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!
