba Hard RAM) and / or expanded memory (LIM-EMS).

Another popular feature was that some models came with an internal 1200 Baud Modem, the first of its kind in most computers.

Many thanks go to woody.cool for giving me the Taifun 1230/40 accelerator card for my Amiga 1200. The 1230/40 also has a SCSI interface, so I can now install a CD-ROM drive!

• Processor:68030
• FPU:Not Installed
• MMU:Internal
• Max Ram:32Mb

I have now added a fully working Acorn/BBC Master 128k and a Acorm A3020 in the collection.

The BBC Master was a home computer released by Acorn Computers in early 1986. It was designed and built for the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) and was the successor to the BBC Micro Model B.

The Master featured several improvements on its predecessor. The systems had 128 KB RAM as standard, alleviating the shortage of available RAM which had amongst other things discouraged use of the best graphics modes in the original design, and had two cartridge slots mounted above the new numerical keypad. Rather than the MOS Technology 6502microprocessor used by the Model B it ran on the slightly improved 65SC12 : the cost of this CPU compatibility with the Model B was that the address bus was still only 16 bits, meaning that only 64 KB could be directly addressed at any one time and the remaining memory had to be paged in as required. However the 65SC12′s extra instructions allowed a little more to be shoehorned into the OS and BBC BASIC ROMs, limited by the memory architecture to 16 KB each.

Latest machine added to my collection the GRiD 1910 tablet PC!

The following text is taken from http://everything2.com/title/GRiDPad+1910

The GRiDPad 1910 is the computer most commonly associated with the words “grid pad”, AKA the brand name “GRiDPad“, owned by GRiD.

The GRiDPad 1910 is basically an extremely portable PC-XT. It has a 640×400 backlit Monochrome CGA display. It has 2MB of system memory, and often came equipped with a 20 MB 2.5″ IDE disk. The pen system is capacitance-based, with a wired stylus. There is a 6-pin micro-DIN XT keyboard interface. Audio is limited to the usual PC Speaker support. There is one serial port expressed on the unit, and expansion for a modem, which came in 2400 and 9600 bps flavors. There are two ATA-FLASH slots on the unit, which are used strictly for storage. There is also an expansion bus connector on the bottom of the system, which includes at least a keyboard connector, a parallel port, and a floppy bus. There are buttons F1 through F5 and a sleep button on the unit, as well as a hard power switch. Power is supplied via Ni-Cad battery packs.

This unit was used primarily for inventory purposes and the like. Apparently it was used within Chrysler for that purpose, and by the United States Army. The military specified more rigidity and durability from the case than the civilian version provided, and so GRiD made the case out of magnesium. They were never sold to the public that way, but occasionally a unit will slide out of the hands of the military.