ZX Spectrum T-shirts!
Ready prompt T-shirts!
ZX81 T-shirts!
Spiral program T-shirts!
Atari joystick T-shirts!
Arcade cherry T-shirts!
Battle Zone T-shirts!
Vectrex ship T-shirts!
Moon Lander T-shirts!
Atari ST bombs T-shirts!
Elite spaceship t-shirt T-shirts!
C64 maze generator T-shirts!
Competition Pro Joystick T-shirts!
Pak Pak Monster T-shirts!
BASIC code T-shirts!
Vector ship T-shirts!
Pixel adventure T-shirts!
Breakout T-shirts!
|
|
Welcome to old-computers.com, the most popular website for old computers.
Have a trip down memory lane re-discovering your old computer, console or software you used to have.
There are actually 1253 systems in the museum.
SHOW ME A RANDOM SYSTEM !
 LATEST ADDITIONS
|
 TERAK CORPORATION 8510 Data Processor
The Terak 8510 is a complete stand-alone micro-computer based on DEC's LSI-11 chipset (16-bit !), in other words, it si a PDP-11 compatible. It was one of the first high-end microcomputers and among the first desktop personal computers to offer a bitmap graphics display.
It was capable of running a stripped version of UNIX version 6. It was the first personal machine on which the UCSD p-System was widely used. Various universities in the USA used it in the late 1970s through mid-1980s to teac...
|
 |
 TOSHIBA Visicom 100
This beautiful but obscure Japanese system was released in january 1978. It's basically a clone of the RCA Studio gaming system, one of the first videogame console of all time (released in january 1977).
Made by Toshiba, this beauty was also based on the RCA 1802 micro-processor, and its video counterpart, the CDP 1861. However the main difference with the Studio II is that the Visicom 100 offers colour display thanks additional hardware.
Another nice difference, is that unlike the Studio ...
|
|
 BIT CORPORATION Dina 2-in1 / Bit 7200 / Chuang Zao Zhe 50
The Dina, also known in Taiwan as the Chuang Zao Zhe 50, is a video game console originally manufactured by Bit Corporation, later sold in the United States by Telegames as the Telegames Personal Arcade.It is a clone of both the ColecoVision and Sega SG-1000 consoles, with one cartridge slot for each platform, and came bundled with the game Meteoric Shower, which was built into the system. Telegames never advertised its compatibility with the SG-1000.
The Dina's controllers are modeled after ...
|
|
 OHIO SCIENTIFIC Challenger
In 1977 computing industry is changing fast. Ohio Scientific Instruments who were making a lot of expansion boards for their 400 single-board computer, called "Superboard", realize that it would be nice to sell all this hardware, all assembled, in a single case, ready to plug and use.
That's what is a Challenger computer, more a concept than a single system. Indeed under the name Challenger came different configurations based around the Superboard system:
- Challenger 65-1k: 6502A CPU, ser...
|
|
 WANG LABORATORIES Wang 2200
The Wang 2200 appeared in May 1973, and was Wang Laboratories' first minicomputer that could perform data processing in a common computer language: BASIC. It had a cathode ray tube (CRT) built-in its case and also an integrated computer-controlled cassette tape storage unit. 65,000 systems were shipped in its lifetime and it found wide use in small and medium-size businesses worldwide.
There has been quite several diffent models of the 2200:
- 2200A : first models released in 1973
- 2200B :...
|
|
 MATTEL ELECTRONICS Keyboard Component
Sometime before the failed Aquarius home computer scheme was hatched by Mattel, the Intellivision team had attempted to expand Intellivision into the growing home computer market by turning it into a full fledged computer dubbed as the "Intellivision Keyboard Component", much in the same way Coleco was soon to do with their Adam computer.
The unit featured a built-in cassette tape drive for loading and saving data. The Keyboard Component would plug into the cartridge slot on the Intellivision...
|
|
 RCA Fred 2
This Fred 2 computer is a prototype designed by Joseph Weisbecker, engineer at RCA. He already imagined several early computer designs before this Fred 2 model, such as the System 00 or the original Fred concept.
Fred is rather a concept imagined by Joseph Weisbecker for educational computer able to play games. This concept emerged in several hardware versions through time. The first models could be dates as early as 1970 or 1971 !
Unlike the System 00 which used only small-scale digital T...
|
|
 BANDAI TV Jack 5000
The TV Jack 5000 from Bandai released in 1978 is one of the first cartridge based system from Japan.
It's the equivalent of european and american systems like the Hanimex SD-050, Acetronic Color TV Game, Prinztronic Micro 5500, SHG Blackpoint, Binatone Cablestar, Radofin telesports, etc. There have been tons of systems like these.
