Being of a certain age I remember when personal PCs and microcomputers first became widespread and modern computers of all sorts are a bit boring.  I have been looking for something to play with from the "old days" that doesn't 1. Take up too much room and 2. doesn't cost a fortune.  I eliminated all the large microcomputers (with the requirement for monitors/tape drives/floppy drive and some remarkably silly prices!)  and decided to look at the Sharp series of pocket computers. The first one I bought was a Sharp Pc-1360  which looks almost unused, it can be programmed with a version of Basic. I soon found a flaw in that it's quite hard to get info in and out without using some rare equipment (tape interface or serial interface,) I'm currently working on the serial interface problem.

 

I then got the chance to buy a Sharp Pc-1500 (with a huge 16Kb ram) but this had similar problems with I/O as the PC-1360 but I recently managed to buy another PC-1500 with the Plotter and cassette interface - it was sold as not working - mainly because it had no batteries in the main unit and it had no power supply for the plotter. But after a quick trip to Maplins for PSU and the removal of the knackered Ni-Cd batteries from the plotter (they leak all over the insides eventually rotting it away!) I have a fully working plotter and can load programs from the PC (as a WAV file). I had forgotten how long it takes to load  programs.  

 

The best thing is my daughter has been using it for simple programming - ten year olds are easily impressed when then can write a simple program that adds up a few numbers!

 

 

 

 

Old game consoles are more my thing...

 

Fully restored my dad's Atari 2600 a couple of years ago but I've got pretty much everything up to a PS1...

I've repaired my Dads old turntable and am listening to records via it

How about an Osborne portable computer:-

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qE5Jyd0JSs4

 

These hit the UK in the late 1980s and there were a couple in the NHS finance office where I worked.

 

64k memory,  4" CRT text display, 2 x 5.25" floppy drives,  CP/M OS, I can't recall if they had battery power - considered the bees knees at the time. They were considered "luggable" according to the advertising blurb at the time weighing in at about 30lbs. On a good day, you might be able to save that half-hours worth of keyboard  input  data from a Lotus 123 spreadsheet onto the disk.

 

 

Or from ten years earlier - Dr Wang's Wordplex desktop machine. Again 15" CRT, twin floppies, Zilog's 8-bit 80 processor (Equivalent to Intels 8080) or a PDP 64 bit minicomputer from the  70s (These had core store memory):-

 

http://www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/objects/computing_and_data_processing/1982-960.aspx

 

Must be collectors items now.

 

There always the Amstrad 1512/1640 from the late 1980s to which you could retro-fit a 10/20Mb (!!!) hard disk to complement the 1 MB of memory and there's got to be loads of Ataris' Commodore 64 and North Star Horizon's, IBM desktops knocking about:-

 

http://www.classiccmp.org/dunfield/

 

 

 

Nick

Edited 29 October, 201411 yr by Clunkclick

Have you looked into emulators? You don't get the same feel for the hardware, but they're cheap or free and don't take up the space.

Have you looked into emulators? You don't get the same feel for the hardware, but they're cheap or free and don't take up the space.

 

Most are free too!

Check out the old Psion 5 series of pocket computers. Then wonder at why no one has made a modern one. The clamshell keyboard is a little engineering marvel and imho hasn't been bettered.

 

 

A more recent little wonder to play with would be the Raspberry Pi. There is a significant hobbiest community using them for all sorts of things - http://www.raspberrypi.org/

Edited 31 October, 201411 yr by Aspman

Have you looked into emulators? You don't get the same feel for the hardware, but they're cheap or free and don't take up the space.

 

I've got a full Amiga emulator running on my MacBook pro. its quiet funny if you start workbench and show it round your mates as if its another version of OSX.

I programmed the old Psion II and 3 series - they were used for out of office time recording for Solicitors when at a clients or in court.

 

Remember the old Psion II Datapacks - basically an EPROM in a cartridge - you had to UV bake them to reformat them for use.

Tempted to look at an emulator for the C64 and Atari 520 ST - had both when I was a lad so would be good to look at them again. Maybe get some games running (like the ones that took 20 minutes to load in those days and corrupted at 19 minutes....

I keep meaning to buy myself a raspberry pi and getting some emulators on there, Spectrum and something like Mame perhaps.

I still have a Spectrum +2 in my mum's attic - the James bond pack that came with a light gun, still in the original box too

I still have a Spectrum +2 in my mum's attic - the James bond pack that came with a light gun, still in the original box too

 

I had a +2A with the light gun. Can't remember which pack it was, had a bunch of lightgun games that came with it. Operation Wolf was one.

I have a few more "things" than the Sharp PCs (2 PI s, Acorn A7000, Psion NetBook, a couple of old Windows CE devices, and Psion 3a. )   The A7000 is up the loft at the moment as the PI can run Risc OS much better if required.

