The Archive (Centre For Computing History) - Computerphile

Key Takeaways

There's a certain part of the museum that most people don't get to see, which is the archive. And this is one of the archives, um, which has some of the machines out that are on display for those people that are that are interested. Um, and you're lucky enough to see it. In the museum, there's over a thousand different systems, different machines in the collection. Um, that's not multiples of the same, you know, lots of BBC micros and things. It's it's actually independent different systems. Um, could be different models, um, but over a thousand machines. is um quite a lot of it is in their original boxes and they're somewhere else. So any machines that we have that are in their original packaging are stored uh in the other building, but over here we have some of the machines that are a bit too big to go in boxes and actually are kind of interesting. So we want to put them out on shelves. So it's storage, but it's storage that you can have a bit of a nose round. So this is kind of like the uh the special stuff. Yeah, this is for the connoisseur. Um and uh and if you ask nicely sometimes we can we can bring people over and show them. We number every shelf and when you go on our website, so if you want to see any of these machines, they're all on our website somewhere. Um, and we can look at the back end of the system and say, "Right, that machine is on shelf uh 116 in the the uh the store that we're in now." So, we can find this stuff pretty quickly, or at least that's the idea. Um, but it is random. So, there's there's no correlation between that machine there and that one. It's, you know, these things are just on shelves, so we can find them. Um, but there is a lot of interesting stuff here. Some very rare stuff. Um, some commonal garden stuff as well. Um but uh but yeah, just to go through a little bit of it. Um I don't even know where you start with this, but we have some machines up here. Um Acorn fans might recognize systems like this and specifically these ones. So we've got an ANO system 3, a system 5. Um but this is Steve Furber's prototype. It's kind of the prototype of the prototype really. There was a machine called the Proton which would later become the BBC Micro. Well, this is the kind of the prototype. The the Proton was based on this machine. And there's Steve Hub's very first machine that he made up the top there. It's entirely homedesigned, including anodizing the aluminium in the kitchen sink and things like that. So, a bit of acorn stuff going on over here. We have some nice Apple iMacs. We've got all the different colors and some Apple 2Os as well. There's also some clone machines. So, that's a clone of the Apple 2 back when it was possible to do such a thing. Yeah. I mean, this was a licensed clone. Um, so, uh, Apple did allow certain manufacturers to make, um, their own versions of the machines. Um, that is also a clone of an Apple 2 with disc drives builtin. I'm not sure how legit that one was. The Euro Plus, the Apple 2e, things like that. But then there's other machines as well that are somewhat less common. Uh, we have the ICL systems up there. Um, interesting effect. Don't know if you can see that. This machine is not on, but you can still see what it was doing. So, there's something called screen burn. So if a machine was left on with the same display on the screen all the time, it would actually burn that into the phosphor. Bit of a shame, but it's kind of an interesting thing. Um, so you can see the software they were using, probably a word processor or something like that. Early that's a compact disc recorder uh a little bit big. And there's a CD reader as well. So um yeah, some some really early stuff that uh kind of quite a bit of a joke really to see something like that um on a shelf whereas it's now just literally an internal CD ROM on most machines. Atari STE there. That's a prototype of the Acorn business machine. So, we have some really early um interesting stuff there. That's pretty much unique. That's a later Torch Unix based machine. Torch started off by making business computers but based on BBC Micros. So, they'd have a BBC Micro with a Z80 co-processor um and sell it as a CPM machine. That is kind of the effectively the prototype of this machine here, AON business computer. Again, you know, they're not necessarily sat next to each other. Maybe we will at some point, but at the minute it's really know about what stuff is here rather than precisely where it is. It's quite nice in that respect because you kind of happen upon things you weren't expecting. This is true. Yeah. Yeah. You might find things you weren't looking for. Um this one very uncommon. That's the Olympia people CPM base machine. CPM is a language. So CPM was out there um kind of early DOSs system. So DOSs was so basically effectively I got to choose my words carefully here. DOSs was kind of a ripoff of CPM. Um, so there was a language um, uh, called Cudos, quick and dirty operating system, which was kind of a bit of a a copy of uh, of CPM. Um, and CPM was a language used by lots of machines, Z80 based machines, um, and and very much more businessoriented. So you you had lots of spreadsheets and word processors that would run on CPM operating systems. We've got very early PET down there with a chiclet keyboard. The first incarnations had the cassette deck built in to it, but had this very small little keyboard. Obviously, you couldn't have a full-size keyboard because of the cassette deck. Um, but that made it a little bit tricky to type on. So, the original PET 2001 series with those keyboards are fairly uncommon now. Most of them were replaced or or people upgraded to the full size keyboards, which are over there somewhere. I quite like silicon graphics. They just look lovely, but they they look like machines you need to own. Very powerful machines, incredibly expensive at the time. Um, most of these kind of things, all the silicon stuff, silicon graphic stuff we get, it's usually from universities or, you know, uh, like you say, high-end broadcast systems and and um, render farms and stuff like that. Research machines produce computers uh for use in education. If you're in the UK anyway, a lot of people remember those from school if you're 40 something like me. And the 480Z was kind of a network machine um, that uh, a lot of people had in schools and remember from school. Um, the Zenith beta system. This thing's a a beast. Um computer there from Zenith with a hard drive or Winchester as they called it built in with its monitor there. On top is an HP85 Hip Packard's machines. Very very popular use uh machine there for a lot of scientific and um uh various other work of that nature. Um Next slab. So this is Steve Jobs's company Next after he was ousted from Apple produced this beautiful machine. This is the slab. normally sits down this way and he also produced the cube which we have out on display. Very powerful machines but in uh true Steve Jobs style very expensive. The next step operating system would later become um uh the Mac OS system. It was based on the the same sort of Unix based system that the next system used. Um what else? I have no idea what that is. It's probably a power system. I have to look that one up. Um so lots of single board computers back in the early 80s. UK 101, NASCOM, um, and I think it was ETI produced some, um, instructions. You could buy their magazine and build your own computer. Um, and PowerRAN, um, was the the name of that system there. So, I think that's what that is. Very big, luggable Toshiba laptop and a plasma screen. There's one of those out on display as well. More RM machines. An intermediate system. So, this was quite interesting. This was a system designed to convert different disc formats. 3 in, 8 in, 5 and a/4, two other formats, so you could read from one disc and translate it to another. I've never seen another one of those machines. So, this is the Alter 8800B. This is the one with that style front panel. So, that's the one you saw was the one we have in the museum. This is another one. We got another one because it's just a different front panel. Um, the 8800B there, which is the it's known as the turnkey version. So, this was basically the same thing except it didn't have all the switches cuz you were most likely going to connect it up to a terminal and access it from there. And then very rare hard disk controller for the outair and a set of floppy drives for it as well. A little outair collection down there. This is kind of interesting. This is just a PC, a Philips PC system, but it links to a laser disc player. Um, so this system was running um educational software. Well, not educational training software. Was that what the uh doomsday was based? The doomsday system is very very similar Philips laser displayer except it has extra hardware underneath which is the interface to the BBC micro. This was controlled purely from RS232 from that PC. Um, and this was used at Ford for training software to show people how to do stuff. I don't know. That system there is purely a word processor. That's the IBM display writer. So this part, the floppy drives and the keyboard and the printer there gives you a word processor. So it's a very expensive typewriter. It really is. Yeah. Um, but display writer later on become display right. So all of this hardware became software afterwards that you could just run on any PC. Um, deck. I think that's a deck professional. Is that down there? Needs a bit of a clean. Various different SJ research networking things for the BBC Micro. An Acorn's networking stuff there. Canon's early machines there. The AS100. Is that a tonto or is that an OPD? You never know, right? So, this is an OPD. So, this is computer. This was designed to be obviously on your desk. And it had a built-in phone. It had a connection so you could get onto BBS's and view data type systems. Um, but ultimately inside that is a Sinclair QL. So, it's basically a QL with some plug-in cartridges that gave it some inbuilt software. And up here are two micro drive cartridges. So, that with its monitor there, sat on your desk and you had a QL um that beefed up for business use. ICL were a big mainframe manufacturer, weren't they? So, this was