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I just came across this old 3½ x 5 inch photo and decided to scan it for my flickr friends. Here I am working on my little Mac SE, trying to do something in a very simple b+w paint program. In the far right background is the 1988 calendar I designed for Sloan Paper Company. Just under my closed typewriter I can see the calendar sheet reads "November." Just behind my Mac you can see my old Apple Imagewriter, dot matrix, printer. I still had a lot of hair back then, but it was beginning to thin. I was forty-six years of age when I made this self-timed shot.
A HP Series 486 Network Advisor at Air 14, Payerne
Auftr. Nr.: RO 8702 J7023
Datum: 27.11.1997
Techniker Nr. R. Maier
I made these in about 1980 I think. You can actually buy these for real now. I was ahead of my time...
IBM's PCjr was a failure, or so I gather, but this one was more successful. Released only in Australia and New Zealand, I spotted a couple at a garage sale many years ago, and had to grab them. There used to be a cartridge-based version of Lotus 123 for this computer, on two cartridges, which always impressed me.
My first home micro. They came in 16k and 48k models. (that's 16 or 48 kbytes RAM)
To save space, this one used 8×64 kbit chips (4164), which actually made it a 64k computer, but the internal address decoding only allowed access to the 16 kbyte ROM at the top of the address space. People resorted to hackery to access the memory, or using the external floppy drive which included this logic.
Apple IIc (model no. A2S4000) with Apple Monitor (model no. G090S) and Apple Stand (model no. A2M4021).
A HP Series 486 Network Advisor at Air 14, Payerne
Auftr. Nr.: RO 8702 J7023
Datum: 27.11.1997
Techniker Nr. R. Maier
She was looking in a strange way... ^^
Born in the same year as I and widely recognized as the spark that led to the microcomputer revolution. Programming was done with the switches. No Monitor, just stylish red LED.
I made these in about 1980 I think. You can actually buy these for real now. I was ahead of my time...
I made these in about 1980 I think. You can actually buy these for real now. I was ahead of my time...
I still love the design of my Psion 5mx!
Psion 5mx by Mobil Yazılar is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.
This is a Creative Commons photo taken by Mobil Yazılar. You can use this image for commercial and non-commercial purposes, with credit to Mobil Yazılar.
My Amstrad/Sinclair ZX Spectrum +2A model from 1987. Still in (almost) perfect shape and working.
The machine is built on a Zilog Z-80A processor with 3.5 MHz speed, 128 kilobytes of RAM and tape recorder as a data storage. Today it seems odd connected to my 50 inch TV, but... I learned a lot using it almost 30 years ago :-)
BTW: I'm very curious how our great high-performance notebooks will working 30 years from now? :-)
King of all gaming platforms. Custom vector display (not raster, like every other screen you're likely to encounter these days), with colourful overlays. An arcade machine that fit under your bed, and a gaming collector's holy grail.
Most of the Apple-centric part of my "collection".
Missing persons:
* Mac Mini G4 1.4 - Purchased new in 2005.
* iBook G3 Dual USB - Purchased new in 2001.
* Apple TV 1 & 2.
* iPad 1
* iPods: 3rd, 5th and 6th gen.
* Imagewriter (purchased with //c)
* Apple Modem 1200
* Macintosh LC with IIe card
* iPhone 4S, Macbook Air and Macbook 15" Retina (not technically collection, work machines).
Hailing from 1977, this was the infamous computer that you could kill by writing the wrong value to the wrong part of memory (it'd kill the video circuitry).
The days of the proprietary mini-computer. Data General, Prime, Digital, Harris.
This was one of Sunderland Polytechnic's Harris H100 multi-user computer systems, circa 1980, which provided a service for 30 or so students at a time using display screen terminals. Fortran and BASIC were available as programming languages. This machine was in the Priestman Building with maths and computing.
The two boxes on the right are exchangeable disk drives, each with a capacity of 40MB - so in today's terms you would have room for a small handful of photos from Flickr. 1-2 raw files from a full frame DSLR. There is a reel to reel tape deck for loading software upgrades and taking backups. An operating system upgrade typically took all morning and a backup perhaps an hour.
I can't recall the exact model number of this mighty beast, or the CPU clock speed, but I think it had 512K of RAM.
