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
The first personal computer produced by Sharp. I thank my friend Carlo who lets me raid his warehouse where he hides some very significant items. 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
Sometimes computers come unexpectedly from friends, relatives or unknown people that contact me on the site: a surprise and a discovery. Other times I actively dig the web – sites, classifieds, forums, auctions – to look for a particular piece I’d like to have. This VIC 20 belongs to the second category: I was searching for the very first model of this computer – also known as the “PET style keyboard” VIC 20 – and the most difficult task wasn’t finding it, but finding it at the right price.