Something very nice and long-awaited turned up in the post today. I thought it would be good to have an open thread for precious old things newly acquired.
Here’s my new arrival today, an in-working-order HP-25 programmable calculator:
The story is that I’d failed to make an offer on one of these several years ago at a radio rally and regretted it ever since, so finally I found a working one on ebay and managed to scoop it up. Most examples of this machine are offered non-working, because of a horrific design flaw, which is that the charger will fry the machine if for any reason the batteries are missing or not quite making contact. Not coincidentally, I suspect, this one came without a charger.
I thought it would be good to have an open thread for precious old things newly acquired.
Seconded.
Yesterday, at the Marzaglia Radio Fair[1], I acquired a few interesting items, such as as a working PowerBook 5300cs with system software in French (I couldn’t understand which option was shutdown, which reboot and which standby…) and the manual for the very first version of Quark X-Press, from 1987.
I will share some pictures here as soon as there’s enough light.
[1] Sooner or later I’ll write a bit about this cra^^unique open-air ‘electronics’ fair, where you can find anything from old grammophones to valve amplifiers, juke boxes, home computers, antennas, semaphores (oh, yes) and medical instrumentation…
Sounds great - please do post photos! There are a couple of Radio Rallies due near me, and I’ll be going to at least one of them. No guarantee I’ll find anything to post here though…
Here are three pictures of one of the items I acquired and I covet the most, a 30+ years old manual. Historic software and documentation are so rare to find!
I’d forgotten this thread! Here’s a thing newly acquired which isn’t old, but is retro - it’s an EEPROM module for the BBC Micro, to give me 4 programmable ROM slots in my Beeb:
