This is the recovered Machine Room from 2005. Please don't expect wonders. The look and feel of this site is nine years old, and so is its code. Some of the functionality has been recovered while the rest of the site is modernised and restructured. Watch this space!

1. So, What's In Here Then?
2. Can I Make Copies of Information to Use Elsewhere? How About Pictures?
3. Can I Link to The Machine Room? Will You Link to My Site?
4. Excellent collection! Where did you get all that kit?
5. Why are you doing this?
6. So What's So Good About Obsolete Computers?
7. Are There Other Sad Geeks Like You?
8. Why Don't You Have Computer XXX in the Machine Room?
9. Why Don't You Have Computer XXX in the Machine Room?
10. Why Don't You Have Computer XXX in the Machine Room?
11. Please Give Me the Pin-Out for Connector X of Computer Y. Please Give Me Program Z For Computer W.
12. What Is Field XXX for?
13. You Mentioned Hackers. Are You A Computer Criminal?
14. Boldface Is Ugly. Why do you Insist on Using It? You Obviously Know Nothing About Typography. Oh, And You Keep Misspelling ‘Color’!
15. The Machine Room Sends Me Cookies. Cookies Are Evil! What's Up?
16. Can I Download The Machine Room For Offline Browsing?

 

1. So, What's In Here Then?

The Machine Room contains pages for various old computers of all types and sizes, their manufacturing companies, and more. There is information (and, where possible, logos) of the companies, pictures of most computers, timelines, pricing, rarity assessment for all you collectors out there, technical details including discussions, interesting trivia and tidbits, and links to other places on the Internet where you can get further information.

There's also a search feature to help research, overall statistical data, lists of the most accessed companies and computers, cross-references to aid comparisons, and even games and museum-like exhibits for a more linear discussion of the advancement of the state of the art in the past sixty to seventy years (believe it or not).

 

2. Can I Make Copies of Information to Use Elsewhere? How About Pictures?

As far as text is concerned, you can have anything you like provided it is only published on the Internet. You should, however, credit the author (Alexios Chouchoulas, unless otherwise stated) and, if you feel like it, provide a link to the Machine Room.

Pictures are a somewhat different story. Few of the images actually belong to me. If you're going to be using pictures, it's advisable to contact the owners and request their permission. Almost all of the people will be happy to allow you to use the images (provided you credit them and/or provide a link to their Web pages), but it's good to ask before using them.

To publish material off the Internet, please acquire express permission from the author of the text or the owner of the image.  

3. Can I Link to The Machine Room? Will You Link to My Site?

Of course you can link to the Machine Room! There are two good ways of doing it.

• Link to the main page. Use the following URL to do so: http://machine-room.bedroomlan.org/
• Find the entry of a computer you're interested and link to that. You can use the URL shown by your Web browser. Try to link to the ‘Summary’ category of the entry whenever possible.

As for linking back to your site: too many people ask to get links. I have to apologise to most of the very kind folk who've linked to the Machine Room and never got a link back: creating a link page and updating it would have been a full-time job given the amounts of E-mail I get (I even have trouble replying to some messages these days).

If you have a general site, for example about Eighties Micros or Minis of the Seventies, or a collection page, I've set up an automated link page, where you can add your own links to your sites. I'll visit all links and even rate them. If you have a specialised site, for example one that focuses on a certain computer or company and provides in-depth discussions and information, then please, please, don't use the links page. Add your links to any and all suitable computer entries. You'll have to register to do this, but then your information will be at the exact right place for potential viewers.

 

4. Excellent collection! Where did you get all that kit?

It's not a collection! I sometimes wish it were, but I'd have to rent a small country just to store all the stuff! Instead, I settle for cataloguing and gathering technical details, manuals, pictures, et cetera. In short, what you see on the Machine Room.  

5. Why are you doing this?

There are a few answers to that:

I have fun doing it (weird geek that I am).

I like old computers. I have this penchant for variety and pluralism. The kind you don't get any more, what with PCs and Macs controlling the entire market. The Eighties are entering the realm of history these days, but I can't help but remember that there was unbelievable variety back then. I liked that. Sure enough, there was unbelievable incompatibility, too, but, ooh, the colours and cases and different keyboards and really clever innovations! There were people still experimenting with a new market and, even in the Eighties, quite a few hackers playing around with new ideas.

I get very annoyed with people who tend to think that a computer is a PC (read ‘IBM PC clone’) and an operating system is a GUI. Someone on alt.folklore.computers once said that the computer market has an amazingly short memory. It's true. I hope the Machine Room serves as a reminder of the way things were in ye not-so-olde times.

If nothing else, with all the information people send me, I manage to educate myself. The Machine Room sports entries for computers I'd never heard of before, until some kind soul sent pictures and/or information.  

