From iconic machines like the IBM PC to the silliness of Sony’s £1,190 netbook, we’ve scoured the darkest corners and blown dust off some of the oldest, oddest and rarest kit we can find – starting with a true icon of the industry.

IBM PC

Introduced on August 12 1981, IBM’s Personal Computer was the first machine to popularise the now-ubiquitous term – and one of these antiques sits at the back of the PC Pro Lab.

Processing grunt was provided by the single-core, 4.77MHz Intel 8088, and floppy disks and cassettes are both supported. There’s a mighty 256KB of RAM, with 64KB of that soldered onto the motherboard. The IBM PC didn’t come cheap, either: a barebones model without any drives cost $1,565 and the top-end model came with bells, whistles and a monitor for $20,000.

The motherboard includes five eight-bit Industry Standard Architecture slots, with three of ours occupied: there’s a floppy disk drive controller card a SixPakPlus memory expansion board packed with 64KB chips, and a multidisplay adapter that’s actually two slabs of PCB stuck together. In the middle of the machine is an IBM 5 ¼in Diskette Drive.

Only one question remains, though, once we’ve blown the dust off this venerable old machine – can it run Crysis?

Apple Macintosh Plus

The Macintosh Plus might be a disturbing shade of yellow but that’s hardly surprising – it first saw the light of day in 1986. Released for £2,599, it was produced until October 1990 – the longest production run of any Macintosh – and was supported by Mac OS up to 1996.

It broke ground in other ways, too. As the first Macintosh to include a SCSI port it paved the way for external devices such as hard disks, tape drives, printers and CD-ROM drives, and this was also the first Macintosh to use SIMMs for its memory – with a massive 1MB of the stuff included as standard across four 256KB sticks.

Our particular model bears the familiar Cupertino, California label on its rear, but the sticker also reveals that this machine was “Assembled in Ireland” – a far cry from today, where most technology seems to be produced in Asia.

Apple Macintosh Colour Classic

Fast forward a few years – and look under a different test-bench – and you’ll find another piece of Apple history. It’s the first compact Macintosh computer to come with a colour display, and we wouldn’t have the iMac – the world’s finest all-in-one PC – without the Colour Classic paving the way.

Originally priced at $1,400 in February 1993, it ran on Mac OS 7.6.1 – the first version of the OS to drop the “System” from its name so the more distinctive moniker could be trademarked and the OS licensed to third-party Macintosh manufacturers.

This ancient all-in-one was more upgradeable than most of today’s models, too. The Processor Direct Slot was used with the Apple IIe Card, and ran software designed for the older Apple II. This backwards compatibility was supposed to entice the education market to upgrade from Apple II machines to fully-fledged Macintoshes, but other upgrades were also available, from CPU accelerators to Ethernet and video cards.

This versatility means the Colour Classic enjoys a cult following today: users have modded the machine with Power Mac parts so its screen runs at 640 x 480 rather than 560 x 384, and others have fitted motherboards from more powerful models.

Casio Cassiopeia E-115

Technical editor Darien Graham-Smith found the Casio Cassiopeia E-115 hiding at the back of his cupboard, but it first arrived back in October 2000 when PDAs, rather than smartphones, were big news.

So, what did you get for £422? There’s the sturdy exterior, which we described as “dull-grey silver” and “resting on its laurels”, alongside a cradle that “feels cheap and doesn’t engage with the Cassiopeia as solidly as we’d like” in its full review.

It wasn’t all bad news, with a 240 x 320 LCD screen that was better than its rivals, and a 131MHz StrongARM processor that was “fast enough to ensure instantaneous contact searches and speedy application switching”, according to us. It also had 16MB of ROM and 32MB of RAM memory – “about as much as you currently need”, at least back then.

Oh, and the software? Microsoft Windows CE 3.0 PocketPC Edition. Our model is old and, presumably, scarred by Darien’s cupboard, so it wouldn’t turn on – although that’s probably for the best, given that we concluded that the Casio simply couldn’t “match the standard” set by Compaq’s iPAQ.

Apple iMac G4

The G4 marked the first major redesign of the iMac, but the forlorn model found in the PC Pro Lab has clearly seen better days. It’s missing its monitor bezel, the distinctive round base is looking grubby, and it wouldn’t turn on – although that chrome, cantilevered arm is as smooth as it was when the G4 was eased from its box in 2002.