I have several of the RiscPC's. Nice machines. One is even spec'd up a bit. I remember buying a 16meg memory upgrade - only £300. A winchester as they were known waas quite a bit too.

I also had/have one of the Acorn branded Psions, not sure which version it was. A really great idea and very nice to use.

Did you ever try the Acorn A4 laptop? size of an A4 sheet, a bit on the thick side but beter than any other contempory laptop I ever managed to get my hands on.

I've got a Casio fx-7000gb in my desk at work. The trouble is that its been so long since I used it properly that I can't remember the graphical functions.

Day to day, I use a 17 year old casio FX82sx that I had to buy to conform to university rules in 1997. Can't believe some chancer is asking £23 for them on ebay.

Edited 9 November, 201411 yr by 'daiking'

I've got a Casio fx-7000gb in my desk at work. The trouble is that its been so long since I used it properly that I can't remember the graphical functions.

Day to day, I use a 17 year old casio FX82sx that I had to buy to conform to university rules in 1997. Can't believe some chancer is asking £23 for them on ebay.

I would kill for that fx 7000 I had one for years and it gave up the ghost a while back so I have now got a new graphics calc from Casio and it is not a patch on the 7000 - the new one is difficult to use in comparison as the have reduced the key count and it is all through menus now - poor

Got an old palm tungsten t in a drawer as well and that is great but can't use it for work any more as the drivers are tricky to find for newer windows versions

I would kill for that fx 7000 I had one for years and it gave up the ghost a while back so I have now got a new graphics calc from Casio and it is not a patch on the 7000 - the new one is difficult to use in comparison as the have reduced the key count and it is all through menus now - poor

*heads to eBay to check values*

I've got an old iPaq 2190 in front of me now and two Palm M500s in my drawer (with 16Mb SD cards, feel the power!).

 

I was using them to carry a work calendar but an upgrade of Office software at work finally killed them. I liked the Palm best, the old skool LCD lasted for ages without a charge and I didn't need it to do much.

 

The iPaq worked but Windows Mobile 6.5 is awful compared to the more modern mobile OSs. Work looking at just to remember how bad it was before Apple kicked off things with the first mobile iOS.

 

When I can be bothered I'll stick them all up in the 'free' forum.

 

I've still got and use the Texas Instruments Scientific calculator I used at school, I think it must be about 22yr old.

[edit] It was a Ti-36X. Going for £20 on Ebay, probably about what I paid for it. However I painted mine with the clearcoat from my Dad's car touchup kit.

Edited 10 November, 201411 yr by Aspman

Both SWMBO and I still have our school calculators, still in daily use. Hers is a Casio College fx100 from '85 and mine is a Casio fx450 from '82. I found someone on ebay offering a new fx100 for £120! Prices for used machines around the £20 to £40 for either of them.

 

Shows my age but I could only use my previous calculator (Casio fx39) for some of my math O-Level papers, as we were about the last year to still use log tables. Now those seemed old tech even at the time!

I've got a Casio fx-7000gb in my desk at work. The trouble is that its been so long since I used it properly that I can't remember the graphical functions.

Day to day, I use a 17 year old casio FX82sx that I had to buy to conform to university rules in 1997. Can't believe some chancer is asking £23 for them on ebay.

Used an Fx9700 (Graphical) to check results for a OU maths course I did. They were great. As was the "Scratchpad" pc software from University of Miami sources.

 

Nick

Edited 10 November, 201411 yr by Clunkclick

I notice nobody mention slide rules. But my best memory was a work acquisition of an electronic Calculator- almost like a mechanical abacus. punch in a number, punch in divide by - put kettle on and wait. Coffee was ready long before calculator was finished.

I'd suggest giving a Raspberry Pi a go for programming, and something like an Amiga if you want to try some old fashioned computing that actually works rather than beeing a frustrating experience like anything older may be.

I now have a working serial cable (hand built)  to the Sharp PC-1360 and can write programmes on the Windows PC and send them to the Sharp and back again very easily - I can do similar trick on the PC-1500 but I have to use a couple of window programmes to convert the text into a sound .wav file and load it through the cassette interface. On the look out for a Sharp CE-158  or a Tandy 26-3612 serial port to enable serial transfers with the PC-1500 but these two items seem very rare.

 

There was a sharp PC-1600 with a FD drive and a lot of extras but I thought the asking price of over €1000 was a bit on the steep side I'm a more of £20 at most man.

Both SWMBO and I still have our school calculators, still in daily use. Hers is a Casio College fx100 from '85 and mine is a Casio fx450 from '82. I found someone on ebay offering a new fx100 for £120! Prices for used machines around the £20 to £40 for either of them.

 

Shows my age but I could only use my previous calculator (Casio fx39) for some of my math O-Level papers, as we were about the last year to still use log tables. Now those seemed old tech even at the time!

 

Reminds me of this: