My Vintage Computer Collection.

If you follow me on Twitter, YouTube or Steemit, you know I collect old personal computers.  I'm fascinated by the evolution of this technology.  While I don't get to spend too much time using them these days, I still find myself wanting to collect them.  It's an odd hobby I suppose, but no more odd than Tom Hanks collecting typewriters.  Let's take a look at some of my computers.

This is the Atari 400 which was released in 1979.  I believe it had 16 kilobytes of RAM and had a notepad application built-in.  What you did with that...  I guess just leave notes for someone to read when they passed by the computer...?  I used to have one in the late 1980s.  This isn't that one.  I honestly don't know whatever happened to it, but it was special to me.  It was given to me by a family friend named Mark.  He knew I loved computers and gave me his along with a couple of program cartrdiges.  One of those cartridges had BASIC on it.  I remember copying a program listing from a 3-2-1 Contact magazine that had a little rocket blast off, fly through space, and land on the moon.  I was so excited I had to show everyone in the house.  Sadly, I had no way of saving all those lines of code so when I turned that computer off, it was never to be seen again.  

This is the Atari 800 which was also released in 1979.  It was the higher end model Atari was offering.  It was beastly in look and feel.  The keyboard looks and feels like that of a typewriter.  I love the way it feels when I type and I'm enamored by it's appearance.  Hope my wife doesn't read this; she may get jealous.  It came with 48 kilobytes of RAM and supposedly you could swap out the RAM cards for larger amounts.  

This is the Commodore 64.  It came out in 1982.  I'm pretty sure the first run wasn't in this color.  Regardless, most folk may have acquired a 1541 disk drive, but that's it.  They hooked it up to their television set.  Having 2 drives and a Commodore branded monitor would have been... really expensive then (still is).  I do have a printer as well.

This is the Atari 800 XL. This came out in 1983.  Much more modern looking than the 400 or 800 and for the most part, could use all the software that those previous computers used.  Yeah, I had to have dual drives, just looks good to me.

The Coleco ADAM.  My first computer.  Released in 1983.  I didn't have a disk drive then nor a second tape drive, but I could still play ColecoVision Super Games, cartrdiges and run some neat programs like SmartBASIC and SmartLOGO.  

This is the Apple Macintosh 512K.  It was released in 1984.  I really wanted the 128K from a evolution point of view, but honestly, this is more functional and if I ever really wanted to use it, I could find more software for it.  I'm not much of an Apple fan, but I can't deny it's place in computer history.  

This is the IBM PS/1.  Released in 1990.  My mother was always pushing me into computers (I wasn't kicking and screaming) and knew I had to have something more professional someday.  That someday came in 1990 while shopping at Sears.  She went for the WHOLE package including a printer.  I remember a guy coming to the house to set it up for us.  How times have changed.  Anyway, this computer introduced me to the online world via Prodigy. 

  

This is the IBM PS/1 version 2121.  It was released in 1992 and had a bigger hard drive, faster processor and expandability.  This has Windows 3.0 installed, but I am not sure if that was normal or if someone installed that themselves.  The previous version above had DOS. 

I do have more computers, but some are still in storage boxes.  Need more room in this basement office.  This is far from a huge collection, quite modest I guess, but everything takes time ;)