How rare they are, how much they cost
For young children in the 1970s and 80s, (compact) cassette tapes with narrated stories (basically children audio books on tapes) were a popular pasttime, not least because it did not require parental presence, because cassette players were relatively inexpensive, and because content (i.e. audio book cassette tapes) was cheap or could even borrowed from friends […]
The device I want to talk today about is not a computer in the sense that you can run your programs on (although it probably has all the technical means to do so), but a humbleebook reader. It’s not even the first ebook reader (that honor goes to the Rocket eBook). But it is not […]
I recently learned about Google’s Notebook LLM, a Large Language Model that allows you to create prompts on documents you upload to the system. It can do many things, but one thing it can do quite excellently is to create a 2-person podcast episode on the uploaded documents completely automatically. As you can also use […]
If you ask people what the first Atari ST-family clones were, most will answer with names like Hades (1996, 68040) and Milan (1998, 68040). Very few will mention the Medusa T40 (1994, 68040, although one could argue that this is not a clone, but just a very invasive accelerator) or the spectacularly rare GE-Soft Eagle […]
In the late 80s, early 90s, mobile computing still meant traditional text-and-keyboard devices although the computers used for that purpose were already quite small. You could get portable versions of WIMP desktop computers (e.g. the Macintosh Portable), but these computers required you to sit down in order to use them. Mobile devices for casual use […]
I recently brought the tv-computersystem to a vintage computer meeting in Stuttgart, Germany (click here if you are interested) and learned a little bit more about this machine. The computer works when switched on (after around 48 years…) without even having to replace capacitors. We could not find the channel on a TV that gave […]
Recently, there was a computer on ebay.de which I never heard about before which turned out to be the quirkiest, most interesting and innovative model I learned about in a long time. No one else bid on it, so I got it for a low price. It is now the oldest computer I own. Meet […]
In this blog I try to talk only about computers with the understanding that computers are devices a user can execute programs on that haven’t been contained on this computer before (I am aware that this definition of a computer helps only to distinguish between, let’s say, dedicated word processors and computers in our sense. […]
At the VCFB 2021 in Berlin I presented a recent purchase of mine, a Fujitsu Micro 8 computer complete with its Bubble Memory drive option. If you do not want to the read following post, you can simply watch the video. Ok, so obviously, you want to read about it. Here we go! Let’s start […]
Recently, I had the rare joy to open the still sealed box of a PDA computer. Normally, one would think twice about opening a still sealed box, but this is a model that is so rare that there is almost no demand for it. I got it for 20€, postage included. The manufacturer’s name on […]