My thanks to Ettore for the donation of this complete system: a Macintosh II, a 13″ AppleColor High-Resolution RGB Monitor, a mouse and a keyboard. Ettore wrote to me that he had a Macintosh II upgraded to IIfx that he wanted to get rid of, but he didn’t want to take it to a landfill. Unfortunately not many people have the time or will to send a couple of boxes and often these old machines are dumped. Continue reading
Today, July 23rd 2014, the Amiga turns 29: it was presented in 1985. That year my parents bought a Commodore 128, while my first Amiga, model 500, arrived in 1988. As always I won’t discuss the technical details of this revolutionary computer, but I will pay my tribute with a set of photographs. Continue reading
I bought this Commodore 116 on eBay a few weeks ago from a German seller. The keyboard didn’t work, and I had to repair it. Not a simple task, as these keyboards weren’t built to be opened; I’ll probably write a separate article to document my restoration. Continue reading
Last Sunday, like every second Sunday of the month, I went to the flea market of Udine (I live 10 minutes away from the city). I hadn’t found anything interesting in months, but this time I brought home an Atari VCS, renamed “2600” a few years later, with a dozen games and some instruction booklets, but without joysticks or paddles. Continue reading
This computer represents the swan song of the PET line: the failure of the CBM-II and the unstoppable advance of the PC in the business sector forced Commodore to stop the production of these computers. Continue reading
I remember Spectravideo mainly for its joysticks, even if the company started its business in the early eighties by producing games for the Atari 2600 and other systems, and then selling computers. In this post I pay my tribute to one of the most known joysticks, the QuickShot II.
This is one of the floppy drive models marketed by Commodore for its business line of computers. Before turning it on I made a thorough cleaning, but when I tested it, it didn’t work properly. For example, the command to list the content of a floppy disk showed the wrong characters and after a few attempts nothing was displayed at all. I started to try all the socketed ICs on other drives to search for the fault, but they were all working; then I re-connected the drive to a PET and it functioned perfectly. Probably a few IC pins were oxidized. Continue reading
A few days ago I found a box in the warehouse of my friend Carlo, containing some Sinclair items. They had some traces of humidity, fortunately on the outside only. I took them apart, cleaned, tested and then reassembled them, taking a few pictures as usual. Continue reading
This is the Portable with a backlit LCD screen (model M1526), a revision of the first version (1989 model M5120) that was unusable in low light situations. I bought it from the U.S. in 2000 – at that time it was just an obsolete Mac, and the price was quite low. Continue reading
At the end of 2013 I was having dinner with a friend who owns an MMF 9000 (MMF stands for Micro MainFrame, the computer is known as SuperPET in the States), and I asked him if he could lend it to me so I could take some pictures. But by an incredible coincidence, a couple of days later I was told (thanks Marco!) about an identical computer for sale 40 Km from where I live. I called the phone number on the classified ad and on the very last day of the year I went to take a look at the computer. It worked and had all the add-on boards (two of them, it’s the first revision) that make this computer special.
I bought it for a very reasonable price and I decided to take some pictures to document this rare computer. Continue reading