Met old Stuart at MCM last weekend. The queue for him was enormous.. and it was purely because he was talking to everyone in it for bloody ages. And he's lovely in reality too. And despite looking sweaty and knackered, because he presumably was after meeting people for like 20 hours over three days, he seemed genuinely really interested in talking to every one of his fans. Absolutely top top bloke.
I was lucky enough to meet him recently. Couldn't agree more - lovely bloke, a real gent. Reacted as though I was the one person he'd been waiting all day to see, and had all the time in the world for me.
So. Box one, mystery black box of wires appears to be magnetic core memory, little tiny magnets laced (by hand) on really fine wire. For years this was the best computer memory you could get; it was also non-volatile because the little magnets kept their polarization. One wire to magnetize the core one way or the other for one or zero, and another to sense one or zero. Simple. Hard as fuck to make, now it could probably be made by machine but there's no call for it anymore. Texas Instruments speech synthesizer is for the TI99/4A computer which was a really neat machine with a whole host of capabilities like, well, speech synthesis. The thing was hugely expandable; you could get an expansion chassis for it and both fixed and removable disk drives, a mouse, etc. They also had a cartridge port and could run programs that way, usually games of varying merit. They were never very successful, though.
gunmunz I'm afraid that one's got me by the left nut. My dad had a Timex Sinclair (Timex had the ZX Spectrum license in the US) and I'm surprised anyone has nostalgia for the little door stop; that keyboard was a war crime. I still have no idea what the dome thing is. If I had to guess, it's a RAM expansion, that was a thing for the Sinclair and it had the configuration of a "black box with one connector", but that thing doesn't look like it'd mate anything like comfortably with the system. The dome shape speaks to me of an antenna, but wireless networking on one of those is as goofy as the CAD/CAM system for the Apple ][ we've got the controllers to at work.
The weird device is a PARCtab. It was unveiled in 1988 and labeled as "ubiquitous computing" by parc(part of xerox)to demonstrate what they though how people would interact with their handheld devices in the future. It is often considered a precursor to the more popular PDA handheld device. There wasn't enough mainstream appeal at the time to sell it so it was for the most part confined to the status of being used as research testbeds.
I suspect he's just making them up as he goes along. "Hey this is a ZX 24, the predecessor of the ZX60, which had only three keys and they were all on its' underside. Naturally, it didn't sell very well." See how easy that is? ;)
He buys their silence with the millions he made producing videos for TH-cam. Ashens is old Hebrew for "Illuminati". Conspiracy Therory unfolds... >>Edit: comment written at 21:21. Illuminati confirmed. If I don't write again, you know what to do!
This really has become my favorite series, which is bittersweet because I know it can't last forever. Someone find this man some more boxes of old obscure electronics!
Thanks for another video from this awesome place. we have been for a day out to the museum and it was brilliant .the staff are really friendly and helpful and my two autistic children had a lovely time playing on all the computers and consoles . my oldest son was in heaven as he is a massive fan of retro gaming and your channel.
Somehow managed to make something with less colour than the spectrum, and barely any more processing power despite having a 68k derivative onboard... plus its default storage system was the Sinclair microdrive. shame, shame.
You just made my boyfriend's day with your discovery of that TI-99/4A Speech Synthesizer; his family had it and the computer that it went to, and he played so many games on there, even did minor programming on it as young as 3 years old (a prodigy, he), so that dragged him down memory lane by the ear. Congrats, man.
These are easily my favorite videos because I am massively interested in retro technology and own quite a few retro gaming consoles and personal computers
+vengeance1701 It would also be advisory that you just buy a boat from a man that has already built one. I have also heard of particularly large boats with the capacity to hold numerous amounts of people, which can also traverse large amounts of water. Perhaps you could stow away on one.
I was there when he was recording thees. I heard the staff say to eachother: 'Is ash still recording upstairs?" I asked them who's ash and they explained ashens.
I spent HOURS on that stupid pool game as a kid. I had completely forgotten it until i saw him pull it out of the box. Memories. This is why Ashens is the best channel.
These are honestly some of your best videos to date and I've been watching you so long we actually had a brief TH-cam message conversation concerning the Airphone 4.