More power in a mobile phone than this lot.
I once lost the supervisor password and had to load a program in binary machine code using the toggle switches on the front panel of the processor, to access the disk and manually patch in a new password. REAL PROGRAMMING!
If you wanted anything doing you pretty much had to write it yourself. In those pre-internet times, copy a file from one computer to another type? Write file transfer send and receive programs on both computers and plug them together.
Macintosh IIsi (M0360) with Macintosh Color Display (M1212), AppleDesign Keyboard (M2980) and MacAlly mouse. Installed System 7.1.
If only it had a proper keyboard and a storage device other than Sir Clive Sinclair's microdrives (i.e. short loops of audio tape in a little pack about the size of a CF card, read by cassette players with delusions of grandeur).
A HP Series 486 Network Advisor at Air 14, Payerne
Auftr. Nr.: RO 8702 J7023
Datum: 27.11.1997
Techniker Nr. R. Maier
Simvol IK clone of ZX Spectrum 48K
Игровой компьютер «Символ»
CPU: КР1858ВМ1 or Т34ВМ1 (Z80A russian clone)
CPU clock: 4 MHz
Chipset: Т34ВГ1 (ULA russian clone)
Memory: 16K ROM + 48K RAM
Firmware: Sinclair 1982 or Didaktik Scalica 1989
Video: RGB or b/w monitor or TV
Audio: 1-channel beeper (on PCB) and audio output to monitor/TV
Input: KEMPSTON Joystick compatible interface (in chipset), tape, mechanic keyboard.
Enchanced functions: possibility of install КР580ВВ55 chip — parallel interface for printer (Centronics), CPU system bus (not installed, but placed on PCB).
Sofware compatibility with ZX Spectrum 48K
SIze: 270 x 170 x 60 mm
Weight: <1,1 kg
Power: +5V, <3W
Temp: 10°C — 35°C
Origin: Russia, Penza city, 1994
Week 44 - Out of the Box
A little bit of nostalgia. This equipment probably hasn't seen the light of day in more than 30 years. I quite literally took it "out of the box" to see if it was as I remembered. The original packaging is the backdrop in the image.
And there it was in all of its 16 bit glory, my first exposure to the world of computing. The Texas Instruments TI 99/4A. With 16K of RAM and a 192 X 256 16 color graphics output (monitor not included) it was quite the early 80's home computing powerhouse. I mean it would have to be if you had Bill Cosby as an endorser! That man didn't throw his celebrity behind any old product now did he?
Pudding pops.
Floppy disks? Who needs them when you can house your data on the included tape cassette storage system! It could load your home budget spreadsheet in just under 10 minutes! Amazing!
Have kids? They'll love the TI 99/4a as much as you do with games like "Hunt the Wumpus" and the pirate-themed game "Adventure!" Granted it's a text based game and you never actually get to SEE any pirates, but your children will be riveted for hours by thrilling game play such as:
You are standing in room with a stick on the floor. There is a door to the East.
GET STICK
You are now holding a stick.
HEAD EAST
You are now in front of a door.
OPEN DOOR
There is a pirate behind the door and he has stabbed you with his cutlass.
For the Lancaster County Photography Meetup's 52 Week Project.
Sitting in front of the Opus Discovery-1, a box that offered a floppy drive controller and floppy drive (no more microdrives), serial and parallel ports, joystick ports, a monitor port, and probably other things I don't remember now, which made the Spectrum an actually viable computer.
Not the real Macintosh, but as close as it gets — and it has the numeric keypad (and extra memory) which the original lacked.
Tandy and Radio Shack's transportable TRS-80. This one has twin half-height 5¼" floppies and a nice big screen.
This one was 16 bits before home users had any clue what that meant. By the time they realised, it no longer mattered, and no-one cared.
Complete with the famous TI Extended BASIC module (cartridge), and the equally famous TI Speech Synthesizer as featured in ‘Speak and Spell’ (and by extension, the movie E.T.)
This machine had pretty decent hardware, but nowhere near enough memory to speak of: 256 bytes of RAM (part of the CPU) and 16k of video RAM. Everything was stored on the video RAM when the graphics chip wasn't looking, something that made it seriously slow until you gave up and got a memory expansion box.