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.
• Several prototype Acorn development boards.
• 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.