The TV Jack 5000, like all these systems, use cartridges based on General Instruments chipsets which offers different games on each chip. That's why all these sy...
|
|
 OLIVETTI A5
Olivetti introduced a mainframe about 1960 which was called ELEA, then in 1965 the Programma 101 - which was probably the world's first real desktop computer. Then a little later they introduced the Audiotronic range of "office computers". The first was the A770, which was replaced by the A7. The A5 was the desktop version.
The Olivetti Audit 5 or A5 was largely an electro mechanical computer. It printed via a golf ball typewritter mechanism at the astonishing speed of 16 character per second...
|
RANDOM SYSTEMS
|
 INTERTEC HEADSTART
Thanks to Michael Hoyle for this information:
The HeadStart had two models. HeadStart VPU and HeadStart ATS.
The VPU was an impressive machine. It was a portable or a desktop machine.
Notice the picture has a smaller keyboard that snapped on the front bezel
and a handle on the back. No customers ordered the portable version.
The VPU had a Z-80 and an 8086 and could support up to 1MB RAM. Inside the
computer consisted of three circuit boards. Two (over the top of ...
|
 SANCO TPC-8300
The Sanco TPC-8300 was made in Japan by Alps, the company that also made the famous mini 4-colour plotter-printer one found connected to numerous home computers and professionnal devices.
Alps probably took part in the design of the Sharp PC-1500. The appearence of the TPC-8300 was thus close to the PC-1500's although all the features of the computer were laid down by the French Sanco company.
In spite of a 2-line display the computer had no success in Fren...
|
 MICROACE MicroAce
A few months after Sinclair released its ZX-80, Microace of Santa Ana, California launched a clone of this computer.
It was exactly the same machine, but a minor modification made that it could be expanded to 2 KB of RAM.
The internal ROM was also a pure copy of the Sinclair's original. Sinclair thus sued Microace but met with large difficulties because the judge couldn't seee the ROM content!
Sinclair eventually won because the Microace keyboard was also iden...
|
|
 AUDIOSONIC Tele-Sports IV
This is a typical system using catridges based on the different chipsets developped by General Instruments in the late 70s. Each GI chips was able to generate several games, ball games for a start, then later car racing, motorcycle, submarines, tanks and shooting games.
The system has two detachable controllers with one analog joystick and one fire button each. The control panel is composed of 10 buttons to select the different games offered by each cartridge (10 being the maximum). Difficult...
|
|
 RIVA T-800c
The main particularity of this pong system is that it is very very very small! The pads are only 2 x 6 cm. It looks like it had been made for dwarves or very little kid hands. Though this must have been a kind of marketing feature (so small you can take it with you anywhere you want), it also must have reduced the manufacturing costs...
The speaker hole takes a third of the front panel! The tiny controllers are mounted on each side of the system, but can also be detached to play in the sofa ;...
|
|
 HITACHI MB-6880 / Basic Master and Basic Master Level 2
This early japanese computer seems quite strong with its metal case. The machine has a very sober look. The keyboard is minimalist too, no CTRL or ESC keys...
There is apparently no graphical high-resolution but the computer offers 253 predefined characters including graphic symbols.
The power switch is placed on the front case just above the keyboard.
The MB6880 formal name was "Basic Master" but it was called as "Basic Master Level 1" after MB-6880L2 "Basic Master Level 2" was release...
|
 SALORA Manager
The Salora Manager was the Finnish version of the Video Technology Laser 2001.
However, it had some differences compared to the original:
• It had a new case to match the cheaper Fellow in the more Salora-like colouring,
• The keyboard had been modified by adding the Scandinavian letters Ä, Å and Ö,
• Joysticks ports were different so you could only use joysticks manufactured by Salora (many machines were hacked to use Atari...
|
 MICROMEGA Micro M16
The motherboard accommodates up to four memory boards, each with 16 K 16 bit words of programmable memory, four IO cards, and an optional front panel card. A parallel IO card includes two 16-bit input and two output ports as well as EPROM sockets for IO device handler sofware.
System software includes 8K macroassembler, linker and relocate loader, an editor and a debugger.
The M16 provides a 8K PACE BASIC which features IO and memory access, wait for input or timer.
And, last but not le...
|
|
 AMSTRAD 464 / 6128 Plus
These Amstrads were the successors of the Amstrad CPC 6128. Amstrad tried to prolong the life of the old 8-bit Amstrads, which suffered from competition with the new 16-bit home computers (like the Amiga and Atari ST).
Amstrad made some important modifications to maintain the level of its machines, the CPC 6128 Plus became 95% compatible with the CPC 6128 (using the same operating systems AMSDOS and CP/M 3.0). However, some software did not run on the plus ran...
|
 COMMODORE CBM 500 / 600 Series
The CBM 500 had a 40-column, 300 x 200 pixels display. Contrary to the 600 and 700 it also had two ports for joystick, light pen and paddles.