XEROX PARC. Shame we don't know what the device was. For those of you non computer geeks in the audience, PARC stood for Palo Alto Research Center, XEROX's Research Center in, well Palo Alto, where they developed magical space wizard technology, like OO, and what was essentially the modern desktop computer, graphics and all. They probably could've gotten rich off of it, but they didn't know what they were doing, and decided to stick with copy machines.
Without PARC computing would be way different. They had the first GUI, mouse, even ethernet was developed there. The device in the video is a very early PDA. I remember reading an article a few years ago about it. The device had IR to transfer information if i remember correctly. The three buttons where for selecting options. Google Xerox PARC PDA and you can find more info about it. Oh PARC still exist, but not in so much of it's past glory. They were working on healthcare related devices two years ago. They was part of the division I worked at when I was working at Xerox.
I apparently made a horrible gasping noise when I recognized the PARCTab. I remember seeing those in the late 90's on the PARC website and wanting one soooo badly, along with the IR-based wireless networking that used giant ethernet-connected IR deathstars mounted in the ceilings of each room.
At lot of this stuff is waaaaay before my time but it's really great to be able to see the history of British computing and gaming. I'm gonna make it a point to go to that museum one day.
Heh I remember back about 12 or 13 years ago trying to run Half Life 2 on my crappy computer with a 900mhz AMD Thunderbird and a Voodoo Banshee for graphics. The game ran at a blazing 12fps. I was so determined that I still played it, regardless of how shitty it ran.
I love these archive videos. It's a fantastic bit of intellectual improv on your part and I'm always left wanting more. Were I in the UK I would definitely go to this museum.
4:29 There's a local store that has a big crate of older ISA modems. Micro Genius is a famiclone, by the way. It's actually pretty good if I recall. 6:05 Looks like something that would've come out of a Xerox Alto. 6:32 Speak of the devil. 7:42 Philips CDi inspiration much? 8:58 The TI99/4 had a speech synthesizer if I recall. A TH-cam user called bd594 has one of these, I believe. 10:20 I could use a card like this for my G3. 13:20 Elite was a good game as well. Gotta love the ingenuity of people in the late 80s early 90s compared to now. 16:47 Is that the Frieden mechanical calculator CuriousMarc fixed for the computing museum?
I had a plus d interface from mgt, it was a disc/printer interface for the spectrum. Pressing the button would allow you to dump save game states to disc or tape. Quite an interesting bit of kit.
Every time I see these videos I wish I could hop a plane to the UK and spend the entire trip here! So many retro electronic goodies, it'd be like a dream!
I like how he says "It whispers to me about the cheeses of the world" it's a nod back to his 10th anniversary special where he says youtube was a mouse in space that beamed down visions of the all the cheeses in the world.
Oooh! I have a Ti-99/4a right here that I still use every once in a while! Extremely underrated classic computer! Would love that speech synthesizer at 8:55
I worked in a private school between 97 and 2001 - they were still using Archimedes in the primary classes when I started and the science departments has a huge amount of education software on BBC floppies - I spent an enjoyable few weeks working out how to wire a BBC -B to a PCs serial port to suck the data off the floppies so we could port it over to emulators and keep on using the educational stuff in science classes.
me and my brother actually bought a massive collection (around 20 big boxes) of stuff like this 15 years ago for £80 and split it between us, ive been selling a lot of it on ebay recently and already topped a £700 return & still got a fair bit left, my favorite piece's that ive kept for myself is a commodore amiga 600 and a 128k zx spectrum with a few hundred games!
Good job, Ashens! You guessed correctly on the concave/convex option! (All teasing aside, that's how I always remembered it, personally-- conCAVE, being dipped-in, like a geologic cave. Convex, by process of elimination, being the one that bulges out.)
the handheld device is called The PARCTab, it were a prototype for a early PDF like thing under their "ubiquitous computing vision" to show people their vision of the future. it was showed off with the PARCPad that was pretty much the same but book sized and featured a "touch screen"
The song that plays during the montage of the computer museum at the end of these videos always reminds me of Tubba Blubba's theme from Paper Mario for the first few bars...
We did actually have the Amstrad 8256 or a close relative in the US. As I recall, the Sears department store sold them. I never saw one in the wild, or heard of anyone buying one, but I saw them in many stores at the time.
