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When moving to Glyn-Coch in 2000, we discovered that our youngest son, Owain, had never seen our old Sinclair ZX81 working. We started canvassing opinion about the possibility of a 'home computer museum' and a lot of the people liked the idea. We started with just a few computers that we had used for many years previously (a Commodore 64, BBC Master, Sinclair ZX81 and Sinclair Spectrum). Once we had our limited supply of computers on display, we were offered machines from our visitors, who had enjoyed their visit!
If you would like information on our computers or on our computer display, please do not hesitate to Contact Us.
Our computer list now includes: |
Sinclair ZX81 |
Sinclair Spectrum |
Sinclair Spectrum+ |
Commodore Vic 20 |
Commodore 64 |
BBC Master |
Texas Instruments Travel Mate |
| ...................................and many more! |
I am a (non playing!) member of the Computer Conservation Society (CCS), which preserves important computers and their history. For more information on the Computer Conservation Society and its work click here.
If you have worked with computers (especially more then a decade ago) I am sure that you will find this group fascinating. And whatever your experience, I am sure that they would like to know. Many important machines have almost been lost, simply because, in this industry, people have been too busy with the next job to worry about old equipment. As an illustration the CCS, whose headquarters is at The Science Museum, recently sent out a circular asking if anyone knows how to programme the computers which controlled the Atlas Missile. (This implies that NASA has forgotten how to drive the launch vehicles for the Apollo moon shots!) A working party of the society recently explored a warehouse where a museum stored scientific looking equipment, and were able to identify several parts of a significant machine scattered through out the building.
While the CCS does tend to concentrate on nationally important machines (like the Turing Bombe, which decoded the Enigma codes in WW2 or the academic machines with which university research groups did basic research on hardware and software, they are also interested in practical applications of this work. A recent article in Resurrection, their journal, described the commercial versions of the groundbreaking Manchester University machines. If computers named Manchester Baby, Pegasus, Sirius, Orion etc. are familiar to you then you will certainly be at home in the CCS. If like me, you once used obsolete Orion data cards to to wedge a rocky desk, then CCS is just amazing!
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