As Phil has said, the museum has been very pleased to accept a major collection of all things Acorn from Chris Whytehead, this is crammed full of machines, prototypes, rare circuit boards, and of course a huge wealth of software, a wonderful library of Atom, BBC B, Master, Archimedes, and Risc PC, I have made some headway into the Atom and Electron titles, which have considerably boosted the museum’s holdings for those machines.
The donations from very kind members of the public have still been coming through the door, many more Amiga, BBC, Spectrum, C64, Amstrad, and even some for the more recent machines, Gamecube, PS3, Xbox 360, and our first Xbox One game.
As usual I am going to highlight some of the more colourful software recently added to the system.
Flight Path 747 – ZX Spectrum This game holds the unhappy distinction of scoring the lowest ever percentage in Crash magazine, who labelled it an unplayable game with poor controls, no instructions relevant to the machine, with the strong suspicion it was written in basic, they scored it just 4%
Planetoid – Electron This was one title in the Chris Whytehead collection that I personally wanted to see, this was the machine’s version of Defender, and was a conversion from the BBC B, the Electron valiantly gives a very similar performance to the original, and Chris has donated the German, as well as the UK version, we now have a whole couple of shelves of the distinctive Acornsoft Electron green chequered boxes.
The Acorn Atom Introductory PacK This was the pack for every new Acorn Atom owner, it contained a comprehensive manual, and four cassettes, these are full of some very useful programs like teaching aids, financial packages, and some simple games.
A special shout out to Gary who has upgraded my archiving machine, and made things a whole lot quicker, including the scanner which was massively slow before hand.
Well, it’s been a while since I posted anything. Rest assured, it’s not because we’ve been sleeping on the job! Plenty has been happening behind the scenes here.
We recently accepted a very large donation of Acorn equipment and software from Chris Whytehead. Chris has long been known as one of the main collectors of Acorn equipment and software in the UK. He recently decided that his (massive) collection of Acorn gear should be part of the Centre for Computing History’s collection. Our volunteer archivists do their best, but – literally – multiple truckloads of equipment will take some time to process. You can keep track of our progress on the Chris’ Whytehead Collection page.
A selection of some of the more unusual items we’ve catalogued recently:
A German Acorn Electron. Extra RF shielding but otherwise not much different from the UK model.
A Prologica CP-500 microcomputer. A Brazilian clone of the TRS-80; this one has travelled the world appearing in several exhibitions before finding a home at the Centre for Computing History.
A Kalamazoo K1100N. We’d never heard of this computer or the company! Apparently it’s a CP/M-based computer that did payroll, inventory, invoicing – everything. If it were sold today it would be as an Enterprise ERP system. Seems Kalamazoo did fairly good business in the car dealership market, and large customers could have several K100N machines networked to work on a single database. Unfortunately ours has suffered some cosmetic damage from rats and failed to boot – probably the capacitors have dried up.
A nice amount of Commodore 64 and Gameboy Advance titles new to the site this week
This is just a tiny cross section of the 100 or so titles added to the site this week.
Broken Sword – GBA A very rare thing on the GBA, a fully fledged adventure game on the machine, with beautifully drawn backdrops, and a very down beat story, to counter the more humour filled adventures of the day, such as Sam and Max.
Hideous Bill And The Gi-Gants – C64 This takes my vote for the strangest name of the week, released on the Virgin label, we really must load it up and see if it lives up to it’s wonderful title
Kane – C64 This was a series of mini games set in the wild west, and was a huge success for the Mastertronic budget label, it also appeared on the Spectrum, BBC Micro, Amstrad and also the C16 got a version.
The Last V8 – C64 A game notable for being the first title for the Commodore 128, and one of the very few that was released for the machine, this version of The Last V8 was released later and is compatible with the C64
The latest additions for the C64 have brought about a bit of a milestone, as the library has passed over the 1,000 mark for titles logged on the site for the Commodore machine.
Later this week I should be archiving a whole host of Amiga titles, recently donated along with an impressive A500 hardware setup, including external drive, needs a bit of a clean though.
It seems I didn’t get as much archiving done this week as I had hoped—the only items I added were:
A ZX80 1-3K Byte RAM Pack. Not much to say about this; it’s a small memory add-on just like all the others. It is Sinclair brand though.
An eyemodule2 camera for the Handspring Visor. In great condition and with all the original packaging and manuals.
A Competition Pro joypad for the CD32. At first glance I mistook this for a Megadrive controller, but then I noticed the button count was wrong. Competition Pro were well-known for making aftermarket joysticks and joypads, and anyone who used the stock CD32 controller will understand why this model was so popular.
A Stack Light Rifle. It uses the standard lightgun interface and can be used on any of the 8-bit home computers. The included stock and barrel extensions allow you to use it as a rifle or pistol.
In other museum news, Gary has been doing excellent work sorting out the network and has also updated our office PCs to get us off Windows XP which becomes unsupported later this month.
