The Jim Austin Computer Collection - Near Driffield

I still have an IBM 5155 - one of the first "lugables" from 1985 - I bought it when they were first released and could never force myself to throw it away
 
i'm going to sort a trip out there will email him :-)
 
So many machines I've worked on or owned, even more than in the National Museum of Computing at Bletchley Park. What a collection
 
Oldest computer I still own is my BBC model B, which doesn't work - probably needs new capacitors. Also still have my Achimedes A310 which I haven't tried to use in over 30 years. I liked the 6502 machine language, it made the so called "reduced instruction set" of the ARM chips look enormous.

Did you know there's someone making Raspberry Pi powered DEC PDP 10 replicas in the states? The original is older than me, but I really want one.
 
onomatopoeia said:
Oldest computer I still own is my BBC model B, which doesn't work - probably needs new capacitors. Also still have my Achimedes A310 which I haven't tried to use in over 30 years. I liked the 6502 machine language, it made the so called "reduced instruction set" of the ARM chips look enormous.

Did you know there's someone making Raspberry Pi powered DEC PDP 10 replicas in the states? The original is older than me, but I really want one.
Click to expand...
I still have my Commodre 64 and Amiga 500.... Probably non-working now...

Spent a while working on DEC PDP11/34 systems where I worked . The oldest system I ever worked on used ferrite core memory and was programmed by ticker tape.
 
It's fascinating. We should appreciate all the people who collect obsolete equipment—I'm not one of them; I throw away everything that stops working or is superseded.

I got into computers pretty early, in the mid 80's, I wasn't too sure what a computer actually was at the time but appreciated that it would make my business far more efficient, and my first 'real' computer was an Amstrad with an attached dot matrix printer, which allowed me to print off price lists - I think that it could hold 32 pages in its RAM.

An Amstrad or 2 later, and I expanded it by buying a hard disk card costing £200, storage was 20 Mb and I thought that I would never need that much . . .

I then bought a Visico (I think) 286 machine complete with a B&W laser printer, about £5400 . . .

Back then, a computer was of very limited use if we didn't learn BASIC programming.
 
I used paper tape on a Univac 1106 which had a fixed disk for the OS and everything else on tape; the memory was ferrite core arrays, so intricate. Programmed it in a 36-bit assembler code. This was what ran the pay and personnel side of the RSF in the 1970's. We then rewrote everything in COBOL running under VME/B on an ICL 2980 mainframe. Happy days.

My personal computer journey started with a Video Genie, a clone of a Tandy TRS80, with 500 baud cassette tape storage and 16k of RAM. I wrote family history programs on it in Basic. Then at work I got a BBC B with disks to use to teach RAF personnel about microcomputers, then later as an MoD lecturer we used a PDP10 for teaching Assembler and COBOOL programming, and an RM380z to teach Pascal and microcode programming. More happy days.
 
I started in IT in 1978 on an IBM 370/145. After seeing an internal advert for a trainee operator (I was working on HGV repairs at Leyland Motors), with zero training or experience, I started as the second man on a 2 man night shift. As they say, I learned to say “sh!t” behind the printers when they stopped stacking. We ran the warehouse stock system. After a long career, covering IBM banking mainframes (3031), Data General stockbroker systems (can’t remember the models), PC and network support for a major local authority, I retired there as a senior IT manager in 2005. And still no more academic qualifications than my initial 3 “O” levels! Do I miss IT? Not a bit.
 
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