Haha. As soon as he said "Texas Instruments" I thought "I'll bet it's the speech synth!". Those things were good fun. I think most people who had a TI had that module. I don't remember why the front flipped open like that. Maybe I never knew. I still distinctly remember the strange way it said "Excellent Shot, Commander" in the game "Moon Mine".
Well I finally got to go to the Centre for Computing History, mentioned your channel too! That place is truly amazing. They have a Sega Mega-Tech!! The 50hz CRTs were painful to look at at first, took a little while to get used to them again. Enjoyed playing with the Amstrad Mega PC, Acorn Archimedes machines, NES, Famicom (which sadly was not playable, had that as a kid not the NES) Dreamcast with Sonic Adventure, Dragon32, Commodore VIC20 and 64 and the Mastersystem. Played around with BASIC on the Apple II and fombled the Amiga 500. They also have a replica of a 1970s office and some very large computers. Sadly couldn't find a Virtual Boy or Sega CDX. The guy told us they have plans to completely change the foyer area and put something called a 'Mega Processor' in there but that's all he knew. We are going there again!
Nice. A Micro Genius IQ-501. I found one of those a few months back for $5 Canadian at a local thrift store with both controllers. Very cool Famicom clone. They mostly sold them most often in regions where Nintendo didn't set up shop, so for example, in soviet russia they had the micro genius labelled as the Dendy. As far as Famiclones go, they're top quality. They'll play any famicom cartridge as they're pin compatible. Even Castlevania 3 should work. I like the design of the thing, feels almost like a tape cassette deck.
Nah, the discoloration on old computers has nothing to do with smoking, it's bromine fire retardant that colors the surface brown when it's exposed to sunlight.
Yup, my first SNES and some Triniton monitors have done the same. It doesn't happen to all of them though, it depends what batch the plastic was molded from. Supposedly you can 'reverse' this, but I haven't tried.
Yep, it's Dendy. Or Dendy Classic, to be more specific. There was also Dendy Junior model, which looked almost exactly like the first model of Famicom, but in a different color scheme. Early 90's were fun times in Russia, lol. Steepler - the company that imported and sold these pirate clones under the Dendy brand was so huge, that it had it's own chain of "official" Dendy stores, the official Dendy magazine (modelled after Nintendo Power) and freaking Dendy TV show on national television. Both were immenselly popular with kids. Nintendo either didn't care enough to intervene or couldn't do anything, because the copyright laws in Russia at the time were nonexistent. If you asked me in 1992 (I was 11) what was Nintendo, I would have said that it was one of the developers that make games for Dendy (like Konami or Capcom, but a bit lamer).
I found a fully working Amstrad PCW 8512 being thrown away in Canada while I was living there. I rescued it and played around with CP/M for a while until I was able to afford a PC. So yeah, they had made it over to Canada at least :)
6:29 is called a Xerox PARCtab at old times that was used as an office handheld tablet or something that has a bunch of applications supposed to "help you" with your daily office work, and the screen is indeed a capacitive touch one xD
I had an Acorn Electron.and so did my then best friend (we used them to help with Computer Studies because the programming language was BBC Basic, the same as the BBC Model B systems at school). I can confirm that they did not come with turbo switches or sound jacks.
I have a PCW and I didn't know that test device existed. The board with slots and and switches is a VIC-20 multiple cartridge device. The Dragon 32 joysticks were analogue. The speech synthesiser is for the TI99/4A. The Plus D is a Spectrum disc interface. I have an Acetronic, which has a Radofin board in it.
The Xerox three-button thing is a Xerox PARCtab. One of the earliest examples of a PDA, and definitely one of the first of its kind with wireless networking. That black half-globe is actually the infrared wireless network interface.
in the iMac 3dfx box - the card with the sodimm socket is an iMac CPU daughter card. That generation of iMac had an expansion slot - the next generation did not. But it did have a Radeon which helped. Since the CPU board was socketed, it meant you could upgrade that too.
I had a dktronics keyboard for my Spectrum 48K in 1985. The duplicate higher cutouts at the back are so you can fit an Interface 1 underneath inside as well. The sticky labels on the keys were prone to twisting and coming off!
That Plus-D unit looks like something I had for my Spectrum +2A. It connected to the expansion port on the rear and hooked up a 3.5" disk drive (only took the 720Kb disks if memory served). When you hit the red button, it flashed the entire memory onto the disk, so you could avoid having to load the game off the tape next time you wanted to play it. You just had to remember to press a key on the keyboard to tell the machine if it was a 48k game or a 128k game.
