⌨⬛ This is the NeXT computer. Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau used it at CERN to set up the first web server, id Software developed games like Doom and Quake on it, and at Slovenian daily newspaper Delo they used it to digitize the entire newspaper production process.
🦖🌪️ Silicon Graphics graphic workstations were once synonymous with high performance - they even appeared in movies like Jurassic Park, Twister, and Congo. In the museum, we have a lot of interesting peripherals for them, including several SGI IndyCam cameras.
✏️📺 In our museum collection, we have a unique gaming console called the Vectrex, which comes with its own built-in TV screen. Its distinctive feature, as evident from its name, is vector graphics (made up of lines) instead of raster graphics (like pixels on the screen) - giving its games a unique look and very smooth animations.
💼💻 Many people would have loved to own an HP 200LX in 1994. It's powered by a 186 processor running MS-DOS 5.0, with 2 MB of available RAM, and offers plenty of I/O ports and expansion possibilities.
Maintenance at @ComputerHistory. I fixed high-speed rewind on the vintage IBM 729 tape drive. It pulls the tape out of the columns, fast-rewinds most of the way, puts the tape back in the columns, and finishes with slow rewind (video). But that's not what was happening before...
🦕🖥️ The Lear Siegler ADM-3A terminal (1976) looks like it's straight out of The Flintstones 😃 We received it 12 years ago from the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering, and it dates back to the times before the influential VT100 terminal.
💡🖨️ For terminal access, you don't even need a monitor. Ancestor of this dot matrix printer with a keyboard, the DECwriter III, had its roots in teleprinters, which evolved from telegraphy. This model dates back to 1977 and supports only the more modern RS-232 standard with a maximum speed of 9600 bit/s.
🌴✋ Palm. Just like BlackBerry, once synonymous with the personal digital assistant. First acquired by U.S. Robotics, then by 3Com, and later by HP, which ultimately retired the brand name in 2011.
🔢🕹️ The Schmid TVG 2000 is a German clone of the second-generation Emerson Arcadia 2001 console from 1982. It is powered by an 8-bit Signetics 2650A processor running at 3.58 MHz, which addresses 1 KB of memory. The screen has a resolution of 128x104/208 and supports 8 colors.
💿📚 The Iomega Jaz is a series of portable data storage media and drives introduced in 1995, succeeding the successful Zip drive with larger capacities (2 GB in 1998).
⚾🧱 Arkanoid for DOS was developed by the Japanese company Taito in 1988. It successfully continued the brick-breaking genre that Atari had pioneered with the arcade game Breakout in 1976. Arkanoid was a hit, with versions available for nearly 20 different systems in addition to DOS. What's your favorite "breakout"?
🧼💾 An unused cleaning kit for 5.25'' and 3.5'' disk drives. The liquid, we fear, may have evaporated by now. There's also the question of whether the material in the cleaning disks is still in a condition that we'd dare bring it into contact with the drive head 😅
The MSX Philips VG-8010, a younger sibling to the more famous 8020, was released in 1985 as part of the MSX standard (despite lacking certain features like a Centronics port and expansion bus.) It was the second MSX computer from Philips 🖥️ and came with 32kB RAM, a chiclet keyboard, and two cartridge slots (missing the cover in our case).
The Tandy Portable Computer 100, was a pioneering portable computer released in 1983 by RadioShack, part of Tandy Corporation. It featured an integrated keyboard, a built-in LCD screen, and ran on four AA batteries, making it highly portable for its time. 📠💻
📻 We are broadcasting a ZX Spectrum game over the air in collaboration with Radio Student! This week marks Radio Student's 55th anniversary, and they were among the European stations broadcasting computer programs over the radio in the 1980s, a tradition we are reviving. The game being aired is Kontrabant 2, originally released by Radio Student in 1984. 🎮