Retro Computers

This is one of my recent (and very cheap) eBay purchases. It’s in very good condition and it works. It may new a new power socket or plug on the PSU. Also came with tape leads.

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

Built by engineer Tommy Flowers in 1943, the Colossus computer was the first digital, programmable, and electronic computing device. The machine was used by British code breakers during World War II to help decipher messages encrypted with the German Lorenz SZ40/42 machine.

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?

Managed to pick up a rather special machine last week – a BBC Model A. It looks like this one has not been upgraded as it only has the printer port. No tube, disk drive, RGB, Econet, user or analog ports either!

Im still in the process of cleaning it. I’ve run out of my ‘special’ cleaning stuff. It was brown with over the top school markings on.

You can see the rest of the photos on Flickr! and read more about the BBC Model A here.

I have been donated a fantastic ‘little’ machine today. I’ts a Research Machines 380Z. This machine is based on the Z80 CPU running at 4mhz. My machine has 64k of RAM installed and 2 5 1/4″ floppy disk drives. This machine runs the CP/M operating system.

There is more information about this machine at Wikipedia. I will be powering up this system over the weekend so I will upload more photos soon. I may need this Research Machines 380Z service manual!

I have more photos available on Flickr.

Old-Computers.com says the following about this machine.

The HX-10 was a classic MSX 1 computer with no special feature… But it was one of the first MSX computers to be exported outside Japan. It met a good success in UK where it can still be found in flea markets and boot sales…

Apparently there were several models of the HX-10 (D, DP, DPN, F, E and S) depending on the country they were sold, but it’s not clear what’s the difference between them so far… The HX-10 DPN and F had a Scart video output instead of RF/composite outputs, and the HX-10S had only 16 kb RAM.

In its native country, the HX-10 was also named Pasopia IQ to fit in the Pasopia family developped by Toshiba.

• CPU : Z80A at 3.6Mhz
• RAM : 64Kb
• VRAM : 16Kb
• Sound : General Instruments AY-3-8910 Programmable Sound Generator
• IO Ports : 2 joystick sockets,1 cardridge slot,Tape-recorder plug (1200/2400 bauds),Composite video output,Centronics interface,RF video output, 1 expansion bus

Ive owned my HX-10 for about a year now, and I think its a good little machine. Sadly, I only have 3 games on tape, and no cartridges.

Do you or did you have one of these MSXs? What games would you reccomend – please let me know using the comment box below.

Here are probably 2 of the most important computers of all time (Well, the BBC is definitely a very important machine!)

You can click on the photo above to see a higher resolution copy on Flickr.

Here are the specifications of the 2 machines.

BBC Model B

• CPU : MOS Technologies 6502 at 2Mhz
• RAM : 32k as standard (This one has 52k RAM)
• Storage : Either audio casette or disk. This one has a SD Card reader acting as a disk drive
• Graphics : 640×256 with 8 colours + teletext (Mode 7)
• OS : OS 1.20 and Watford Electronics DDFS 1.50

Apple MacBook Pro

• CPU : Intel Core 2 Duo @ 2.26Ghz
• RAM : 2GB DDR3
• Storage : 160Gb SATA
• Graphics : 1280×800 16 Million colours
• OS : Apple OS X 10.6.3

The BBC is the older machine, but it boots to its OS in under a second. If only modern macs and PCs would be as quick.