Computer Museum

From Hackbox
Revision as of 00:42, 1 March 2011 by Wim (talk | contribs)

Exposition

Visit the museum, located in Antwerp, Belgium.

Collection

1979 HP 250

Items by vendor:

Components:

Projects

  • A Steering Wheel built in the old days.
  • The Transfer PC has utilities to bridge the gap between various vintage computers and the modern internet world.
  • The Logic Analyser allows to debug TTL circuits at moderate speed.

Wanted

I'd like to hear from you if you want to get rid of obsolete computer related material that you would otherwise throw away or should throw away but would feel bad about it.

In principle, I don't buy items, anyone can do that. There is more than enough free stuff to save from being scrapped to fill my available space and time. Almost all of the collection was donated over the last 20 years and I like to keep it that way. I prefer to be given a broken item than just buying a working one. The latter doesn't make me feel good. If your item has some collectors value then either you want money for it: go ahead and sell it on ebay or whatever, if you don't want money you're more than welcome to donate it and I do promise that I will never sell it without your permission and will preserve it to the best of my capabilities. You can follow it's fate on this site. I try to treat the items as a curator would do, not as my private property (in fact a lot of them aren't).

I don't have a specific wanted list but:

  • it should be old such that it's entirely obsolete and worthless for regular use, typically that means about 10 years.
  • the older the better, 1990's is OK but it's starts to get really interested in the 1980's. Ofcourse, the 1970's would be fantastic (I hardly got any equipment actually manufactured in that era).
  • the more uncommon, the better (I prefer an 1990's SGI workstation above an 1980's AT PC).
  • the cost for me is the room it takes for storage, so big things need better arguments to be maintained.
  • it must not be in working condition, the looks are more important (I can replace a broken RAM chip by a different looking one but I can't replace a yellowed or scratched case). Also, if you don't know if it's in working condition, don't power it on unless you know what you're doing, the power supply may be flaky and damage the rest!

Need anything ?

Feel free to ask me if you want to recover your personal data from a 20 year old commodore formatted floppy disc, read the programs off cassette tapes you wrote 30 years ago on your TRS-80 or are in desperate need of a boot diskette to bring your classic Mac back to life.