Old computers always kind of amaze me because at the time I was born there were a number of different operating systems but the Big Three of DOS, Linux, and Macintosh had already been established. It was only later I learned that Amiga was still going strong at the time. It seems like a lot of old computers tended to have proprietary operating systems, which I guess is why they ultimately failed when general-purpose OSes like the Big Three were released.
The DKtronics keyboard did house the Spectrum motherboard. If I remember correctly, the second set of holes was to allow an Interface 1 to also be included.
I had that very same dktronics keyboard for my 48k spectrum, ah what memories! And you put the spectrum inside (minus its rubber keyboard) btw. I then lost my rubber keyed case and eventually lost the dktronics one too, it could even be that very one!
Met old Stuart at MCM last weekend. The queue for him was enormous.. and it was purely because he was talking to everyone in it for bloody ages. And he's lovely in reality too. And despite looking sweaty and knackered, because he presumably was after meeting people for like 20 hours over three days, he seemed genuinely really interested in talking to every one of his fans. Absolutely top top bloke.
I was lucky enough to meet him recently. Couldn't agree more - lovely bloke, a real gent. Reacted as though I was the one person he'd been waiting all day to see, and had all the time in the world for me.
I feel like this "computing history archive" could really just be the back room of your house.
Tell us the truth, Ashens.
*YOU CAN'T HANDLE THE TRUTH!*
The back room of his house has a portal to this archive, so you aren't entirely wrong.
Maybe it's his basement
I absolutely love these archive box videos. They're kind of like loot crate videos that I actually give a shit about. Thanks for the upload Ashens.
This
So. Box one, mystery black box of wires appears to be magnetic core memory, little tiny magnets laced (by hand) on really fine wire. For years this was the best computer memory you could get; it was also non-volatile because the little magnets kept their polarization. One wire to magnetize the core one way or the other for one or zero, and another to sense one or zero. Simple. Hard as fuck to make, now it could probably be made by machine but there's no call for it anymore.
Texas Instruments speech synthesizer is for the TI99/4A computer which was a really neat machine with a whole host of capabilities like, well, speech synthesis. The thing was hugely expandable; you could get an expansion chassis for it and both fixed and removable disk drives, a mouse, etc. They also had a cartridge port and could run programs that way, usually games of varying merit. They were never very successful, though.
I was about to comment the same thing about the core memory.
I really wish he would've shown that part. It's a very interesting part of computing history!
so that's the dome thing?
gunmunz
I'm afraid that one's got me by the left nut. My dad had a Timex Sinclair (Timex had the ZX Spectrum license in the US) and I'm surprised anyone has nostalgia for the little door stop; that keyboard was a war crime.
I still have no idea what the dome thing is. If I had to guess, it's a RAM expansion, that was a thing for the Sinclair and it had the configuration of a "black box with one connector", but that thing doesn't look like it'd mate anything like comfortably with the system. The dome shape speaks to me of an antenna, but wireless networking on one of those is as goofy as the CAD/CAM system for the Apple ][ we've got the controllers to at work.
It was, but it was never released:
www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/31270/Sinclair-QL-Prototype-Wafer-Memory-Expansion/
The weird device is a PARCtab. It was unveiled in 1988 and labeled as "ubiquitous computing" by parc(part of xerox)to demonstrate what they though how people would interact with their handheld devices in the future. It is often considered a precursor to the more popular PDA handheld device. There wasn't enough mainstream appeal at the time to sell it so it was for the most part confined to the status of being used as research testbeds.
More Ashens is Confused at Outdated Technology seasons 1-12, please.
So this is basically a giant advertisement for the Centre for Computing History. And I still legitimately find it fascinating.
It must be fun to know all these things and what they do.
For the most part.
I suspect he's just making them up as he goes along. "Hey this is a ZX 24, the predecessor of the ZX60, which had only three keys and they were all on its' underside. Naturally, it didn't sell very well." See how easy that is? ;)
TheLobstersoup o m y
+TheLobstersoup The tech geeks in the comments would call him out on it if he were making it up
He buys their silence with the millions he made producing videos for TH-cam. Ashens is old Hebrew for "Illuminati". Conspiracy Therory unfolds...