We described the G4 as “smooth and elegant design that puts other computer makes to shame”. Even now it stands out in a sea of modern all-in-ones that all look a little too familiar.

Our review also highlighted Apple’s concentration on “excellent design and ease of use”, but that has downsides – a specification we described as “Paleolithic”. It’s the first time we’ve seen computers compared to dinosaurs, but the SDRAM was slow and the GeForce 2 MX graphics chip was a generation behind the curve. It might look nice – as Apple devices are wont to do – but PCs ran our Photoshop 7 benchmark almost twice as quickly.

Dell Latitude

The oldest laptop we managed to find demonstrates the changing of technology. This Dell Latitude isn’t quite as backward as we first thought. It’s either a C540 or C640 – we’re not sure which, as it’s been hidden on a high shelf for far too long – and it’s a mix of old problems and forgotten boons.

It’s running a Pentium 4 chip with Windows XP, but the most striking thing about this machine is its design – or lack of it. Plain plastic is the order of the day, and the lid features the familiar Dell logo, along with the kind of build quality that we’d slate if this machine were reviewed today.

The base doesn’t cover itself in glory, either, with stickers, flaps, screws, feet and even some exposed fans. It’s also obvious where laptops have fallen backwards as companies rush to build slim, snazzy Ultrabooks: we rarely see keyboards with the kind of comfort, responsiveness and travel as this Latitude offers, and the 4:3 screen has a native resolution of 1,600 x 1,200 – a huge amount of desktop real estate compared to the 1,366 x 768 and 1,600 x 900 screens that now seem to be the norm.

Nvidia GeForce 7300 GT, 7600 GS and AMD Radeon HD 2600 XT

We’ve a big plastic tub full of graphics cards in the Labs and, while most of them are recent, a trio of PCBs lurking amid the anti-static bags and DVI to D-SUB adapters come from decidedly older stock. Two Nvidia cards, the GeForce 7300 GT and 7600 GS, are joined by AMD’s Radeon HD 2600 XT.

They were launched in 2006 and 2007, and they handily illustrate the impressive speed at which technology is pushed forward. The first 28nm GPU has just arrived but, back then, Nvidia and AMD were using 90nm and 65nm processes – and the 390 million transistors in the AMD card pales when compared to the 4.3 billion in AMD’s latest.

The bandwidth statistics are telling, too: the Radeon card churns through 35.2GB/sec in its 512MB incarnation, with the 7300 GT and 7600 GS offering 10.67GB/sec and 12.8GB/sec respectively. The latest high-end card, the Radeon HD 7970, chews through 264GB/sec – and even modest boards, such as Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 550 Ti, handle 98.5GB/sec.

Oh, and our benchmarks? The 7600 GS played Call of Duty 2 at 18fps when run at 1,280 x 1,024. Bless.

Sony VAIO P-series

Sony senior vice president Mike Abary famously said his company would never join the “race to the bottom” when netbooks hit the big time, and he wasn’t joking – Sony’s VAIO P-series cost £1,190 inc VAT for the top-end model.

That money paid for radical design, with a base occupied entirely by the keyboard,  that’s still so small and fiddly that you have to peck at the keys, prod at the trackpoint and squint at the 8in 1,600 x 900 screen. The Z-series Atom was decidedly Z-list, too, thanks to performance that couldn’t match £350 rivals.

I’ve watched all manner of events on a big screen at the pub: football, rugby, that weird version of rugby that Americans in riot gear play, to name but a few. Last night, however, the London Macintosh User Group (LMUG) invited me to sample a whole new viewing experience over a pint of Guinness and a pack of pork scratchings: a Steve Jobs keynote.

Of course, nobody really watched the Apple keynote except the thousand or so US journalists and developers who were granted an Audience With Steve Jobs. Bizarrely – for a company that makes the Soviets look like corduroy-wearing liberals when it comes to exerting control over the media – Apple decided not to stream the event live.

Instead, the 80-odd people crammed into the basement room of the Wood Marylebone pub were forced to watch an Engadget text feed and two intensely irritating chaps from Twit.tv regurgitating the speech from an illicit video feed.  It was the technology equivalent of going down the pub to watch Sky’s Soccer Saturday, where a bunch of portly ex-footballer sit watching the match on their monitors and tell you what’s going on.