a departure for them, right? It was. Yeah. This is starting to get into the the more personal side of things. Um but it was basically just that system and it was rebranded then as so same system British Telecom BT Merlin Tonto. So BT got in on the act as well. There was a little bit of a a spate um with companies producing kind of communications computers um and uh slightly misreading where things were going. Well, you know, yes and no. Uh yes and no. There were there were, you know, genuine very good uses for these things. We've got a great system over there as well. I'll show you. Um but you know, computing is mostly about communications these days. um you know so the whole connectivity with the internet and sharing information these were doing that kind of thing obviously much much more simplified um and giving people instant access to stock data and shares and whatever else um so you know uh something we don't have now because the computer is much more general purpose but could have been that way uh TRS80 there is that model two or one that's a two great big 8 in drives at the side there. Keyboard is sitting on top. I think some Apricot machines, the Zen. We've got a couple of development systems as well from Apricot. Um, they weren't quite PC compatible. They were close, but not quite close enough. I remember seeing apricots back in the day and thinking black ones in fact were thinking they looked amazing, but were they just trying to rip off Apple because of the names? No, there was I don't think that was it at all. Um, there there were lots of companies based around fruits. Um I I don't really know why there's this maybe there's a whole conscious collective that everybody thought that would be a good name for for these things. Um yeah I don't know. Um but Apricots were good equipment. They were they were very good machines but they purposely decided to make them very very slightly non-standard so that they kept their customer base. Um so you had to buy their version of the software for this machine. Um which ultimately would turn out to be a bad idea. You know everybody wanted compatibility. Floppy drives didn't quite run at the same speed as everybody else's. So they were completely unreadable. But then they did produce a machine, I think they called it the Chameleon, um, Apricot Chameleon, which was then much more PC compatible, but by that time they kind of missed the boat. It's kind of ironic really because now it doesn't really matter. As long as the files are the same, it doesn't matter at all because everything connects the same way. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. The physical media is is is gone. Um, and you just spelled it over the internet. But um, but no, but back then that was obviously a big deal. you need to take your floppy disc, put it in a envelope, send it to somebody else so they can read your your word perfect files or whatever it might have been. Um, so, uh, so being not compatible was a bit of a problem in that way. Um, and well, ultimately leads to the end of of Apricot really. I don't know how that got up there cuz that weighs a ton. A microphone computer. Again, I've never seen another one of those. If anybody out there knows anything about them, please let us know. We've got an original brochure for it, but this is this is metal and and weighs an absolute ton. I would imagine probably pretty much is just a CPM based machine, but incredible. And the monitor mounts directly to the to the unit there. Um, Commodore. Yeah. So, not many people know that Commodore did end up making PCs. Very basic. One's 808 based, I think, or 86, not sure. Um, Diablo, uh, that's a Xerox system there. Um, Tandes, that's again effectively just early PC. Uh, more apricots over there. Oliveti that is just a data printer I That's basically a terminal printer uh terminal. That's an old friend for me. My first uh PC experience, a 286 my mom got for word processing, but we managed to get it to do all sorts. Of course you do. It was for games. Although PC games at that time weren't that great. CGA was Another World was the most impressive thing we ran on it. Yes, absolutely. Didn't really know how to work it. Yeah. No, PC at that time were a little bit limited. So for for games and things that were weren't that great. Prince of Persia. I think that we got that running. That was Yeah, the animation on Prince of Persia was was brilliant. Absolutely brilliant. A Samurai machine there. Um that's a again 8 in based. It's effectively CPM based system. But there's a couple of systems we've got with different names but very very similar systems. Amstrad's got a few of the Amstrads here. These are kind of business machines. There's a digital there though. Is that would that have been deck? Is that a deck? Yeah, that's a deck. Um a digital much much later on in Deck's life. Um just a PC. Nothing nothing to see there really. Um but uh but yeah, we've got deck alphas and and things. Is that an alpha over there? I think there's an alpha in the background there. Um but yeah, some Amstrad machines. They're quite nice. I like the later Amstrad PCs, the 286s or 2286s as they're known. They're always beasts, weren't they? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And actually, I mean, that's quite a big monitor. The the other one we've got has got a very small monitor like this. And then the word processor. Again, these are other versions. So, we have the 8256 on display, but then we have the 8512 as well. So, that we've got both. Oh, we just mentioned this in the other video actually. There is an Nex sorcerer. Now, I like these. Why do I like these? Because they're clearly low production run. And what I like most about them is their cartridges. So, they have plug-in ROMs at the side, but when you take it out, that's what they look like. Do you recognize that at all? Is that an eight track cassette? That is an eight track cassette. If you look in the end there, you see the way it's all been hacked out. Now, I love the idea that these things are being manufactured at Exod's company somewhere and they've got a massive pile of Diana Ross tapes and they're unscrewing them all with tape everywhere, hacking these edges and then putting their circuit boards in. Let's have a look at that. Well, the thing is, I mean, it was low production run, so this is a very cheap um molded case. It's it's not um it's not a quantity case. There should be a one of these things over the end there. Yeah. Um but, you know, this is a relatively low production run case. Um, I don't know how many of these produ machines they produced, but they probably didn't produce that many. So, this was effectively five grands worth of machine in today's UK money. But, you know, to have a cartridge made like that would have cost you a lot. The injection molding would have been, you know, thousands and thousands of pounds. So, why not use AT tapes at this time were at the end of their days, they were probably very, very cheap to buy. Um, and it's probably cheaper to pay somebody to take all the tape out of it. Um, and than than it is to get these things molded. So, actually, I think it's absolute genius. I love it. Um, great idea. So, uh, so yeah, that's the cartridges for them. One of my favorites. We've got the, um, disc interface and monitor all built in onto that screen there. And there's also sort of an expansion interface underneath it as well. If that part of it was five grand, I have no idea what the complete system there would cost, plus software. So, yeah, I love the XD Sorcerer. We've got a boxed one as well um, in the uh, in the archive over the road as well. Um, we try and keep the original boxes and manuals and everything else where we can. Um, there are no manuals here. Um, we tend to separate those and any software that come with them, they're separated out and somewhere else. Um, and it's all sort of linked on the website so we know where everything is. Um, so that way we keep the best best condition we can. Uh, Deck 3000 there. So, that's sort of Dex's higher end sort of stuff um as opposed to their PC stuff later. This is a Sony um MSX machine. It's an MSX2. Um, but that has an interface that allows it to connect to that laser displayer as well. um a little bit doomsday system like I'm seeing another old friend up here. Kind of the boring era for Apple. They were very much beige boxes. There wasn't too much thought gone into the design uh of what they looked like, but they were perfectly capable machines from the internals point of view. They were doing things nobody else was doing, right? Yeah. The multi Motorola stuff going on and they were Yeah. 68,000 machines. They they were good wellspec machines. Um and like we were talking earlier, these things were used for early multimedia. So, you know, producing videos on these things, you know, was was possible, albeit limited. So, um, you were saying sort of quarter frame. Yeah, we we used to do, so my my introduction to video editing was on a Power Mac, very similar to that, and we couldn't do full frame video. Uh, you could do a quarter of a frame and have a lot of black space around it. Yeah. Yeah. But, you know, that's what people were were impressed with. You you had CDROMs that had limited space anyway. We weren't on DVDs or anything like that. Um, so a a multimedia CDROM, you had sort of 700megish to to to play with. Um, so you couldn't have a great deal of video anyway. So there were all these very small little clips that were part of another page. So um, uh, was the encyclopedia Compton's encyclopedia and in Carter and stuff like that had these little and not on every article, just on the few. Um, and uh, and I remember going through things like in Carter back in the day and just looking for the ones with video. You know, I wasn't interested in an article if it didn't have video. um you know and you'd get these little um it wasn't even 352 was it across? It was smaller than that but um they were tiny like something like 288 pixels or something ridiculous and compression standards were still evolving and not a lot of the machines could decompress much. So yeah, so it had to be very minimal decompression because the processors weren't capable of decompressing it live. Um and yeah, you you were very limited but it