>>Edit: comment written at 21:21. Illuminati confirmed. If I don't write again, you know what to do!
These are slowly becoming my favorite Ashens videos
This really has become my favorite series, which is bittersweet because I know it can't last forever.
Someone find this man some more boxes of old obscure electronics!
Thanks for another video from this awesome place. we have been for a day out to the museum and it was brilliant .the staff are really friendly and helpful and my two autistic children had a lovely time playing on all the computers and consoles . my oldest son was in heaven as he is a massive fan of retro gaming and your channel.
But it WAS a quantum leap, in that it was practically the shortest leap possible.
I just did now. I guess it was indeed quite a jump. The Fonz would be proud.
Haha, Mackintosh?
Somehow managed to make something with less colour than the spectrum, and barely any more processing power despite having a 68k derivative onboard... plus its default storage system was the Sinclair microdrive. shame, shame.
Are we talking the only way it was a Quantum Leap is that it put Dean Stockwell's eyebrows on every program?
i love how Ashens makes this really interesting i dont think i could stomach this if this was a video by anyone else.
It's 2am
I have school in the morning
Oh look an Ashens video!
JmKw lol it's 10:45 pm were I live
Lol fam it's only 9pm
welcome to british internet
it was only 9 or 10 where I was.
Shona O'Neill Every bushel has it's bad apple. Consider me that bad apple. Watch your back. I'll speak to you soon.
You just made my boyfriend's day with your discovery of that TI-99/4A Speech Synthesizer; his family had it and the computer that it went to, and he played so many games on there, even did minor programming on it as young as 3 years old (a prodigy, he), so that dragged him down memory lane by the ear. Congrats, man.
love your videos on old tech like this, it's like a window showing the times of yesteryear. bravo
I LOVE these computer history videos. they are some of my favorites.
I really wanna go digging through that archive. I'd spend all day going "I remember that!" and then putting the thing back.
Only Ashens could make me laugh with a video like this. "Whispering about cheeses...."
This is probably my favorite ashens series to date
These are easily my favorite videos because I am massively interested in retro technology and own quite a few retro gaming consoles and personal computers
Wish I could get there, Stuart, melad. Got this rather large bit of water in between me and said destination.
Boats have historically been widely used to traverse large pockets of water, so that's an option.
Gast Ah. I shall learn to build one!
There's a really big rock in the way for me.
AgentTasmania You must destroy it then.
+vengeance1701
It would also be advisory that you just buy a boat from a man that has already built one. I have also heard of particularly large boats with the capacity to hold numerous amounts of people, which can also traverse large amounts of water. Perhaps you could stow away on one.
If I ever manage to make a trip to the UK I will definitely be visiting this museum.
Timstuff it's cool I've been there it live about an hour by car
seems like such a cool area to visit. reminds me of something i'd see in my grandpas closet
I love these, they remind me of the older Ashens videos
Dr. Ashen... Loved this video. With that in mind, PLEASE more of this! old computer stuff is why I'm subscribed!
Plrase do more of these, easily my favourite series on the channel!
I was there when he was recording thees. I heard the staff say to eachother: 'Is ash still recording upstairs?" I asked them who's ash and they explained ashens.
I spent HOURS on that stupid pool game as a kid. I had completely forgotten it until i saw him pull it out of the box. Memories. This is why Ashens is the best channel.
DK Tronics keyboards were used on the ZX81 as well as the ZX Spectrum. This is why they keyboard has stickers as the layout was different.
Love the longer videos!
These are honestly some of your best videos to date and I've been watching you so long we actually had a brief TH-cam message conversation concerning the Airphone 4.
XEROX PARC. Shame we don't know what the device was.
For those of you non computer geeks in the audience, PARC stood for Palo Alto Research Center, XEROX's Research Center in, well Palo Alto, where they developed magical space wizard technology, like OO, and what was essentially the modern desktop computer, graphics and all. They probably could've gotten rich off of it, but they didn't know what they were doing, and decided to stick with copy machines.
Without PARC computing would be way different. They had the first GUI, mouse, even ethernet was developed there. The device in the video is a very early PDA. I remember reading an article a few years ago about it. The device had IR to transfer information if i remember correctly. The three buttons where for selecting options. Google Xerox PARC PDA and you can find more info about it. Oh PARC still exist, but not in so much of it's past glory. They were working on healthcare related devices two years ago. They was part of the division I worked at when I was working at Xerox.
It was the PARCTab. An early prototype of PDAs.
Thanks for the info knowledgeable person!
Sweet. I, like most of us, only really know PARC for the dynabook project, and what came out of it.
I apparently made a horrible gasping noise when I recognized the PARCTab. I remember seeing those in the late 90's on the PARC website and wanting one soooo badly, along with the IR-based wireless networking that used giant ethernet-connected IR deathstars mounted in the ceilings of each room.
Ashens, that Voodoo card was for the original iMac, it goes in the mezzanine slot.
At lot of this stuff is waaaaay before my time but it's really great to be able to see the history of British computing and gaming. I'm gonna make it a point to go to that museum one day.
Heh I remember back about 12 or 13 years ago trying to run Half Life 2 on my crappy computer with a 900mhz AMD Thunderbird and a Voodoo Banshee for graphics. The game ran at a blazing 12fps. I was so determined that I still played it, regardless of how shitty it ran.
I once played Assassin's Creed Black Flag at 2fps for exactly the same stubborn reason.
My current games laptop runs Assassin's Creed III at a fantastic 6fps, despite the fact that other games of similar ages run at 30.
I don't think I've ever watched this channel while not toasted out of my mind
Clint Basinger would love this.
He sure would, I bet he watches this already anyway. ClInt if you're here reply to my comment!
He could make like 30 oddware videos with all this crap!
It's like 60 thrifts in one box!
Yes he would.
shits in suits jjjj
I love these archive videos. It's a fantastic bit of intellectual improv on your part and I'm always left wanting more. Were I in the UK I would definitely go to this museum.
I get so excited when Ashens uploads I sound like that screaming goat vine
I've been really enjoying this series of videos!
4:29 There's a local store that has a big crate of older ISA modems.
Micro Genius is a famiclone, by the way. It's actually pretty good if I recall.
6:05 Looks like something that would've come out of a Xerox Alto.
6:32 Speak of the devil.
7:42 Philips CDi inspiration much?
8:58 The TI99/4 had a speech synthesizer if I recall. A TH-cam user called bd594 has one of these, I believe.
10:20 I could use a card like this for my G3.
13:20 Elite was a good game as well. Gotta love the ingenuity of people in the late 80s early 90s compared to now.
16:47 Is that the Frieden mechanical calculator CuriousMarc fixed for the computing museum?
Ah, yes... the before bed Ashen's upload.
Time to rebinge all my favorites.
This might be my favorite series ashens does
The black dome at 2.50 is a Sinclair QL add on. It looks like the extra RAM module. Probably 512K
I had a plus d interface from mgt, it was a disc/printer interface for the spectrum. Pressing the button would allow you to dump save game states to disc or tape. Quite an interesting bit of kit.
Every time I see these videos I wish I could hop a plane to the UK and spend the entire trip here! So many retro electronic goodies, it'd be like a dream!
Just when I'm getting sleepy, here's a legit reason to procrastinate on even going to bed!
I like that matey isn't even hitting a cue ball, he's just going straight for the red.
I got quite excited when you uncovered the Hurricane there.
Alex Higgins died in 2010 as he was a heavy smoker, and was diagnosed with throat cancer.
I like how he says "It whispers to me about the cheeses of the world" it's a nod back to his 10th anniversary special where he says youtube was a mouse in space that beamed down visions of the all the cheeses in the world.
its probably been found out by now, but that was a xerox parctab
I love it when I see a new Ashens video!
I had a BBC acorn electron, it was my first PC. Many hours spent playing hopper. Good times!
Loving this series. I hope there's more
Oooh! I have a Ti-99/4a right here that I still use every once in a while! Extremely underrated classic computer! Would love that speech synthesizer at 8:55
Next week on Barshens: SCART or SHART?
I remember playing Lemmings on an Acorn computer in school in the early 90's.
Your school sounds very outdated..early 90s????
we had acorns at my primary school in the late 90s, I think we were some of the last to use them though
My prep school was still using BBC Micros well into the mid-1990s.
benryves A teacher in my high school had a BBC Micro. I used to play on it during lunch time playing Chucky Egg and Astroids, I think.
