Retro Computers

This was a great find at a car boot sale – a K&N Acoustic Coupler. This one looks like it was made around 1974. Didn’t come with any cables – so ive not been able to test.

Click the photo below to see some more photos of the box.

Pick up one of these today from a local car boot. Came with 5 games.

• Taz-Mania
• Sonic The Hedgehog
• Castle of Illusion feat. Mickey Mouse
• Ecco the Dolphin
• Puggsy

There is another retro gaming event this weekend. I wont be going as its a bit too far away form me.

When: 23.01.2010 – 23.01.2010 14.00 h – 23.59 h

Where: The Garden Gate Pub – Aldershot

The first ever Retro Computer Games Festival is going to be taking place at the Garden Gate pub on Saturday 23rd January 2010. The event will open it’s doors at 2.00pm and we’ll hang around until the landlady kicks us out (around 1am normally). There will be around 20+ systems available for people to play on during the day. You can get more information on the systems from the Systems & Games link on the site.

We will be running a couple of competitions during the day, the details of which will be released at the event. Registration for the competitions will be on a first come first served basis, so be sure to turn up early if you wish to enter! Entry to the event is free but there will be a small charge for competition entry which will be put towards the prizes.

As the event is being run in a pub there will obviously be refreshments available. The Garden Gate has a good selection of ales and is in the good beer guide it will also be serving pub food through the day.

For more info, visit http://www.retrocomputergamesfestival.com or the Facebook event page here.

Take a look at http://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/6565/GRidPad-1910/ to see it in the catalog. I think the next addition to the museum needs to be the new Apple iPad!

I picked up the following 3 machines over the last couple of days. They are…

• Sharp MZ-700
• Nintendo 64
• Cobalt Raq2 Internet applicance.

Many thanks to their donator!

Here is a quick report on my visit to The Centre for Computing History on the 10th January 2010. The museum was established to create a permanent public exhibition that tells the story of the Information Age. The computer museum preserves and presents a collection of important computers and related artifacts. It spotlights the people behind the inventions and records the information necessary to inspire and enthuse future generations.

Machines donated by me

I have given the 2 machines to the museum.

• GRiDPad 1910
• Apple Quadra 950

Deep Blue

The museum now has a IBM Deep Blue supercomputer. You may have heard of these machines before. They are famous for playing chess against Garry Kasparov. It’s a huge machine! Its currently in the reception area of the museum. Unfortunately, we have not been able to power it on yet as we don’t have a suitable power supply for it. It’s not as simple as plugging in a 13 amp plug in a wall socket!

You can read more about this phenomenal machine at Wikipedia.

Apple Performa 475 build

When you are working on old computers, there may be a time where you need to archive disks, or write disk images onto blanks. Reading/Writing PC disks is relatively easy with no special hardware required. If you want to read/write 400k 3.5″ disks written by a Apple Macintosh 128k, it’s not so simple!

To get around this issue, I retrieved one of the many Apple Performa 475 we have from storage. I completely wiped its hard drive, replaced its PRAM battery, popped in a LAN adapter and installed System 7.5.5. I also installed Open Transport so it could access a TCP/IP based AppleTalk servers – but we had a problem! We don’t have a server that can support AppleTalk. So I had to build one. See further down this blog post for more information! We could have used FTP, but I wanted something a bit simpler!

Once the machine was built and ready to go, I installed the disk imaging software. That’s it! We can now archive 400k,800k and 1.4Mb Macintosh formatted floppy disks, Zip disks, Syquest drives and many more! Once the disks have been imaged, we copy them to one of our file servers from the AppleTalk server.

Netatalk & Avahi server

As mentioned in the Apple build above, we needed a AppleTalk/AFP file server. For the server, we used the following hardware that was just laying around doing nothing.

• Pentium III 1Ghz
• 640Mb RAM
• 1 * 40Gb Hard disk (this has Windows 2000 on)
• 1 * 60Gb Hard disk for the Linux install.
• 100Mb LAN adapter.

I decided to install Ubuntu Server 9.10 x32 on this PC as this has the netatalk binaries in the repositories. Apart from the base install, the following addional packages were installed.

• OpenSSH – allows us to use putty to connect to a console session and to transfer files via SFTP
• Samba – So windows clients can access the data
• Netatalk – The AppleTalk file server
• Avahi-daemon (mDNS server – bit like Bonjour on Mac OS X)

For a detailed description now how to install Netatalk and Avahi, see the following blog post at Kremalicious.

 Ta da!!! – we have a AppleTalk server!

Conclusion

This is was a very successful visit to the musuem, and we got a lot done. Im planning to go to the museum again in the next few weeks. We need to prepare for a very important event happinging in April. Watch this space for more information.

I reccomend you take a look at the museums website. If you can help the museum in any way you can contact them directly using the addresses below.

General Questions & Information :
Contact : David Coxshall – Email : admin@computinghistory.org.uk
 
Press & PR
Contact : Elaine Collins – press@computinghistory.org.uk
Telephone : 01440 708494
 
Technical Queries & Vintage Computer Hire
Contact : Jason Fitzpatrick – info@computinghistory.org.uk