was the beginning of you know what we have now. Um, you know, I remember making websites with with tiny I don't know how many. They were less than 100 pixels across video of of a laser show that I was I was filming and I thought that was amazing that people can go on the web and see this tiny little video. It was it was huge, but you know, you look back now and it's bit of a joke. Um, but there you go. Things change. Um, that's what we're about. Uh, so moving on. What do we got? I'll try and speed this up a bit. SWTPC um, uh, early machine there, Victor. um machine we have HP 9825. So these are kind of again sort of scientific machines that these were used for big glorified calculators in a way. Couple there the A and the B version. Not sure what the difference is. Seno machines PCs there from Seno toss. Again these are these are machines that were um CPM based but rather than plugging in a monitor you would plug in a terminal. So they had lots of serial connections. So you could have eight users or something like that all using that one system at the same time. Um, and they had things like concurrent CPM that allowed people to use the operating system at the same time. Yeah. So, this is interesting. Um, I've got two stories on this one. Um, so this is, for anybody that recognize it, part of the risk PC. So, have we got a risk PC around? Um, no. So, anyway, uh, oh yes, right underneath it. Um, so that's your standard wrist PC, but you could have an extra slice. They called them slices, which would be one of these. Now, the two stories are um that that at this was definitely at the Acorn World Show. Um and they had a wrist PC that was built up with lots and lots of extra slices. Um and somebody said that they the pizza oven was just a bit of a joke to say you could add all these different things to it and you could even have do your pizza. Um but actually other people have said, well, it was a little bit more aggressive than that. That actually the pizza oven, um it was part of the wrist PC they had on display. It was trying to show that um Intel processors which used a lot of power and therefore dissipate a lot of heat could cook a pizza. Um so actually their their ARM processors were way better, much lower power. Um but Intel processors you could cook your pizza on. Um now I don't know which of those stories is is the more accurate, but they're both fun. Um and uh and yeah, basically I mean it's a bit dodgy. There's a mains connector there that went in um and powered this light here to give it that kind of red glow. Um, I'm not sure that would be that would pass testing today. I don't think we're plugging that in. Um, no. Um, but you know, kind of fun. Um, and part of, you know, Acorn's Acorn World exhibition. Um, and their display. And I've just realized actually this this is not just a risk PC. That is in fact a prototype risk PC. Um, so yeah, lots of stuff here that is pre-production and prototype and uh before the actual production runs. There's actually another interesting machine there. So, this this case um doesn't look that interesting, but inside it is a machine called the Profit 3. So, this portable computer, if I can get it out, that's going to be recognizable to quite a few people that know Acorn. Is that an Atom? And they will realize that's a rebadged Atom, but an Atom with a disc interface. So you could take around your Atom in this carry case. There it is. Um, so you got a carry handle there. Um, so you could carry it around and on top you can stick your monitor, plug it into the mains there, take the composite video output and away you go, you've got your portable PC. So um, yeah, that's the profit. And I think again that was aimed at a specific market. Uh, I think it has a spreadsheet not built in but on the disc. Um, so it was sort of for accountants on the move. The 380Z again people recognize from school, but that is a very early what they call the blue box version. Not many of those around in that in that kind of box. More Amstrad, Archimedes, all the different versions of Archimedes, 310, 440, 441. Got the Riskix machines over there. So the R1 140s and R260s over there. So Acorn got into kind of a um a different operating system called Riskix. These are more powerful machines. Um, and this was aimed more at the the Unixie high-end uh market, but obviously didn't go that far. Cambridge workstation down there. Again, they're quite rare. Another Cambridge Acorn machine. That was again towards the end of days for for Acorn, sadly. Memory 7,000. That's a huge lump of a machine. Screen built in with its drives there. The the computer itself sat in front like that. That's the memory 7000. So, the Enigma, that's not the Enigma that people would first think of. That's just the name of it. There were lots of companies making CPMbased machines. There was kind of no uh licensing issues. It was a standard Z80 based uh computer. So, lots of people made their variations on it. Um and so you see a lot of these. In fact, the Galaxy Gemini one there and the Enigma are very nearly identical. In fact, they probably are quite a few machines that are are rebranding that way. This