I worked in a private school between 97 and 2001 - they were still using Archimedes in the primary classes when I started and the science departments has a huge amount of education software on BBC floppies - I spent an enjoyable few weeks working out how to wire a BBC -B to a PCs serial port to suck the data off the floppies so we could port it over to emulators and keep on using the educational stuff in science classes.
me and my brother actually bought a massive collection (around 20 big boxes) of stuff like this 15 years ago for £80 and split it between us, ive been selling a lot of it on ebay recently and already topped a £700 return & still got a fair bit left, my favorite piece's that ive kept for myself is a commodore amiga 600 and a 128k zx spectrum with a few hundred games!
The item in the playmobil bag at 5:50 looks like Magnetic-core memory! A very early computer RAM chip from the 1950s, used until the mid 70s
That's what I was thinking, for the 1401 or the like
Ashens should write an entire book on 80's action figures next, I would love to have that on my coffee table.
"To annoy anyverybody in the entire world" I really feel like that should be a word!
Good job, Ashens! You guessed correctly on the concave/convex option! (All teasing aside, that's how I always remembered it, personally-- conCAVE, being dipped-in, like a geologic cave. Convex, by process of elimination, being the one that bulges out.)
ashens, i love these boxes. please keep doing them
i bloody love these videos
the handheld device is called The PARCTab, it were a prototype for a early PDF like thing under their "ubiquitous computing vision" to show people their vision of the future. it was showed off with the PARCPad that was pretty much the same but book sized and featured a "touch screen"
I still have my old ZX Spectrum in the DKTronics keyboard with a 16K memory expansion and the Micro Drive. Them were the days
ashens please keep doing these they are Hella interesting
The song that plays during the montage of the computer museum at the end of these videos always reminds me of Tubba Blubba's theme from Paper Mario for the first few bars...
Seeing that Amstrad testing PCB...man we've come a long way in such a short time.
We did actually have the Amstrad 8256 or a close relative in the US. As I recall, the Sears department store sold them. I never saw one in the wild, or heard of anyone buying one, but I saw them in many stores at the time.
I'm honoured to know I have the same t-shirt as Ashens. Lootcrate. Worth it!
Haha. As soon as he said "Texas Instruments" I thought "I'll bet it's the speech synth!".
Those things were good fun. I think most people who had a TI had that module. I don't remember why the front flipped open like that. Maybe I never knew.
I still distinctly remember the strange way it said "Excellent Shot, Commander" in the game "Moon Mine".
Well I finally got to go to the Centre for Computing History, mentioned your channel too! That place is truly amazing. They have a Sega Mega-Tech!! The 50hz CRTs were painful to look at at first, took a little while to get used to them again. Enjoyed playing with the Amstrad Mega PC, Acorn Archimedes machines, NES, Famicom (which sadly was not playable, had that as a kid not the NES) Dreamcast with Sonic Adventure, Dragon32, Commodore VIC20 and 64 and the Mastersystem. Played around with BASIC on the Apple II and fombled the Amiga 500. They also have a replica of a 1970s office and some very large computers. Sadly couldn't find a Virtual Boy or Sega CDX. The guy told us they have plans to completely change the foyer area and put something called a 'Mega Processor' in there but that's all he knew. We are going there again!
Nice. A Micro Genius IQ-501. I found one of those a few months back for $5 Canadian at a local thrift store with both controllers. Very cool Famicom clone. They mostly sold them most often in regions where Nintendo didn't set up shop, so for example, in soviet russia they had the micro genius labelled as the Dendy. As far as Famiclones go, they're top quality. They'll play any famicom cartridge as they're pin compatible. Even Castlevania 3 should work. I like the design of the thing, feels almost like a tape cassette deck.
looks like they even copied the snes discoloration problem....authentic!
I'm wondering if that one belonged to a smokers family because the one I have is still relatively grey coloured
Nah, the discoloration on old computers has nothing to do with smoking, it's bromine fire retardant that colors the surface brown when it's exposed to sunlight.
Yup, my first SNES and some Triniton monitors have done the same. It doesn't happen to all of them though, it depends what batch the plastic was molded from. Supposedly you can 'reverse' this, but I haven't tried.
