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Exhibiting At The Retro Computer Festival 2024!

Introduction
Script
Original Video Links

Introduction

Last weekend I was down at the Centre for Computing History in Cambridge for the Retro Computer Festival, an annual display of all sorts of weird and wonderful items hosted by one of the UK’s top computer museums. So this is what I and the others in my group had to show off, as well as a look around the museum and also, of course, the other exhibits.

Script

Located on an unassuming industrial estate in England’s historic city of Cambridge, is the Centre for Computing History, one of the UK’s premier computer museums, and the venue for the annual Retro Computer Festival, which I was invited to attend alongside a ragtag band of retro tech YouTubers calling themselves the Big Red Arrow Club.

But before we take a look at what we and the other exhibitors had to offer on the day, let’s explore the museum itself.

The Centre for Computing History is divided into three main areas: First, there’s the reception area with the obligatory gift shop and refreshment stand, and this rather flashy looking CPU thingy. There’s the classroom, which is the smallest of the three areas, and is usually used for school trips and educational visits and the like, and finally, the main gallery, which is where we were stationed for the day.

Just having a poke around the outside of the main gallery and here’s an exhibit that immediately caught my attention - this is of course the infamous story about the Atari 2600 ET cartridges which were buried in a New Mexico desert in 1983 thanks to a massive overproduction error on Atari’s part and the cool thing is that they actually have some of those original cartridges on display here which have since been excavated from that landfill so a very cool to see and a real piece of Atari history.

Now here’s something I was completely unaware of until today and it absolutely blew my mind when I saw it! So this is the world’s first online shopping system from 1984 - which is the year I was born, 40 years ago, believe it or not - and it was made by a company called ROCC - or Rediffusion - and it basically connected to Tesco supermarkets here in the UK and allowed people to order their groceries from home, and apparently this system was a massive success, and they’ve got a really cool demo video here showing the whole thing in action - and it is officially recognised as the world’s first online shopping system, something that I had absolutely no idea about.

Ah, now this is really cool just tucked away in the corner: this is a recreation of a 1970s office - so they’ve got all the furniture, the stripy carpet, the desks, and of course that all important period correct computer hardware including a Commodore PET that you can actually play with and type on, as ably demonstrated here by my good friend Glen from the YouTube channel CRG.

It’s always nice to see some Atari ST representation in these places, and they have one set up here next to its slightly less attractive - although I will admit, much more capable sibling, the Amiga - and while we’re on the subject of the ST, just tucked away around the corner here we have this one, which belonged to David Arnold - he donated it to the museum in 2022, and he’s a Grammy award winning film composer, actually used this one mounted inside this flight case to compose some film soundtracks early on in his career.

A bit of a recurring theme around the museum is of course the local connection to Cambridge, arguably the heart of the British computer industry - or certainly was back in the 80s - and this is a machine I’d never come across before: it’s the 1984 Acorn Cambridge Workstation, and they have quite an impressive collection of these very weird and wonderful Acorn machines, and other machines made by local Cambridge-based manufacturers.

And for the kids - including big kids like our friend Glen again here - they have an excellent selection of games consoles that you can just pick up and play, including the Sega Saturn from 1994 and the perhaps lesser known Amstrad GX4000 from 1990.

And as you might expect from a museum of this calibre, of course, the big iron is well represented - so we’ve got a lovely selection of mainframes and minicomputers, PDPs, all of that lovely, of course, very historically important stuff - and nestled amongst those, I found this display called “Convergence: How The Smartphone Took Over”, and I thought this was really clever, a really good demonstration of all of the various devices that have now been basically made redundant and combined into the modern day smartphone - so we’ve got digital cameras, we’ve got video cameras, there are PDAs, music playing devices, calculators and of course all of those old dumb phones as we now call them from the 90s and I’ve certainly owned a few of these myself - and as part of that exhibit they have this - can you guess what it is?

It’s a 2006 original iPhone prototype! So yeah, this huge great PCB with all of these connectors and things on it is actually an iPhone, believe it or not, and was one of 100 development prototypes produced by Apple. Not sure how many there are left but it can’t be many!

Oh, and while we are on the subject of PCBs, I suppose this is as good a place as any to drop in a seamless plug for this channel’s sponsor.

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Earlier I mentioned how the Centre for Computing History is keen to showcase the local city of Cambridge and its contribution to the computer industry, and out in reception they have some really nice examples of these historically important machines: so this cabinet has some lovely Sinclair machines in it as you might expect, it’s got the Oric Atmos - which I must admit I only quite recently found out was made in the UK - and some rarer things as well like the Newbrain and the Jupiter Ace.

Now this is a real piece of Cambridge computing history: it’s an original Sinclair ZX Spectrum prototype. It was donated by a local company called Nine Tiles who actually worked with Sinclair on producing the basic ROMs - not only for the Spectrum, but also for its predecessors, the ZX80 and the ZX81.

