During weekend I was in Warsaw at Pixel Heaven 2013 retrocomputing event. It was interesting but I had no idea which machines I will see there as normally on such events in Poland you can see some Atari, Commodore 64 and Amiga computers. But here we got far, far more.
All computers were provided by Stowarzyszenie Mi?o?ników Zabytków Informatyki with few exceptions. I have to visit them in Katowice one day and look at rest of their machines.
Main room was filled with Commodore machines on one side:
As you see from PET line though VIC-20 to C64 (in nearly whole range of cases) and it’s portable SX64 version. Then C16/116/+4 line. There was also C128D but crowded for most of time so I did not took a photo.
I always though that C16/116/+4 line was disaster one. But one of guys doing C64 pixel graphics told me that they had 121 colours (compared to 16 on C64) so it gave him more possibilities.
Next set was from Atari:
There were also 130XE, 800XE for which I do not have photos. Too bad that Atari 400 got wrong monitor — picture was snowing due to NTSC output instead of PAL (this was description from owner of same model). And each time I see TOS on Atari ST I want to run away screaming…
Wide line of ZX Spectrum compatibles:
The green one was bought by my friend V0yager. It had names like “Basic 2000″ or “Lambda 8300″ and probably many others…
Speaking of ZX Spectrum… We got Polish computers based on Z80 as well:
First one (Meritum) was compatible with TRS-80. The second one was closer to ZX Spectrum (there was some compatibility iirc) but was extended with networking and was supposed to be used under CP/J (version of CP/M with networking and shared drives). That piano in the middle was a toy produced earlier by same company so they reused a case (including note holder).
Of course such event should have Commodore Amiga computers as well:
Amiga 500/1200 were present as well as another Amiga 4000 desktop.
600 was my first own computer (had Atari 65XE before) so I took a photo. Then we have revision 3 of Amiga 500 mainboard. Lot of things done different then in later ones — such as expansion connector. Amiga 4000D was property of my friend. It had PCI daughterboard inside (with network, usb 2.0 and VooDoo3 cards) and was powered by Cyberstorm PPC card. You can see cards on the last picture.
Some selection of strange IBM PC and compatibles:
Second one had touch screen, phone, fax and printer…
Other ones:
Vectrex (the first photo) is machine with vector graphics only, then Sharp MZ-700 with tape recorder and printer, Spectravideo SVI-738 X'Press and then German clone of Atari Pong.
But none of them gave me such joy as line of products from other British company:
From left:
- BBC Micro
- BBC Master
- Acorn Electron
- Acorn A3010
- Acorn A3020
I spent some time playing with RISC OS on A3010. It had some crazy ideas like AppDir but was fun to play with. Managed to drop down to text mode but it’s shell was too strange for me. Same with ARM BASIC. But it was great fun being able to play with one of first ARM based computers. Too bad that later someone change graphics mode to one incompatible with monitor ;(
It was great selection of old computers. I want to thank David Alan Gilbert for his comments on my Google+ posts related to British computers.
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I saw so many computers at Pixel Heaven 2013 was originally posted on Marcin Juszkiewicz website
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