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.
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!
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.