The CBM 600 was the same as the 500 but had a 80-column display and 256 Kb RAM.
MicroSoft Basic was in ROM. Both models had an option for a second processor (8088 or Z80) to function alongside the standard 6509, the 6509 was then used for I/O, display and keyboard management. They worked under Commodore DOS or CP/M an...
|
LATEST COMMENTS
|
|
|
|
 |
 |
 |
FORTUNE 32:16
I worked for Western Digital (WD), the company that supplied the disk controller for the on the Fortune 32:16. I designed the parallel section and firmware for the hard disk controller. Fortune’s controller was based on the WD’s WD1001 ECC disc controller that was intended for Seagate ST506 drives. It was based on five 20-pin WD-designed gate arrays and the Signetics 8X305 processor.
The 8X305 was a special beast. It could execute instructions 3x faster than the Fortune 32:16’s native 68000 processor. But the 8X305 only had EIGHT instructions. Its speed allowed me to read 5Mbits/sec parallelized data off the disc and make real time decisions on that data. It also allowed me to implement the WD1001’s eight virtual host-facing registers in software.
Since the Fortune 32:16 was all about performance, the disk controller needed to implement DMA. DMA controllers of the era typically handled only 8 bit data and 16 bit addressing. The 32:16 bus had 16 bit data and 24 bit addressing.
I came up with a DMA solution that required no LSI devices nor counters. I had the 8X305 run the 24 bit counters and 8-to-16 bit bus conversion in software. The 8X300 would send addresses and data to simple, cheap octal latches.
The Fortune engineers did not like this software solution because they perceived it as slow. Yet, in their own DMA specification, they required devices to not hog bus bandwidth.
I demonstrated that the 8×305 software solution met both Fortune’s performance and non-bus hogging goals. The software loop required to update 16 bits of data, update the least significant byte of the address, maintain a word counter, initiate the DMA state machine, and wait for completion was only 8 8X305 instructions or 2 microseconds (us). The required 256 16-bit word DMA transfer could happen in just 512 uS. The sector time of the disk drive was about 1000 us. So my software DMA could deliver data to/from memory at full disc speed.
(DMA transfers that crossed 8 bit and 16 bit boundaries took 2.75 us and 3.25 us, respectively.)
|
 |
|
 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
LITTON - MONROE OC-8820
Actually the OC8820 was a dual drive. The 5MB drive which was either a Mini Scribe or Seagate was detached and had a lead shielded cable that weighed a ton. I want to say the 8810 was a single drive. I worked out of the San Carlos and then San Francisco office for several years for Monroe and sold a number of those systems. The DB software was Condor and the spreadsheet software was Supercalc and of course the word processing was Wordstar.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
NCR PC8
I owned one of these. Built like a tank and served as a solid workhorse into the mid 1990''s. Replaced video with a Hercules board, had two HDDs and ran DR-DOS 6. The only one truly better for reliability was a CompuAdd that finally died in 2001.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
ATARI 130 ST - 260 ST
Not entirely true: only the 520 STF(M) models have a floppy drive built in. There were also 520 ST(+) models that had the same dimensions as the 260 (in fact, rebranded 260''s) and therefore no built-in floppy drive.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
ACT Apricot PC
Does anyone know where I can get a set of operating disks for the apricot pc and an xi as I can’t find mine and I would quite like to revisit these 2 computers now I have retired. If you can help then please email me at charles.whitmore@icloud.com thank you
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
ACT Apricot PC
I have an Apricot Xen 5, processor box only, no keyboard, no screen, no peripherals. It has a hard drive (capacity???) and 3.5" floppy. I don''t know if it works, but maybe useful for spares. Therefore free to a good home. I can deliver in person to South West Scotland area but currently due to Covid restrictions, not to England.
|
|
|
|
|
|
RANDOM SOFTWARE TITLES
|
|
| 
|
 game - boxing - sport
|
|
game -
|
|
| 
|
game - shoot them up - war
|
|
game - ball and paddle - pinball
|
|
game - educational game
|
|
game - hangman - paint program - tic tac toe
|
|
game - shoot them up - space
|
|
game - blackjack - casino - fruit machine - poker - roulette
|
|
| 
|
game - board game - mind games - othello
|
|
| 
|
game - car - racing - top-down view
|
|
game -
|
|
game - dogfight - duel - plane
|
|
game - beat 'em up - martial arts
|
|
game - naval battle - space - submarine
|
|
game - horizontal scrolling - shoot them up
|
RANDOM ADVERTS
|
|
|
