Retro Computers

(Original posting) 30 November 2009

Summary:  Help wanted maintaining and demonstration the Bombe machine – a request from John Harper.

Bletchley Park is constantly in the news and is a growing historic site with museums on codebreaking and on computers – and one of the main exhibits is a fully working operational Bombe machine.  This machine is the result of a remarkable rebuild project led by John Harper and earlier in the year won the prestigious IMechE Heritage Award.
The Bombe Rebuild Team now has a fully working and reliable machine but do not have enough resources to demonstrate it on a regular basis. We are now looking for volunteers to operate and demonstrate after appropriate training has been given.  Demonstrations are most needed at weekends.

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Picked up 2 machines at the RCM meetup yesterday.

• Texas Instruments TI99/4a
• Atari 800 XL + 1010 tape drive.

Photos will be uploaded later.

This is a advert for the “Cascade Cassette 50″ games collection. Personally I think this was one of the worse games collection ever released!

I scanned this advert from the “Computing with the Amstrad” magazine Vol.2 No.1 January 1986.

You can read more about these games on this Wikipedia article. Post a comment below to let me know what you think!

 Its that time of year again – the November Retro Computer Museum open day! This is now the 3rd public event held by this museum.

I will be attenting the event again this year, and im currently planning to bring 3 systems. One is my recently obtained RM Nimbus PC-186, another is my Amstrad CPC6128 (Now with its additional 3.5″ drive) and also a Apple SE/30. The Apple may not make it to the weekend, as I think the display is about to fail. I do have a spare SE/30 but I doubt I will be able to swap componets around over the next few days. If the SE/30 doesnt go, I will take my 486 PC with a mixture of older games.

If you would like to know more about the event, please click the banner below. Hopefully I will see you there!

Finally got a monitor attached to the RM. Using a Philips CM8833-II.

Machine boots to its welcome disk, so I can now play Worms and Trains!

This is a great interview with Jeff Minter of Llamasoft. Includes questions like…

How did having tons of 11 year olds thinking you were god feel?
What is the worst game you have ever played?
Is it just nostalga or were games better in the 80s?
Crabs piss out of their eyes. What’s your favourite animal fact?

You can read the whole interview here.