Subj : What's in your attic?
To   : All
From : nelgin
Date : Mon Oct 09 2023 13:00:24

Figuratively speaking anyway.

When I moved from the UK to the US, I left a lot of my retro gear behind at my parents and in the end told them to take it to the tip.

I don't have many regrets in my life, but that one was huge.

I had a BBC Micro with sideways ram with built in real time clock, AMX mouse, floppy drive, 10mb hard drive and controller, modem, 100's of floppy discs, all sorts of ROMs, JP101 sparkjet printer...all gone to the tip.

Back then, there was no ebay, no craigslist, no realy way to sell them.

I'm slowly but surely crawling back my lost inventory. One thing I can never recover is the BBS I wrote for my computer studies O level, and some BBS software I purchased (cos mine sucked!).

Now, I've had a BBC Micro imported along with disc drive, and some modern
add-ons like a co-processor made with an r-pi, gotek and some other fancy stuff.

Recently, I got a ZX Spectrum, it has some bad ram chips so working on changing those out. I also got a Commodore 64 which is also faulty. A Vic20 showed up and a TRS80. I really wanted a Video Genie, also known as System-80 in Australia, but they're as rare as rocking horse sh*t!

Right now I'm also on the hunt for a Dragon 32, but getting people to ship from the UK to the US is not easy. That would about round off all the retro computers from my childhood that I'd love to add to my collection.

I never really got into the Apple stuff, and generally have a dislike for the company so none of that in my house!

One system I didn't own but was also somewhat popular was the Amstrad CPC464 but those come with a monitor and shipping might be a bit out of the question.

Why did the UK have all the best retro kit!

Oh yeah, the Osbourne 1 too - luggable computer with built in monitor and disk drive Yummy!

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