And perhaps one of my favourite things in the museum’s collection: this is the iconic BBC Micro, of course, produced as part of that BBC schools programme back in the 1980s, and as you can see, it’s been signed by all of the original team at Acorn who designed it - and the rather unassuming box sat next to it, well, that is the original ARM development unit. So inside that box is the very first ARM V1 CPU, the predecessor to the very CPU that’s in all of our smartphones and all those other devices nowadays - of course, famously developed on the BBC Micro!

And venturing from reception into the classroom, which was the smaller and quieter of the two exhibition spaces on the day, I couldn’t help but notice this lovely collection of RM Nimbus PCs - and I suppose I should also point out this rather nice 380Z in the middle, which was the predecessor to these PCs - a CP/M machine, but a little bit before my time, not one that I really have any memories of but I certainly used the RM Nimbuses at school, and one of my favourite facts about these computers is that it was one of the only PCs in existence to use the Intel 80186 CPU. Very strange architecture, not 100 percent DOS compatible, but designed for the education market, and absolutely ubiquitous in British classrooms in the 1980s.

Speaking of which, they also have this complete Domesday system on display. Now, if you’re not familiar with the Domesday Project, it’s a very impressive thing indeed: it’s a dedicated laserdisc player which hooks up to a BBC Master, and the actual data on the disc was collected from British schoolkids in 1984, so they were asked to submit essays about their lives, photos and stuff like that, and it was all collated together and released on a series of laserdiscs - and if your school was rich enough you could actually buy the setup and you could browse through it and see what all the other kids across the country had to say, and unfortunately, these are becoming very, very rare thanks to bit rot, which is of course eating those original discs, but it has all been preserved now - in part thanks to work by this very museum - so a very cool thing to see, unfortunately not up and running today, but I have played with it in the past and it’s a very impressive project.

But of course, today is all about the exhibitors and all of the weird and wonderful machines that they’ve brought in to show off, so let’s have a look at some of those - and I think I’ll start with this rather nice IMSAI 8080. But, believe it or not, this isn’t actually an original - it’s a very high quality, fully functional replica which is being sold by the people running this table, thehighnibble.com - and not only did they have this awesome IMSAI 8080 replica on display, but they had some other cool stuff as well, like this MARK-8 minicomputer, a KIM-1, and all sorts of wonderful things.

So just moving on, while I was in here I actually spent time hanging out with the rather lovely Tim Gilberts and his collection of fantastic Heathkit stuff. Now I don’t think Heathkit was really all that big here in the UK and it was a bit before my time anyway so really interesting to learn about these machines - of course I’d heard the name before but knew absolutely nothing about them so absolutely fascinating.

Here’s another name you might be familiar with, this is Dave Williams from Devilish Design with his rather lovely collection of S-100 systems, including this IMSAI 8080 running the program from Wargames, complete with fully functional text to speech.

[What would you like to talk about?]

[Falken’s maze, blackjack, gin rummy, hearts, bridge, checkers, chess, poker, fighter combat, guerilla engagement, desert warfare, air-to-ground actions, theaterwide tactical warfare, theaterwide biotoxic and chemical warfare, global thermonuclear war.]

[A strange game - the only winning move is not to play]

Another member of the community who I was very keen to meet today was DosFox, having followed them on social media for who knows how long now - and it turns out they’re actually a fan of the channel as well, so big shout out to you DosFox, you do absolutely fantastic work and it was great to get a chance to sit down and go over your projects. So, this is an Apple Lisa clone, built from the ground up by reverse engineering the original hardware - and if that wasn’t impressive enough, DosFox’s latest project is this Macintosh Plus clone and there’s a really cool story behind how this came together and how they put together a team of hackers across the world to try to reverse engineer the original ROMs for the Macintosh Plus because they were encrypted and had basically never been dumped before - but as you can see, the proof is in the pudding, the project was a huge success and here it is up and running: DosFox’s Macintosh Plus clone, one of the coolest things I saw on the day.

Speaking of well known members of the community, here’s Adrian from Binary Dinosaurs, with a desk full of all sorts of weird and wonderful hand crafted computing goodness.

I’m not quite sure who this chap is though.

[Do you know who I am!?]

Now, this was absolutely fascinating - this was a live debugging demonstration by the rather lovely Tom Stepleton, who took quite a bit of time out to explain what he was doing to me, so thank you ever so much for that Tom. This is a PERQ which is a very rare early graphical workstation from 1983 - it actually had a mouse and a GUI back in 1983! So fascinating machine anyway, but as you might expect, a machine of this age does have quite a few problems, and Tom was debugging it right in the middle of the show with his oscilloscope and logic probes and everything else - and explaining to people what he was doing and the troubleshooting steps that he was going through so really fascinating to see - and despite the fact that it wasn’t fully working, Tom did at least manage to show off this rather nice graphical file recovery utility, which was really interesting to see in action.