6. So What's So Good About Obsolete Computers?

Warning: very long answer. Brace yourselves!

One thing, mainly: simply because they won't run the software du jour doesn't necessarily mean they're obsolete. Most of the computers in this site have their uses today. Many machines are still being used for reasonable applications.

Do you need a gazillion-MIPS, gazillion-squared-Mbyte machine to keep your appointments? No, unless you're using software by a well known major software house which shall remain nameless for obvious reasons. Do you need a high-end graphic workstation to balance your account? No. ‘Needing’ those huge machines is just part of the old ‘my toy is better than yours’ story. It's also encouraged by different facets of the computer industry, possibly the most successful industry ever.

At the time of writing (early 2000), a 486 is considered obsolete today, yet a lot of people find it covers them. In the Summer of 1999, I retired a 386 running at 40 MHz which served around six hundred users' needs of E-mail and hosted a MUD in its spare time (not much, admittedly). There are plenty more 386s running as servers. Many more 486s. So, are these computers obsolete or not? I'd say they're obsolete only when they can perform nothing satisfactorily. Very few computers fall under this category.

Have a few rather tangible examples. What do you think of this page? Did it load fast enough? The Machine Room is currently hosted on Tardis, a network of discarded ‘obsolete’ computers, managed by a host of computer science students at the University of Edinburgh. At the time of writing, the WWW server is Vortis, a Sun 4/330 server (VME Bus, early SPARC CPU). Before it, the Machine Room was ladled out by Leela, an HP 9000 workstation based on the Motorola 68000 CPU, running at around 8 MHz.

In the same building, an Apple IIe was displaying satellite images of Scotland and showing statistics for the Meteorology department, while a veritable army of Acorn BBC Model Bs (almost unbeatable at device control and ease of use) still run experiments in various other departments in that very building.

So, an ‘obsolete’ computer can do something really useful.

Most of the old computers you'll find here were pioneering something or other in their hay-day. Okay, so you can't run Windows on most of them. But back then, they represented huge steps in computer design. Newer PCs are only minor improvements over older ones. And, of course, the industry has (painfully) learned what sells and what flops. They're going with what sells, and that's the safe, secure, standard approach. No unusual features or new tricks. Only the external design changes.

Plus, most old computers have more hack value than your average Pentium -- crack them open, have a look at their innards; you can understand the whole architecture simply by looking at their boards. Some of them are so simple that you can build a copy from scratch in a few hours.

Finally, it's a matter of admiring genius: apart from the design itself (almost always pushing the state of the art to its limits), the ROM of your average old home computer is a miracle of a hack -- people habitually fit a BASIC interpreter and a whole operating system in 16 to 32 kbytes, with not a single byte to spare. Programming on a machine with gigabytes of storage and tens of megabytes of RAM isn't as much fun for the problem solvers. Having limits to everything (relatively slow processor, small amounts of memory, etc.) makes the experience more hackish. What's more difficult? Fitting an operating system on a CD-ROM, or building a 3D game that has to fit in 32 kbytes of RAM and make do with a processor running at 1 MHz?  

7. Are There Other Sad Geeks Like You?

Yup, loads. There are many computer collectors about. There are loads of people who simply adore ‘retrocomputing’ (as using old computers is sometimes referred to). There are die-hard user groups that have survived for a couple of decades on sheer dedication. And there are other user groups trying (and often succeeding) to resurrect machines that were previously considered dead and buried. A lot of these people either can't afford a modern machine that'll cost ten times as much as their current hardware (and provide marginally more productivity) or simply want to use their machines. Have a look at the links page to find out.  

8. Why Don't You Have Computer XXX in the Machine Room?

Because of three possible reasons:

1. I plan to do so, but simply haven't got round to doing it. If you have anything to contribute, please do so. You'll receive due credit, of course.
2. If you can find the name of the machine in the index of computers, then I probably tried to get an entry started, but never got enough information to finish it. Help!
3. If the machine (or its manufacturing company) aren't even mentioned here, then I obviously don't know about them. Why don't you fill me in?

 

9. Why Don't You Have Computer XXX in the Machine Room?

Why don't you send me some information? Hopefully something that'll help me get an entry started: technical details, a timeline, pictures, a few URLs maybe?

Or maybe your computer is somehow outside the scope of the Machine Room. Too recent, maybe? Too common? Ask me and I'll clarify. But this is probably not the case!

 

10. Why Don't You Have Computer XXX in the Machine Room?

Aaaaargh!!!  

11. Please Give Me the Pin-Out for Connector X of Computer Y. Please Give Me Program Z For Computer W.

I will help if I know (and it's legal to do so, especially as far as software is concerned). I can't and won't help you get pirated copies of software.

