Comments on: What’s the oldest piece of PC hardware in Britain?

By: David Wright

David Wright — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 14:21:02 +0000

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!

By: David Wright

David Wright — Sun, 26 Jul 2009 21:41:04 +0000

A friend of mine has an Elliot 802 in his dinning room. It has core memory, so programs do not have to be reloaded when you start it up, which is fortunate as it has nothing fancy like a disk drive. II have seen him load its Algol 60 compiler from paper tape.

It was still fully functional a few years ago – I must call him and see if it still is!

By: Adrian B

Adrian B — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 13:13:59 +0000

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?

By: arthur

arthur — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 10:58:15 +0000

just look here:

http://www.yesterpc.com

By: Cyberspy

Cyberspy — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 10:40:46 +0000

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!

By: stokegabriel

stokegabriel — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 19:54:04 +0000

Another ZX81 in perfect working order. Can’t find the 16K module, but still have the till receipt £59.95 from Smiths Sloane Sq, the original packaging and carrier bag also all the leads and several magazines from that era with code for you to type in, several tape casettes also with programs on inc Chess.
Still beats me in pong, never been into gaming as a result!!!

By: CraigieD

CraigieD — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 11:09:43 +0000

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….

By: palox

palox — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 21:24:02 +0000

Bad News;
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8159406.stm
(although it may not count as it’s not in continual use!)

By: Christopher

Christopher — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 17:16:40 +0000

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.

By: Darien Graham-Smith

Darien Graham-Smith — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 16:53:52 +0000

Dammit. I knew I’d regret throwing out that ZX80.