Wouter's Cra^H^H^HClassic Computer Collection

My first computer : NANOKIT

Ok, so you've never even heard of a NANOKIT. Well, I cut my teeth on one, so to speak.

The NANOKIT (Or NANO-KIT) used a National SC/MP II () microprocessor. The kit was produced by Microsystems and the manual was printed in Cape Town, South Africa. That's probably why you've never heard of it. :-)
I bought the NANOKIT secondhand and prebuild. It came with a set of ROMs piggybacked onto (well, under) the RAM chips, that contained a program to play "Die Stem" (The old South African Anthem) through one of the output pins.
The manual (6MB pdf download) contains quite a few errors, and looking back I can see why I had such a hard time wrapping my brain around this stuff. OK, the fact that I was twelve at the time might have had something to do with it.
If you have more info, please contact me. If you're the author of the manual, I promise not to hit you any harder than necessary :-)
2002-09-23: Received email from Stephen Davies, who says that he also has one, which he got in 1977 or so.

I took my NANOKIT apart, I needed the switches for another project. I'm planning to put it back together, RSN.

Intel SDK-80

The next computer I played with was an Intel SDK-80.

I have a set of ROMs (two 2708s) with Tiny Basic on them, which I've never tried. I've dumped some of it, and it seems to be a copy of Palo Alto Tiny Basic, which you can find at ftp.rahul.net/pub/rhn/tinybasic.tar.Z, or here (local copy).

Apple Logo
Apple ][+

I (miss?) spent a large part of my youth with my Apple ][ clone. It's a UNITRON (Taiwanese clone). I would hazard a guess that most Apple ]['s sold in South Africa came from Taiwan.
My Apple ][ has its own page.

Motorola 6800 D2 and D3 evaluation kits

Around this time I also aquired a D2, and later a bunch of D3 stuff.

(You can find pictures of a really nice D2 kit at The Computer Center).

Al Kossow has the D2 user manual here.

TV Typewriter

Homebrew 6809
I built this 6809 single board computer while studying at the University of Stellenbosch. More info on my 6809 page.

Sharp PC-1500

Homebrew 8031

Other 8031

Macintosh Classic

This Mac was standing on a shelf at the local Cash Converters, priced at R595. It was still there a month or two later, so I offered them R200, figuring that (1) I don't need another computer, (2) they won't dump the Mac in the trash if they have some type of offer for it, and (3) if someone else wanted to offer more they were welcome. The store manager didn't fall for the R200 offer, but a month later it was still on the shelf, and this time I got it.

2004-02-02: I bought four more Macs for R300. More info on my Apple Macintosh page.

HP-85 desktop computer

I got this one from a friend, and I havn't really had a chance to play with it.

www.hpmuseum.org entry

Erik Klein's page.

Series80.org.

Apollo 3000 and 3500 workstations

Osborne 1

My Osborne has a shorted keyboard. Not very useful. Also, the keyboard (like the rest of the machine) is cheep, there's no easy way to repair it.

Al Kossow has the Osborne Technical Reference here.

ICL Personal Computer

This is NOT an "IBM PC", but some kind of a passive backplane machine with four serial ports and no video. 8086 based. Pictures: box, CPU board, FDC board, RAM boards one and two, serial, and the interface to the hard drive controller.

Spectrum +

I have a friend looking out for all kinds of old computer bits on my behalf, on 2000-01-26 he bought a Spectrum Plus for R20. This is a standard Spectrum with a slightly better keyboard. Games and emulators can be found at ftp.nvg.unit.no.

More when I eventually get to plug it in.

Bondwell Model 12

I bought this portable CP/M machine from the Cape Ads for R350 (December 2002).

The people who designed this machine should be kicked. Hard. It's impossible to remove the floppy drives without taking the whole machine, including the video monitor section, apart.

The difference between the Bondwell Model 12 and Model 14 is, apparently, an extra 64K RAM (there is space on the motherboard for this) and double-sided floppies.

I found that someone had taken my machine apart before, the screws holding the case to the front panel were all missing. As far as I can tell, they are all M3.5 machine screws.

Dragon

Dragon hardware

The Dragon Archive.

Dragon Data Archive.

The great computer rescue mission of August 2007

Louise Hamman-de Bruin contacted me, said she had an Osborne 1 looking for a good home. She'd found out about me from these pages via a web search. Turns out she's in Johannesburg, I said "Cool, I'll come pick it up sometime".
I saw an advert in Junkmail, "Free to a good home, Acorn RISC PC". Turns out that Anton Erasmus is in Pretoria and he also has some other Acorn machines going.
Eugene Pinder emailed and said that he has four workstations, three SGIs and a SUN. He's in Fochville in the Free State. He also found me via these pages.

OK, so it was clear that a rescue mission up north was required. I left Cape Town at 06:00 on a Wednesday morning, took a detour via Standerton to pick up some gun related bits, and pulled into Edenvale at one minute to 12. 18 Hours on the road and very saddle-sore.

Picked up the Osborne 1, an electric typewriter and an inkjet printer from Louise.

Picked up the Acorn RISC PC, two Archimedes, a SAM Coupe, a Spectrum, and a stack of software from Anton.

Left Edenvale 04:30 on the Sunday morning, picked up two monitors (I had to leave two more monitors behind, I just did not have space in the car), three SGIs and the SUN from Eugene, and got home at half past nine the evening. On the return trip I had Tanya with me so she could share some of the driving, that helped a lot.

Wouter's Computer bits

NCR Core memory

I can't remember where I got this... some junk box at an electronics store, probably. I think it's from a cash register or something. One bit per ferrite bead. But, it will probably survive an EMP, so if there's something you need to store until after World War 3, this memory's for you.

The sticker on the bottom reads

N.C.R. MFG. CO. (HK) LTD.
CORE MEMORY, PLANAR

P/N 095-0008708
S/N 3962
8 May 1974

The core array is 64 x 64, i.o.w. 512 bytes. There's also one core located off to the side, (You can *just* see it on the top righthand side of the fourth picture) I don't know what its purpose is.

I scanned an article, Coincident Current Ferrite Core Memories , from the July 1976 BYTE magazine. You can download it here. (BYTE lawyers - if you feel that this article still counts as one of your assets, please email me and I'll take it down immediately.)

Bubble memory

The original Intel BPK-72 bubble memory development kit. I bought it (secondhand) planning to use it / play with it, but I never did.

Ian Manners has a mirror of FJ Kraan's web site which has all the bubble memory datasheets.

Network Cards

I have three of these network cards. They came out of an old Novell (2.0?) network. Each card contains a complete Z80 computer (processor, 64K ram, etc).

The one card also has a security module of some type, I assume it went in the file server.

Neil Blount mailed me on 2002-09-07, saying

The network card on you page looks very much like a G-Net card, yes it came with a version
of Novell and there was a dongle card for the Novell in the Server. It ran a type of ethernet,
seem to remember that it worked with other cards. The drivers would be avaliable on Novell's
site or on the Novell 2.x disks.

Generally I would say they are not worth the trouble to setup but if you really want to :-)

If you have more info, let me know please...