Yep, it's Dendy. Or Dendy Classic, to be more specific. There was also Dendy Junior model, which looked almost exactly like the first model of Famicom, but in a different color scheme. Early 90's were fun times in Russia, lol. Steepler - the company that imported and sold these pirate clones under the Dendy brand was so huge, that it had it's own chain of "official" Dendy stores, the official Dendy magazine (modelled after Nintendo Power) and freaking Dendy TV show on national television. Both were immenselly popular with kids. Nintendo either didn't care enough to intervene or couldn't do anything, because the copyright laws in Russia at the time were nonexistent. If you asked me in 1992 (I was 11) what was Nintendo, I would have said that it was one of the developers that make games for Dendy (like Konami or Capcom, but a bit lamer).
I found a fully working Amstrad PCW 8512 being thrown away in Canada while I was living there. I rescued it and played around with CP/M for a while until I was able to afford a PC. So yeah, they had made it over to Canada at least :)
+Ashens I would love to visit there... But there is a major problem...
I WOULD NEVER BLOODY LEAVE!!!!! THAT'S HEAVEN TO ME!!!!!
6:29 is called a Xerox PARCtab at old times that was used as an office handheld tablet or something that has a bunch of applications supposed to "help you" with your daily office work, and the screen is indeed a capacitive touch one xD
So a PDA of sorts?
Congratulation! You found the box they put all the random bits in no one reconized.
Fantastic stuff Ashens.I hope there will be another one soon.
I visited with my wife a couple of weeks ago, hoped I would get to see the boxes... :)
I had an Acorn Electron.and so did my then best friend (we used them to help with Computer Studies because the programming language was BBC Basic, the same as the BBC Model B systems at school). I can confirm that they did not come with turbo switches or sound jacks.
I have a PCW and I didn't know that test device existed. The board with slots and and switches is a VIC-20 multiple cartridge device. The Dragon 32 joysticks were analogue. The speech synthesiser is for the TI99/4A. The Plus D is a Spectrum disc interface. I have an Acetronic, which has a Radofin board in it.
The Xerox three-button thing is a Xerox PARCtab. One of the earliest examples of a PDA, and definitely one of the first of its kind with wireless networking. That black half-globe is actually the infrared wireless network interface.
in the iMac 3dfx box - the card with the sodimm socket is an iMac CPU daughter card.
That generation of iMac had an expansion slot - the next generation did not. But it did have a Radeon which helped.
Since the CPU board was socketed, it meant you could upgrade that too.
i had the micro genius once...Battle city..etc..ahh the good old days of cartridge gaming...loved it to bits XD
I had a dktronics keyboard for my Spectrum 48K in 1985. The duplicate higher cutouts at the back are so you can fit an Interface 1 underneath inside as well. The sticky labels on the keys were prone to twisting and coming off!
That Plus-D unit looks like something I had for my Spectrum +2A. It connected to the expansion port on the rear and hooked up a 3.5" disk drive (only took the 720Kb disks if memory served). When you hit the red button, it flashed the entire memory onto the disk, so you could avoid having to load the game off the tape next time you wanted to play it. You just had to remember to press a key on the keyboard to tell the machine if it was a 48k game or a 128k game.
Damnnn i want to visit that museum one day...
The TI Speech Synth is for the TI-99/4A. It uses the same chip as a Speak and Spell. It's extremely fun to program.
I really want to visit this place if I ever find myself in the UK.
Old computers always kind of amaze me because at the time I was born there were a number of different operating systems but the Big Three of DOS, Linux, and Macintosh had already been established. It was only later I learned that Amiga was still going strong at the time. It seems like a lot of old computers tended to have proprietary operating systems, which I guess is why they ultimately failed when general-purpose OSes like the Big Three were released.
Jingles and Ashes must be brothers!!
I would absolutely love to visit this place. Sadly, I am on the other side of the Atlantic.
OMG!!! I had that voice synthesizer for the TI-99/4a, wow
The DKtronics keyboard did house the Spectrum motherboard. If I remember correctly, the second set of holes was to allow an Interface 1 to also be included.
I love these computer history videos! please do more! I always put likes on these and comment
"Something you don't see every day", that's true, we usually only see his hands
I had that very same dktronics keyboard for my 48k spectrum, ah what memories! And you put the spectrum inside (minus its rubber keyboard) btw. I then lost my rubber keyed case and eventually lost the dktronics one too, it could even be that very one!