Likewise, I'm not an expert on computer X, Y or Z (unless you're talking about one of the machines I own, in which case things may be different). Some people seem to assume that, because their computer is in the Machine Room I must be some sort of guru. I'm not.

Please don't ask for links to more information. If I know of any links about your machine, they're already in the respective entry.

My constant answer (question, rather) to requests for help I can't handle is ‘have you checked the Usenet newsgroups? Have you checked the WWW pages?’.

If you don't receive a reply from me at all, it's probably because the answer to your questions is in the entry for the machine about which you're mailing me.  

12. What Is Field XXX for?

Computer entries have become quite big. Please refer to an explanation of entry contents.  

13. You Mentioned Hackers. Are You A Computer Criminal?

No, I am not a computer criminal. In fact, the Machine Room has been created solely with free software. To explain a bit further:

Yes, I tend to mention hacking, hacks, hack-value, hacker culture and hackers themselves a lot. Chances are you've heard people referring to computer criminals as hackers. You've possibly heard computer criminals refer to themselves as hackers. This is wrong and incorrect use of the term: you've been misled by a popular misconception (gladly usurped by computer criminals because the term ‘hacker’ used to have connotations of respect). The computer criminal is known as a cracker.

Please have a look at the Jargon File for the canonical definitions of hacker, hack, and hack-value.

In short, the Machine Room is a large hack (though I think it's a bit kludgy). People like Linus Torvalds, Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs are all hackers.

Please read the Jargon File, or buy the New Hacker's Dictionary. They'll both enlighten you as to the real nature and history of hacking and hackers. Here's a reference for the book:

Eric S. Raymond (ed.), The New Hacker's Dictionary, third edition, MIT Press, ISBN 0-262-18178-9 (hardback), 0-262-68092-0 (paperback).

It is both unfortunate and regrettable that the press has caught on to ‘hacker’ as a buzzword, and habitually (though inadvertently) defames well-established computer professionals who are part of the hacker culture.  

14. Boldface Is Ugly. Why do you Insist on Using It? You Obviously Know Nothing About Typography. Oh, And You Keep Misspelling ‘Color’!

Web pages aren't like printed matter. Studies have shown that a huge percentage (around 80-87%, in fact) never read a page, they only scan bits of it then move on. This is due to the fact that Web pages aren't paged media (a Web ‘page’ could range from three lines of text to an entire book's worth of material), and many other reasons besides.

In typesetting material intended for printing, I wouldn't be caught dead using boldface unless there was a life-threatening reason to do so. A Web page is different, though. Presenting material so that readers can find what most interests them in the least time is extremely important.

Oh, with regard to using ‘colour‘, ‘centre’, et cetera: I'm not a US citizen or resident, I'm not a native speaker of the language (mee no speakah ze Engrish good), and hence I write in International English. 'Nuff said.  

15. The Machine Room sends me cookies. Cookies are evil! What's up?

You can read all about it in our cookie policy.

Cookies can indeed be used for dubious purposes, but this it true for any tool. The Machine Room allows you to make your choice. Of course, if you think cookies are so bad, you should already have disabled them at the client (browser) side.  

16. Can I Download The Machine Room For Offline Browsing?

No. Why not? Let me count the ways.

• This is a huge site. I'm not sure how big it is because I gave up the mirror process after waiting for several hours (and I have the benefit of a 100 Mbps LAN connection to the servers in my closet). It's certainly at least 400 Mbytes, probably more. And that's not including redundancies. Read on.
• You will download the same page around 40 thousand times The cross-reference page is a script. Your software will try to download approximately two thousand copies of each cross reference page. The I/O port cross reference alone is half a meg. 512 times around 2000 computers is 10 gigabytes.
• There's not enough bandwidth to do it. We allocate a maximum of 128 kbps for HTTP requests. This is shared among all users.
• You put strain on the servers. The Machine Room is dynamic, although we cache a lot of stuff. Our servers aren't as powerful as you may think. Issuing a few tens of concurrent requests a second is too much.
• You ruin it for everyone else. By mirroring the site, you're hogging resources needed to serve the site to other people.
• You're slowing my network down. This is personal, :-). I use Hecate and Bastet for other work apart from serving the Machine Room. I take a very dim view of people who launch effective Denial of Service attacks on my machines.

To make this a better experience for everyone, we throttle people who try to mirror the site. In many cases we will enforce throttling for your entire network, and we reserve the right to block your address and/or network at the firewall. We may also lodge formal complaints with your ISP, ranging from abuse to DoS attack.

If you absolutely must have the Machine Room, contact us, we'll send you a static version on CD-ROM for a nominal fee to cover our expenses (trust me, you'll pay more if you try to mirror the site on your own).