1958 PYE Continental radio

Hi sorry for the long wait but im back!!!!!

today i have something great its a PYE continental radio. not quite a computer but i love it and its electronic. it was made in the 50s (1958) and is British build. Still works great at SW, MW, LW, and VHF signals. shows how great British Built things are. got it from a place (don't know if im allowed to say the name on the internet) for just £7. bit dirty though but i can clean it and re paint the front edges. looks good in the living room table

 

Bletchley park computer museum

HI
My dad and I got to visit the home computer museum in Bletchley Park. It was great they have many computers and some you can try out and play with like the line of BBC micros and the home computing section has others.another part had office computers like the IBM 5150 and commodore PET. There was also a room about the history of ACORN and has all the computers from them. they also have many rare computers like the APPLE lisa, next cube, sinclair zx80 and grundy newbrain. the museum also includes colossus rebuild, the oldest working computer, a large old main frame computer used for traffic control and a room about the history of the internet.

The Acorn Electron

a short while ago i bought a acorn electron on eBay it came with:

the computer
monitor
plus 1 and 3
cassette recorder
5 1/4 inch floppy drive
floppy disks of both sizes
cassette games
joystick
lots of books
files about slogger (the computer belonged to the creator of slogger)
printer paper but no printer
and all nessassery cables
couple of cartreges

Quite allot of computer components and all for only £67 which was amazing considering the amount of items and the owner was a slogger programmer  my dad and I had to go and collect it in south london somewhere (cant remember). when i first used it we had problems with it freezing so we though it was a problem with the ROM but somehow we fixed it and works fine now.

Raspberry PI

a short while ago I bought a raspberry Pi on eBay for £31 and works great. I installed the os raspian wheezy on a 8GB memory card. so far I have used scratch and minecraft on it witch make it a very fun thing to use. I plan on turning it into a retro games emulator.

laptop RAM upgrade :D

Hi just got my new ram from Mr memory.com to upgrade my netbook from 1GB to 2GB of memory the process was easy.

Old

New

The old Sony VAIO

I found yet another laptop in the attic this time its a old sony vaio that my dad youst to have from 2001. its currently got windows xp but origanlly had windows me. the computer fully works, except for the battery. also has a working screen this time being not that old. on the side it has a DVD drive and 3 1/2 inch floppy drive. this computer gives me memories as it was once mine and also has all the old files of the family and stuff.

The Toshiba T4400SX laptop

Found another computer in my attic call the T4400SX by Toshiba its a cool little laptop with windows 3.1. it has a cannon printer, 3 manuals and a IBM mouse, unfortunately the screen does not work but you can plug it in to a monitor using a HD15 plug. I haven't got any games or any other software for it yet but a neet little thing to get into. to this day the most exciting thing i'v done on it was play minesweeper.

brother AX-35 electronic type wrighter

I found a old type writer  possibly from the 1980s it called the brother ax-35. its amazing and it still has plenty of ink left but I can imagine it would be very hard to fined any more so its best not to be used. its a very simple machine I found in my loft and would make a fine addition to my collection as it fully works and counts as a computer : D. 

   

The F.R.E.A.C.K computer

This is old news paper article from the late 70's about a group of students (my dad being one of them) around a computer model called F.R.E.A.C.K if anyone knows any thing then please comment.

we think the computer was a kit of the Sinclair ZX80 with a better keyboard.

Sinclair Spectrum Games

Just received 16 games from eBay for only £1!!!! they also came with a box to hold them in.
Here the list of games:
Survival
Scrabble
Make-A-Chip
Virgin Atlantic Challenge Game
Smashed
One Man And His Droid
The Colditz Story
Joe Blade II
Bomb Jack
Ghostbusters
Chess
Horace & The Spiders
Hungry Horace
VU-3D
User Guide Companion cassette
Faster Than Light (FTL)
Chequered Flag

BBC B Micro

The BBC Micro was the first vintage computer I got again on eBay for £28! but when I got it it wouldn't turn on, so we had a  look inside and tested the voltage of some of the chips only to fined that one of the inside wires was caught in the connection between the keyboard and the mother board. But that was not all half of the keys turned out to not work. after cleaning the connections the keyboard was back and working. only when i thought it was over another problem came my way and that was the picture had split into two! this problem has not yet been fixed.

Sinclair ZX Spectrum

Bought on eBay February 2013 for £12 plus postage. Faulty power supply due to a bad connection which we fixed. Also some of the keys didn't work and we traced this to a broken ribbon connecting the keypad to the motherboard. The trickiest job was to lever off the keyboard fascia as it is glued in place but the key pad then just drops out. Replacements are readily available via eBay.

To replace the key pad fascia we used some strong double sided sticky tape - this worked well and it a good way of controlling the adhesive to avoid spilling glue onto the keys.