Occasionally, the LMUG chaps managed to find a video feed being smuggled out of the hall – but they were so blurry that you couldn’t honestly tell whether it was Steve Jobs, Michael Stipe or Pope Benedict XVI on stage. And it was only a matter of time before Apple’s media death squad identified the miscreants, revoked their press badge, and bundled them on to the Gulag Express without informing their next of kin.

Bingo and a raffle

Such nastiness is clearly alien to the members of the LMUG; a nicer bunch of people you honestly couldn’t hope to meet – listen to their cheery welcome, for Pete’s sake. This was more like a village fete than a technology keynote. There was real ale, a game of Buzzword Bingo (Clickity click, terabyte disks; Heaven’s alive, iOS 5), and a raffle organised by a woman who was old enough to be Steve Jobs’ mum. “The average age of our members is 68,” confided organiser Steve Naybour, which, given there was a 14-year-old developer at the back of the room, left me wondering if some of the members were still technically alive.

During the duller moments – of which there were plenty in a two-hour plus keynote – Steve (Naybour, not Jobs) would flick the audio to his wireless mic and canvas the audience’s thoughts on the evening’s announcements. iOS 5? Enthusiastic clapping. Mac OS X Lion for $30? Even louder enthusiastic clapping. Only available via the Mac App Store? Sucking of teeth. Tough crowd.

The presence of a PC magazine editor sitting quietly in the corner seemed to go relatively unnoticed, aside from some rather curious glances at my choice of hardware. Suffice to say that if armed robbers had raided the basement of the Wood Marylebone last night, they would have come away with 87 iPhones, 86 iPads and a Dell XPS M1330.

Only once did it threaten to turn even the mildest hint of ugly when Steve Jobs proudly announced the iPhone and iPad were going “PC free”, which was greeted with a huge cheer.

I took revenge when asked by Steve Naybour to sum up the evening’s events, and I told the (now rapidly depleting) audience that I thought Steve Jobs’ “demotion” of Mac OS X was bad news for the long-term prospects of the operating system. This was a bit like telling the Tufty Club the squirrel had just been run over; a standing ovation wasn’t forthcoming.

Nevertheless, we shook hands and agreed a good night had been had by all. The LMUG will be holding its next meeting on Monday. The topic? Security.  Macs don’t get viruses do they?

We asked PC Pro readers which type of screen they prefer. They answered as follows:

And this is the type of screen used on the nine ultra-value laptops from our recent Labs in issue 200:

I could have reproduced exactly the same chart for our touchscreen PC labs in the current issue. And, of course, it’s not only the PC makers who’ve fallen in love with glossy screens: Apple customers have formed an online protest demanding that matte screens are offered as an option in the iMac line-up. Some of those Mac fans claimed that glossy screens were such a turn-off that they’d been forced to migrate to Windows just to escape the glossy lock-in.

Why do people hate glossy screens so much? Reflections are undoubtedly a major source of anguish. Speaking as someone who use a glossy screen laptop every day, I’m constantly irritated by the reflections cast across my screen by the overhead strip lighting in the office and, worse still, the sunlight making my screen near unwatchable on the train to and from the office.

And anyone who has a glossy screen on their shared family PC will surely be overly familiar with the daily routine of wiping fingerprints from the display, no matter how many times you angrily demand they don’t put their Marmite-sodden digits anywhere near the screen.

Let’s hope the PC makers wake up to the degree of dissatisfaction with glossy displays and bring back the welcome matte.

We assumed that this simple toy would never go hand-in-hand with computers, but we’ve been proved wrong by a particularly inventive member of the B3ta forums. While the site is normally full of offensive pictures and jokes that Frankie Boyle wouldn’t tell, this show of ingenuity is guaranteed to put a smile on your face: by combining the diminutive plastic bricks with a Mac and a felt-tip pen, he’s built a fully-functioning Lego printer:

I hope you’ll agree that it’s work of genius. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got a date with a boxful of knobbly plastic bricks. That Lego server won’t build itself.

