I still have a Memotech MTX500, sitting in a shop window in Stadthagen now, it is a lovely bit of kit, brushed black alumium – although Apple fans will be disappointed, it isn’t made from a single piece of aluminium

I threw out my old Apricot Xi (10MB HD, graphical user interface, 2 full office sweets, BASIC, C and PASCAL compilers plus documents and it still wasn’t half full!) when I moved to Germany. That was a lovely old machine circa 2004.

Steve Gibson (grc.com) recently rescued a PDP-8 from the scrapper a couple of months back and is regaling his listeners on This Week In Security with stories of assembly language programming on it

I meant Pounds as in weight not price! But that flash drive is insanely expansive!
I’ll stick with my 8gb for now.

I Have a ZX 81 along with a ZX Spectrum 48K and Spectrum + and even a ZX Spectrum 128K the original rare one with the heatsink. All still working. The ZX 81 needs a new power supply but tested it with a friends and worked perfectly first time.

I know of a mate who uses his spectrum 128k as a midi device and I know of another mate that has an Atari ST in constant use as a midi sequencer. Isn’t it strange that in an age of 3D gaming behemoths that a lot of the older spectrum games are now being played online as flash games? Who can forget Boulderdash….

Although these PC’s are fairly old, when I was in the Royal Navy I maintained computers that were, even for their time, way older.

In the 1990’s (I left in 1994) and possibly into this century, the Ferranti FM1600 computers were still widely used.

The one that was part of my Sonar system, an FM1600B, came in 5 cabinets. The first cabinet contained the CPU and other peripherals. The CPU occupied an entire shelf of circuit boards which, if you wanted to (and we were taught to!) you could fault find down to gate level.

Although each memory location contained 24bits, the maximum addressable memory space was 64KB. Wait – it gets better…
Memory came in 4 large (approx 4″ wide, 18″ high, 18″ deep) units, each containing 16KB of core store – 1 hand knitted ferrite core per bit, with 3 wires passing through each. You could even tune your memory with an oscilloscope! Each 16KB block cost £60,000 – £650 flash drives – eat your heart out !

Software came on, of course, mylar (tough paper) tape.
The boot sequence started by using a bank of 24 switches to enter a sequence of single machine code instructions to clear memory. Next, a boot switch was rotated, executing about 14 hard wired machine code instructions, which ‘taught’ the computer how to read 5 hole unsigned paper tape. Running this little program started the paper tape running – the 5-hole code teaching the computer to read 8 hole-unsigned paper tape then finally 8-hole-signed paper type.
It wasn’t all bad though – once the operational program (4 reels of paper tape) was in memory, the whole of memory could be dumped to mag tape (reel-to-reel – no girly cassettes here!) which could then be loaded in little more than a minute!

All you guys with old kit – Do beige DOS boxes go nicotine yellow naturally – or was it the result of all the cigarette smoke in our workplace?

Doing a full IT audit here (new job) and found an 80286 based machine running at 8Mhz (with a turbo button and everything). It is still in service as a UNIX terminal!