About

Why

I started this website because I wanted to share my vintage computer collecting and repairing experiences. I’m into this hobby since 2005 and still find it interesting.
I’m currently focusing on the “1977 Trinity” of home computing: Commodore PET 2001, Apple II, and TRS-80 Model I.
Hopefully I can show you how much fun this hobby can be.

Holy trinity of Home Computing (by Tim Colegrove)

My history with
Vintage Computers

Sinclair ZX81

My computer story started in early 1982 when I bought my first home computer, a Sinclair ZX81.

This was also the year that I started reading ‘Your Computer’ magazine.
This Computer was very affordable and proved to be a good introduction into writing some little programs, as I never got the 16K ram pack. (not enough pocket money)
I played around with the ZX81 for about a year. Sometimes my eyes really hurt due to screen flicker each time a new line of code was entered when memory was almost full. (the whole 1kB of it)


After about a year later I got an ORIC-1 on which I enjoyed coding games in basic and playing ‘Harrier Attack!’ and ‘Scuba Dive’.


Later in 1984 I got a VIC-20 at a bargain and started to write some games in 6502 machine code.
Really enjoyed Rat Race too!

In 1984 I got an Amstrad CPC464 with color monitor which gave me much fun.
I played some of the ‘Roland’ games series, Elite & Alien 8 on this machine.
Programmed a GUI and a few home brew games
= Great fun!!!
Designed and build a computer oscilloscope, for a school project, which connected to the expansion port and started to code speech recognition using this oscilloscope with a microphone on this machine!
FFT based Vocoder type, single words only, command and control only.

This was the last real home computer I owned!
After this moment in time it was all PC’s!
Can you believe it!

Until, of course, I started to collect them and having these machines in my collection.
I started out buying via ebay which went very smooth. Later I started using some other marketplaces as well.
At a certain moment I owned over 70 vintage home computers, unfortunately I had to sell some off a part of these fine machines in 2009, as I started to run out of space for my other hobbies. I started over collecting in 2015 and have over 35 computers in my collection at this time and shifted focus from ’80 UK home computers to ’70 US home computers.