As a developer, my main interest when it comes to CS5 is the new release of Flash Builder (aka Flex 4) and its interaction with Flash Professional and Flash Catalyst, and I’m looking forward to seeing whether Adobe has succeeded in creating the new, more productive workflow it was aiming for.

However, I’ve recently been attempting to peek through the fashionable spectacles of a young web designer so that I can advise a particular individual on how to get started in their own freelance business. And it’s a frighteningly expensive vista.

Picture a web designer in your mind. Just as much part of the uniform as the scruffy jeans and hoodie is the MacBook Pro running Photoshop. It might be possible to shake enough sense into said youth so that he can see the logic in buying a Samsung R780, which is the best part of £1,000 cheaper than the MacBook Pro 15 whilst simultaneously being more powerful. Not that this would stop them from buying the MacBook – who said it was about logic?

However, there’s no getting away from the utter ubiquity of Photoshop in the design community – it’s even more prevalent than Apple computers. You could almost say that a designer isn’t a designer unless they use Photoshop. Most designers will also use Illustrator and, if they’re a web specialist, probably Dreamweaver, but it’s Photoshop that is the defining application.

Hard choice

With the demise of the Web Standard package in CS5, web designers are left with a choice between investing in Web Premium or buying the software packages individually. It’s hard to argue that Web Premium represents good value: it contains nine full products for £1,679 (inc VAT), but that assumes that you would use all of the products. Someone looking to get started in design is faced with either stumping up for the full suite or paying £644 for Photoshop, with an extra £420 for Dreamweaver and £606 for Illustrator. In other words, you might as well buy the Web Premium suite. Which is the point, of course.

So assuming our web designer decides he or she must have a MacBook Pro and, at the barest minimum, Photoshop, the total bill runs to around £2,400, which is a hell of a barrier to entry into the industry. Compare this to a developer. A PHP developer could set up shop with an entry-level desktop PC running Linux and UltraEdit with a total cost of less than £500. Even a developer targeting the Flash Player platform could get away with using the free FlashDevelop IDE with the Flex 4.0 SDK. A professional PHP development setup would include a more powerful computer and a professional IDE such as PHPDesigner – still a fraction of the cost of setting up as a web designer.

So, what’s the answer? Well, our designer could save a little by buying a refurbished MacBook from the Apple store or even a second-hand MacBook, although finding one with a guarantee at a decent price is difficult. Or they could buy a PC laptop.

As for Photoshop, even though this upgrade introduces some juicy new features an earlier version would be adequate for most starting designers. Unfortunately, it seems to be next to impossible to legally buy older versions. I can understand the short-term reason why Adobe cuts off older versions when it releases a new product (in common with most other software developers) although if it truly had confidence in the superiority of its latest iteration there’s no obvious reason why it couldn’t continue to market the previous version at a lower price.

What’s the answer to this conundrum? How do newcomers to web design equip themselves? I appreciate that educational versions exist, but their licence prohibits commercial use and equally, of course, there are plenty of cracked and otherwise illegal versions around, but I’m interested in whether there’s a reasonable and legal path available. If not, by continuing to charge such high prices for the single versions of its software, doesn’t Adobe run the risk of choking off its audience at the industry entry point?

The big question: is the MacBook worth more or less than it was before?

A few years ago I really, really liked Internet Explorer for Mac, but Steve Jobs called Bill Gates a sissy and the Macintosh business unit in Redmond ceased making it. That’s what I was told happened anyway. So it’s been a few years since I used IE in anger.

The Internet is central to what I do professionally and, for better or worse, where I get most of my news and a good chunk of my entertainment, too. On my Mac I use Safari and, I’m not just saying this, it suits me fine. It’s not the greatest thing since sliced bread and neither is it full of magic and ponies.

However, I’ve found Internet Explorer on Windows 7 to be a pain in the proverbial: slow, stuttering and prone to crashing. In all, IE is just a bit rubbish. In fact, so far IE has been the only part of my Windows 7 experience that’s been anything less than moderately good. Perhaps it’s my Apple-centric way of working, but Internet Explorer simply isn’t a tool I’d trust to get me through the day.

I could, of course, search the support forums to find answers to my issues. Why, for instance, does a URL redirect from bit.ly seem to fry IE’s brains? Or why with three tabs open does it grind to a halt and simply pretend to open a page? I want it to just work and it doesn’t.