is quite nice. Um carefully take that off. Not the Toshiba. That's just a a laptop. This has seen better days, but it's beautiful in a very ugly kind of way. So, that is a NASCOM one. No, sorry, it's a Neston 2. I think it's a computer built into a great big wooden box. Lovely. So, you've got the expansion board there for memory. You can add extra ROMs onto it. The NASCOM board is underneath. We get a lot of NASCOMs and UK 101's built into various flavors of of wooden boxes. No two look the same. Is there another one? Yeah, there's that's a UK 101 up there. In fact, again, this is this is edging towards portable computing. So, if we I love the hinges. Yeah. Well, the hinges uncover the keyboard. So, um yeah, the the UK 101 was a was a single board computer. Um you bought it, you you you put it together, it was one board with the keyboard built in. Yeah. People built them into cases that that suited them. So, you've got the the compartment at the back there, which gives you access to 240 volts if you want to electrocute yourself at any point. Um, that's nice. So, I don't know why you need to have a little compartment for that. You know, I've written some really bad code. I must electrocute myself. Um, I'll just open this flap and kill myself. Um, I I don't know. I'm sure there was a reasonable reason beyond suicide. Probably kept overheating, so they wanted to let air in. That probably makes more sense. I prefer my version. I like your um cassette deck built in, you know, brilliant. I mean, people went to these lengths to to accommodate their machines because actually, you know, the machines were a certain amount of money, but maybe a molded case that went with it was half as much again, you know. So, it's, you know, people had to find other ways of of casing their machines if they had made them themselves. We have compacts up there, the early uh compact portable machines, really important machine. So, this is the Osborne one, kind of one of the first uh computers that was popular as a as a portable computer. Um, I'll try and show you. So, they're not light. They're not that portable. You would put that on your desk. You'd undo the catches, which is difficult to do when you're behind it. There you go. So, you have this tiny Oh, we got some information on it as well. Tiny little screen, full size keyboard, full size floppy discs. The thing they chose to shrink was the screen, the bit the you want to keep as big as you can. Probably it was down to what was available. So, these are all offtheshelf parts and they've all been squeezed into this case and probably that screen was maybe used on oscilloscopes or something. You know, there would have been some other use for that screen. So, they've bought what is available and made themselves a portable computer. This thing was incredibly popular. This started off really that trend for mobile computing, portable computing. Um, and uh yeah, sold very very well. This is the early version with the with the blow molded case. Um, no, I'll put that back in in a minute. Let's put that one back up there. But then very shortly after they started producing a slightly more professional version of it, which has a slightly nicer case um but essentially same machine. This was one of the first machines that actually shipped with bundled software. So when you bought this, you got yourself a spreadsheet, a database, communications software. It all came with it basic. So the idea of having bundled software, having literally your whole office in a briefcase, suitcase was first done by Osborne. Really quite an important machine that would later be followed by the other machines that we saw up there. So these what form part of the Holton catch fire story then. Yeah. Well, yeah, kind of. These were the predecessor to that. That machine there with its screen and its keyboard, which is here. Um that is the IBM PC. Um, actually that's the original, the 5150 with two floppy drives. So, this is a machine that IBM produced. Um, it was quite unlike their machines that went before. Um, because they used to make all the parts that went in their machines. This machine used an Intel chip. Um, and it used an operating system from a a lesserknown company called Microsoft. Um, and that was unusual for IBM. That was the first time they've they've done that. And this was kind of in answer to things like the Apple 2OS that were starting to appear around companies um mostly in the states. Um and IBM weren't too chuffed about that. So they kind of rushed um this product uh into existence and it was it was very good. Um it was expensive but it was a hulking great machine um metal case that sat on your desk personal computing. No longer will you rely on the company's mainframe. You could do what you wanted with this machine. So this is great. So that's the IBM PC. what a company, an unknown company at the time called Compact did, um, they took the idea that Osborne were doing, this portable machine, and they made a similar kind of product and they produced, let me put the feet up. Can't reach. There we go. Right. They produced a machine called the compact portable. Now, what's important