The Retroist » IBM

What’s in the Attic …

Flack — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 18:00:56 +0000

Most homes in Oklahoma don’t have basements. Because of the water table, combined with the hard red clay found in the ground here, basements are an exorbitant luxury. In almost 40 years of living here, I’ve only been in two homes that actually had basements. Instead we use our attics for storage, and it is not uncommon here for people to deck out large portions of their attics to create large storage areas.

When people see all the crazy stuff I buy and collect, many of them ask me what my attic looks like. In my old two-story home, my friend and I cut a hole and installed a full-sized door that opened directly up into my attic. I decked out a 12′x12′ floor that held lots of storage tubs and shelves. Here’s a look at just one set of shelves I had up there; I took this picture shortly before we moved.

The top shelf there holds an old 486 DX4/100 on the left an a Franklin Ace 1000 (Apple II clone) on the right. On the second shelf from the top you can see three Apple II computers on the left and four Commodore computers on the right (three C64c models with a 128 on the far right). I believe the machine sandwiched between the two stacks is a TRS-80 COCO.

On the bottom shelf there are two older “pizza box” Mac computers on the left, with an Atari 800 and an Amiga on the right.

All of these computers made the voyage from the old house to the new house. One of the Commodores, the Amiga, and an Apple II system have already been set up in the new place. The rest will probably sleep out in the garage for a while; some of them are working, others I hang on to for spare parts.

Some people have bats in their belfry. Me? I have antiques in my attic.

The Original IBM ThinkPad was a Paper Notepad

The Retroist — Tue, 21 Jun 2011 15:00:57 +0000

I love when I find out fun facts about items I had up to that point not really considered. I have owned and worked on IBM ThinkPads for years and never once thought about their origins. Yesterday I was doing a search on IBM when I came across an older post at A Continuous Lean called, The Original IBM ThinkPad. It has wonderful photos and tells how the IBM ThinkPad got its start as a humble Paper Notepad giveaway that would inspire the name of their line of laptops.

Photo from A Continuous Lean

[more] The Original IBM ThinkPad

IBM Correcting Selectric II Typewriter

Kill Screen 256 — Fri, 06 May 2011 13:14:43 +0000

While walking around work, I came across this 1973 beauty. It is an IBM Correcting Selectric II. Not sure if it still works or not, but still takes me back to the days in school having to work on reports with a typewriter my mom had that was much like this one.

5MB IBM hard disk drive from 1956

The Retroist — Thu, 03 Mar 2011 15:00:50 +0000

5 MB is not much. It is amazing i have a drive that is 5 times that capacity on my keychain.

IBM 350 disk storage unit [via] BoingBoing

IBM Commercial with “Charlie Chaplin” and Fatty Arbuckle for iPad

The Retroist — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 15:00:24 +0000

In the 1980s nothing was cooler then using silent era movie characters to sell high tech gadgets.

They ran these ads for a while so they must have been successful. Which is surprising since the Fatty Arbuckle iPad ads didn’t go anywhere.