I wonder if I’m the only one who finds this with IE or are there millions of people out there who think this is the norm? Is my experience of IE par for the course or a bit unusual?

Also, is the interface supposed to be so appalling? Perhaps it’s me, but the orphaned extra toolbar off to the right-hand side doesn’t make much sense. And then there’s the two Tools menus: one in the aforementioned toolbar and another in the Menu Bar toolbar (which is, admittedly, optional), both of which have different things in them. Have I missed something? Since when do applications have two menus with the same name that have different items in them? Please, please tell me that I am missing something and my tiny Apple-addled brain hasn’t seen the bigger picture.

If Safari were this bad I’d have switched to one of the other browsers quickly, and that’s what I’ve done with IE. Google Chrome is my new default browser. Given that in the coming years it’ll be Google and not Apple that poses the biggest threat to Microsoft’s dominance this doesn’t bode well for the second largest Mac developer and manufacturer of the world’s leading operating system and browser.

Click here to read the rest of Chris Brennan’s blogs on coverting from Mac to Windows 7

Although the Spotify software itself doesn’t support streaming to other devices, it’s perfectly possible to do so with the third-party software, Jamcast. What’s more, the Jamcast software is completely free of charge and (unlike the iPhone/Android software) you don’t need a premium Spotify account to take advantage.

I set this up on my Xbox 360 over the weekend and the process could barely be easier:

1. Download the Jamcast software and install it on your PC.

2. Open Jamcast, click the devices tab and check that your Xbox, PlayStation or digital radio/receiver appears in the list. If not, click Find and it should appear.

3. Fire up Spotify. Jamcast essentially broadcasts the output from your PC’s sound card to other devices on the home network, so check you’ve got no applications such as email clients running in the background, or be prepared to have your listening interrupted by “you’ve got new mail” jingles.

4. Turn on your Xbox and choose Music from the My Xbox section. Select Jamcast from the list of networked devices, then select Playlists and Virtual Soundcard. Click play, and after a few seconds delay, you should hear Spotify streaming through your console’s speakers. (Note that the instructions may vary slightly for other consoles/devices).

JAMCAST CAVEATS

Jamcast is beta software and the streaming experience isn’t perfect. The stream suffered from the odd audio wibble and drop out during our tests. A post on the Jamcast support forums claims this is down to the PC struggling to sample the Spotify audio quickly enough, which could be a particular problem on low-powered laptops and netbooks.

There’s also a five to ten second delay between the sound emanating from your PC and the sound coming out of your console/digital radio, so don’t panic if it doesn’t kick in immediately.

We also struggled to get Jamcast running on our test digital radio (the Revo Pico RadioStation), which recognised the Jamcast Virtual Soundcard playlist, but flatly refused to play it. Others have had more success with digital radios, judging by the forums.

MAC STREAMING

And what about those of you in Apple land, who are unable to install Jamcast? Several online forums suggest it’s possible to stream Spotify using a combination of the $25 Airfoil software and Apple’s Airport Express devices. Note – I haven’t tested this, so proceed at your own risk.

Let me know on comments below if you’ve found any alternative/better ways to stream Spotify to non-PC devices.

I have a guilty secret; although I work o PC Pro, I’m actually a avid Mac ethusiast. I fact, I’ve bee called a fa-boy by some in the past.

They’re everythig I eed from a PC. After a day istalling bechmarks, swappig out hardware ad searchig for drivers, all I wat is a machie that works well ad ever eeds tikerig with. The gorgeous OS and chassis desigs are a ice bous, too.

I’ve ever had ay problems with my Apple laptops, eve though I treat them very badly. My iBook survived over two years of beig throw i a bag, kocked and bumped, picked up at oe corer and geerally treated as a everyday workhorse, before fially givig up because of a broke power adapter plug.

That’s why I’m disappoited that my MacBook has developed a slight fault after less tha half this time – the “” key has falle off, that’s the oe betwee “M” and “O” i the alphabet, and “B” and “M” on the QWERTY keyboard. Ufortunately, my “” key is i my pocket, istead.

I’ll be takig it i to the Mac store later this week to see what they ca do – hopefully I wo’t eed to leave it with them, or I’ll have to tidy up ad remove all my fiacial documets and photographs. I’ll keep you posted.