about this machine is that it was 100% compatible with the IBM PC. So, whatever software you run on your IBM machine, and remember IBM ruled the roost, you know, they they were so dominant in the computing industry, it's untrue and with good reason, but the software that was written for that would run on this machine even though it wasn't a standard IBM machine. There's so many stories that go along with all these machines. And actually, the stories is what we kind of find the most interesting. the hardware is just the excuse to tell those stories. Um, so, uh, so yeah, it's it's really nice when you can get one of these machines and then talk about the the the things that it that it made happen and the the the social impacts of some of these machines. You get a lot of this stuff donated, don't you? Do do you get a lot of those stories from the people who donate them? Yeah, we make sure we collect those stories. Um, quite people are quite um surprised to hear that when they when they come in and say, "Oh, I've got this machine. Would you like it?" The first thing was would say, you know, is, "How have you got it? What did you use it for?" Blah, blah, blah. Um and you know people have got really interesting stories. You know there's there's a lot of shared experiences with using them at university to write their thesis and all this kind of stuff. But then some people are saying well I was doing you know um uh computation for you know DNA and all this kind of stuff. We we have SGI uh systems that we used to decode the human genome. Um we've got other other machines that that were used for all sorts of different things scientific research. We've got machines from the Scott Polar uh research. We've got machines that created the Graten catalog. I don't know if anybody remembers that. Um, you know, massive catalog this thick uh that we had in the UK where you could put stuff on tick and pay it off over the next 36 weeks. Oh, the shop the shopping cart. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But they were huge you yellow pages style uh big cataloges and and that that machine uh was used to to do all the data entry for that for instance. Um just things that you just wouldn't really think of, but they're interesting. um and what it's done for those people, the way that it's changed their lives, people that have that have had their their companies and they've computerized them. Um you know, which means installing a stock control system or whatever, but everything that that went along with that, it's stuff that happens today that you don't think about. You know, it is obvious if you are going to have a business, you're going to have a computer that is going to look after your accounts, everything else. But it wasn't always like that. You know, sometimes it was actually a lot more harder work. Um, and these machines allowed, you know, the speed of business to just increase so much. You know, we used to send a letter to another company and they would reply, you know, a week later or whatever. If you don't get a reply to your email by the end of the day now, it's you know, why haven't they replied? Um, so it's it's changed everything in that way and it's it's because of these machines. That's what's interesting. You know, the hardware is great. Um, but the stories that go along with them are, you know, equally so. So, yeah, there's a there's a lot of memories for a lot of people in amongst all this sort of stuff. So uh yeah, yeah, I can see some of these machines. Um yeah, this one was controlling water processing plant. We have another machine over there that was used for controlling um water flow through a dam. Uh yeah, it's just incredible. Incredible. Lots of Commodores down here. Another early Commodore PET, but then also the later PETs. These are the Commodore SK series. So, so these were basically repackaged versions of the earlier Commodore Pets just in a nicer kind of space 1999 style um cases. Really like those ones. Not really designed to fit on shelves like these, but there you go. But yes, I mean it's just a small part of the collection. Like I say, I don't know, there's probably a couple of hundred machines up here, maybe. I'm not sure. Um there's over a thousand in the collection. Um some of them are just in boxes, some of them in their original boxes. Um there's over 12,000 bits of software archived so far in the collection. Um 9,000 magazines, I don't know how many thousand manuals and um yeah, it's it's quite vast and it's and you can look at all this stuff online. Just go on the website. If the machine is up here and you've seen it, it will be on the website for the connoisseurs next time, right? Yeah, absolutely. There's some more stuff here we can show you. We also go through some of these machines on our own YouTube channel as well. So, we have if you search YouTube for Center for Computing History, um, and also Retro Tech Archive, we've got two channels if you want to follow those. We can do better than that. We'll put a link down there. Awesome. Yeah, follow the link wherever it might be. It's just got that sound of Oh. Oh, Internet Explorer has opened again.