My work has an "IT museum" made up of old equipment that people are done using. They have everything from magnetic tape readers to zip drives to cd-roms on display, with little plaques to explain them.
Not today, but I took my daughter to the Manchester Museum of Science and Industry (Great place for kids and adults) and... they had a BBC-B from my childhood.
That laptop is far too new. My first "portable" computer was a full-sized IBM PC with a small CRT embedded in it and a keyboard that clipped onto the front to protect the floppy drives. I thought I was in a sci-fi movie when I carried it around.
I still have my original childhood stuff, but I'm the guy who gave the duplicates and triplicates I accumulated during my adulthood to the Science Museum when my garage got full.
Love that keyboard feel. My handwriting was never good- my grands can’t read cursive anyway and smtimes I just don’t want to email- it’s not as enjoyable.
Uhm. Yeah. We pirated games by copying on a dual cassette tape boombox running on six D batteries. And the sheet of paper that told med that I had to ff to 186 to load ‘gumshoe’ and 426 for the joystick killer that was ‘summer games’
I once visited this really sweet vintage audio/video museum and restoration shop in Paris, and they actually had a fully restored working 1971 Pansonic "space helmet" portable TV of the same type as I had in my bedroom when I was 14, circa 1971-72. Too damn cool.
When I work in a computer museum and they have Windows XP computers listed under "vintage" and then I have to do mental gymnastics to come to the conclusion it's been 23 years since release 😭
A local used bookstore had a going out of business sale a few years ago. I found a boxed copy of MS DOS 3.1. I said “oh hey, I remember this!” And then I dissociated.
I found my first work computer (an Apple //e I used to write the manual for the writing program I was using) in a Smithsonian exhibit. My first hand calculator from high school was in the Deutsches Museum. I have a bad feeling my grammar school math homework is on a cave wall somewhere.
So old, my dad used to take me to a university to play games on a mainframe connected to the pre internet. Before monitors. Your moves printed out on giant 17” wide crazy loud printers.
The Japanese-market "Super Famicom" and SNES sold in Europe, Australia and elsewhere around the world looked like that. The SNES with a "blocky" case and purple accents like you (and I) had was exclusively sold in North America.
My dad had the Sinclair ZX80, I don't remember it being used (I was too young), but I remember the fitting polystyrene box in 2 parts, and that the whole thing was incredibly light.
I FELT THIS RECENTLY!! I was at the ROM and i saw some of the stuff from my childhood. It was such a weird experience and i think i understand what the last generation felt witnessing the same thing.
I went to the science museum i think in the early 2000s and there was the 3 computers I'd learnt to program on in a glass case: a PET, a RML380Z and a zx80
The Apple II (left) was the UPGRADE for my brother and I because I’m pretty sure we had an older IBM that used an orange display, 10 inch floppy drive, and no mouse.
After that, we upgraded to an HP with a 33 MHz CPU and 440 mb HDD. (We bragged about it.)
Comments
So... yes.
🤣
yes.
Sincerely,
Andreas Pircher
2. caulk wagon and float it across
3. take a ferry across
4. wait to see if conditions improve
5. get more information
What is your choice?
I still have an Apple IIe like that in working condition, which I still play on occasionally in my late 40s.
* bones creak as he presses “post” *
I had a ColecoVision and an Atari 800XL computer.
https://nvmusa.org/
(I do have one tho)
If they had the stuff from when I was a kid, there would be slinkys and marbles.
And dirt. We always had lots of dirt to play with... 😁
Also Spirograph, Mighty Matilda, Vacuform, Creepy Crawlers
Fuck these computers. We had way better stuff... 😁
That was fun.
After that, we upgraded to an HP with a 33 MHz CPU and 440 mb HDD. (We bragged about it.)
@heathercampbell.bsky.social