Jason has restored our Torch Hard Disc Computer to life. It even has the original data on the hard drive. Very cool!
While Philip has been busy with the latest hardware additions, I have had the pleasure of archiving some classic software for the museum.
Like the hardware, the software is archived into boxes, so far there are 132 SW boxes as we call them, containing around 7,800 different titles, they have their covers scanned, contents checked for completeness, and any defects or omissions recorded, this is important as a better example may turn up, and could replace the archive title if the condition is better.
The software is of course available for the public to view on request, so if a particular game gets the nostalgia flowing, why not drop us an email, and we can have it ready for your visit to the museum.
The donations from the very generous public have added many interesting titles to our archive, so what have we had lately?
Ultimate: The Collected Works ZX Spectrum +3 Disk This compilation from Ultimate play The game collects eleven of their best known ,and most loved classics from their work on the ZX Spectrum, only Underwurlde is omitted as it could not be made to work on the 128K machines. our copy has the two disks, instructions, interview with the founders of Ultimate and Rare, Chris and Tim Stamper, and the hint sheet envelope which is still sealed, unfortunately, the map is missing.
Mansion Adventure 1 Commodore 16 The museum has over 800 computers in it’s collection, and the software to match, this includes the machines that were in the shadows of their contemporaries, such as the Commodore 16, which sold reasonably well in the UK, but next to the Spectrum and C64, it was definitely a minority machine, this game is something of a rarity, it arrived with a further 22 games that have been added to the archive, such as Booty, 3D Quasars, and Cuthbert Enters the Tomb of Doom, another uncommon game.
Rockman – Mastertronic, Commodore 16 To emphasize the point about recording conditions of new arrivals, this title was previously held as just a cassette, then a carry case arrives stuffed full of C16 titles, this was sorted for duplicates, then those duplicates checked against the archive for condition, this yielded a complete copy of this fun, and big selling title, so it replaced the cassette only copy in the software box.
Donald Duck PK – Disney – Gamecube Not just about 8 bit retro titles, we are starting to accept titles for much newer machines too, this game arrived with a few other Gamecube discs in great condition, perfect for our gaming nights, and for the younger visitors to the museum.
Centipede – ZX81 – LLamasoft Who can resist a Jeff Minter classic from 1981, arriving in great condition, with original Llama cover.many more classic and not so classic games to come in the months and years ahead..
Welcome to the first of what I hope will be a regular feature showcasing this week’s new additions to the Centre for Computing History’s hardware archive.
Why do we need to catalogue items?
First, some background: the Centre currently has around 1000 storage boxes containing all sorts of items. But the boxes are all shapes and sizes and the individual items aren’t on our system; there’s just a brief list of what’s in the box. As we bring the boxes from our warehouse in Haverhill to the new premises in Cambridge we plan to repack the items in standard-sized archive boxes and ensure that each individual item is photographed, described, catalogued – and most importantly tagged with it’s new location so we can find it in future.
Why go to all this trouble? Because once an item is catalogued, anyone can find it through our website. They’ll be able to read a brief description of what it is and what it does. There will be at least one picture so they’ll know what it looked like. And the site can automatically link them to related items such as peripherals, software, manuals, etc. Most importantly part of the archiving process involves recording the item’s new location so if anyone wants to see it, we can find it with no need to search high and low.
With 1000 boxes to go through this is a slow process. Currently we have 63 properly archived boxes (we call them “BX” boxes, as distinct to the storage boxes which are prefixed with “BOX”). Of course, we regularly receive hardware donations from members of the public and those need to be catalogued as well.
What is the archive?
An important part of the museum’s mission is preservation of computers and their history. To do this we aim to collect one example of every historically significant piece of hardware, software, or documentation, ideally with their original packaging. This goes into our archive where it will be preserved for anyone who would like to see it. If we have more than one of a particular item then the best one will go in the archive and the others can go on public display or used as handling stock. Broken items are still useful for spare parts to keep the display items running – this is a ‘hands-on’ museum and equipment does occasionally break!
Today’s Additions
Nintendo 64 Expansion Pak. Many games could take advantage of the extra memory this provided to give better graphics, framerate, or gameplay options. Don’t lose the little plastic ejection lever or you’ll never get it out the expansion port!
Xplorer FX Professional. A cheat cartridge for the Sony Playstation. Could be linked to a PC to download new cheat codes.
Early Sinclair ZX Spectrum Console. This is one of the earliest ZX Spectrums I’ve seen! Based on the serial number it’s one of the first 8000 ever produced. The early models can be distinguished by their light grey keys.
Prototype Sinclair QL. Owned by the Sinclair company and used for early development.
Thorn EMI Liberator. Designed for the Civil Service in the mid eighties, this was a word processor designed to reduce civil servant’s reliance on typing pools and speed the production and editing of documents. It was required to be small and light enough to fit inside a standard government-issue briefcase.