So, back to the main gallery now, and I suppose I should talk a little bit about our little exhibition here - so, right on the end was me, and I brought the Cefucom-21, that English language teaching computer from Japan which has featured in a couple of videos on my channel - and I was actually specifically asked to bring this by Tony, aka HereBeDragons, who was also mentioned in those videos, and as far as we know, we’re the only people in the UK who actually own these machines - and of course we had to have a photo opportunity with my Cefucom alongside the two that he owns.

Immediately next to me once more - and giving me flashbacks to the Kickstart Amiga show earlier in the year when I was on the next table to him for the entire weekend - was my good friend Rob Smith with his rather loud disco floppy disk cleaning machine. Now much as I complain about this thing, it does make me smile and it is a really clever piece of engineering. But yeah, just for this weekend, Rob added a special feature just for me: an endlessly looping demo mode so he didn’t even have to physically be there to set the thing off… And I must admit, despite what I said at the time, I did actually feel quite bad for him at the end of the day when the audio amp exploded and the thing went silent - and no, it wasn’t sabotage on my part, but he’s a very good sport about it, and he did actually give me the exploded audio amp as a souvenir, so thanks Rob!

Next to us was Andi from the YouTube channel Hack Build Restore, and he was showing off some really interesting stuff including this heavily modified Amiga 600, with some of his own upgrades inside, and of course, a rather nice custom paint job too.

Another Andy now, and a YouTube channel whose name I always struggle to pronounce properly - is it Rasteri or… something like that anyway, but a thoroughly nice bloke who did get me drunk in the pub the night before, which is always nice, and of course best known for his WeeCee, which is a tiny little x86 PC, and also brought along his newest project, which is the HIDMan - it’s a USB keyboard and mouse interface for these old AT and XT class PCs, so very cool to see that in action.

…and last but by no means least is The Gouldfish showing off a recent hardware project from his channel: this is a consolized Sega Game Gear that he actually designed and built himself from scratch, and having seen that video - and it is an absolutely fascinating video, so I will actually link to that down in the description - it was so cool to see this thing in the flesh and actually get a chance to have a play with it, and he also brought along an Acorn RISC PC back to its home of Cambridge!

As previously mentioned, we were there as part of a group of retro YouTubers known as the Big Red Arrow Club, and of course our table wasn’t big enough for everyone to be able to bring something to exhibit so we had to cherry pick a few of our favourite things, but really great to see everyone over the course of the weekend, and I should also give a bit of a shout out to John from RetroBytes who had his very own table being a bit of a VIP, a bit of a bigger channel, and he brought down some really, really fascinating stuff - some of the SGI workstations and things that he’s featured on his channel in the past so it was nice to have a poke around those, too.

I also mentioned earlier that we’d been invited down by Tony, who’s known as HereBeDragons on the socials - the other guy who brought those Cefucoms - and he had his own table as well. Now, the theme of his table was the Motorola 6847 graphics chip, of course used in the Cefucom, but perhaps most famously the Dragon32 and the Tandy Colour Computer, and it was interesting to see that he also had a Sanyo PHC-25, which of course is the machine that the Cefucom is based on.

Another familiar name from the community, this is Dean aka BreakIntoProgram who brought this absolutely fascinating Tatung Einstein based development system for the Spectrum.

And finally, I think I’ll end on one of my favourite exhibits from the day: this is Mark from Dexter’s Tech Lab with his Quantel HAL Express. This is an animation workstation which was released in 1993 and was used in the broadcast industry for all sorts of on-screen graphics and things like that. It’s a really legendary machine, incredibly expensive back in its day, and also incredibly rare to see one up and running nowadays so it was a real treat to see this, and he also had it hooked up to perhaps the best looking CRT I’ve ever seen. So my hat is off to you, Mark, really nice to see the Quantel in action.

So there we go, that’s the Retro Computer Festival 2024 from the Centre for Computing History in Cambridge! Now I feel I should end this one on a bit of an apology to the people I’ve missed out - of course when you’re exhibiting at these things you end up tied to your own table and of course you’re talking to people and demoing things and the time just runs away from you and I didn’t get time to actually go and talk to everybody and film everybody’s tables so apologies if I have missed you out, apologies if you were planning on talking to me at the weekend and we missed each other but I’m sure you know what it’s like and I’m sure we’ll meet up at a future event.

But that’s all I have for this video - so thank you ever so much, as always, to my supporters on Ko-Fi, Patreon, and indeed my YouTube channel members - and thank you to you for watching, and hopefully I’ll see you in the next one.

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