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My home made Covox Speech Thing Digital-to-Analog LPT (parallel port) stereo sound card. Fairly easy to build. The sound is not perfect but it plays stereo, 44kHz!
Three thumbscrews in the back, one on the left side of the tape reader, and four underneath the nameplate on the front. Remove all screws, the Local/Line switch and the manual roller knob, and then lift off the cover.
Recently, I found the time to ‘clean up’ (it's still dirty. It's always dirty!), maintain and test the Cambridge Z88.
This is Sir Clive Sinclair's first computer after Sinclair Research was bought by Amstrad. He didn't have the right to use his name in the company name, hence ‘Cambridge’. But it's a Sinclair through and through, down to the horrible power supply and ‘novel’ keyboard. This one isn't the worst keyboard I've used, but it does have a knack for collecting all the dust in a five-mile radius. It also has the classic Sinclair cock-up: the expansion connector caused more trouble than it was worth, so in newer versions of the computer (mine included) the opening is blocked. The edge connector is still there on the board, of course.
But it was an interesting design with very interesting software and some unusual features. It has 32K of built-in RAM but takes up to 3MB of various types of memory cartridges (static RAM, flash RAM, and EPROM cards—there was no built-in storage). It also has the only implementation of BBC Basic for the Z80 I'm aware of.
I actually used this little notebook as recently as 2003 or 2004 when I switched to a Palm device.
Macintosh IIsi (M0360) with Macintosh Color Display (M1212), AppleDesign Keyboard (M2980) and MacAlly mouse. Installed System 7.1.
In 1979, SciSys introduced an enhanced version of its Chess Champion I and II chess computers. The computer is built around the MOS 6502 CPU.
VCFe 24.0 exhibition No 4.
The 35 year old interdata model 70 (oldest still-operating computer in Australia, we believe (EDIT: decomissioned late 2008, unplugged and carted away to the Sydney Powerhouse museum early 2009). Can anyone prove us wrong?). The 2MB disk pack sits out of the cabinet otherwise it fails, and we don't have too many spares left. I'm looking forward to this being decomissioned (ie, I have some hope of understanding the new system), but I certainly will miss the drone of 10,000 fans.
The adhoc chassis on the far end was the interdata's shared memory->10mbit ethernet interface. It had been there for over a decade. I do remember walking past it one night, and the whole computer crashed, so the entire observing stack needed a reboot.
This device is able to not only work with numbers, but also with units. It's based on RPN: rechentechnik.foerderverein-tsd.de/qpc10/index.html (German only).