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Anyone know what Burroughs machine this keyboard would be from?

Honestly, as someone in both hobbies, I don't quite get the appeal of vintage-irreplacable keyboards for the sake of use as modern-PC daily drivers.

With few exceptions, true vintage boards have terrible switches and terrible layouts. Most of the things you'd want in them can be achieved in modern boards with fewer compromises, most likely for cheaper. They are making a freaking NEW BEAMSPRING now. What more do they want?

I could see it somewhat if it were done as a respectful celebration of the old gear-- like the guy who puts an aftermarket air-conditioner in his classic (Camaro|Trabant) which he only drives 500km per year and just wants to show it off to friends and other enthusiasts. But I suspect there's a lot of "just throw out that cable harness and toss an Arduino in" behaviour going on, alongside the "split the keyboard from the terminal" behaviour.

I do think that the huge font of competent new gear has made harvesting vintage stuff less compelling. If you can buy decent keycaps with any layout and legends you want, you no longer have to scrap old typewriters and terminals for them, or futz around with dissecting a 40-year-old PCB for the precious switches that actually pretty suck. I went to a keyboard enthusiast meeting last month, and was actually pretty amazed how little vintage stuff was there. One broken Model M, a few ADB boards on converters, the Pingmaster I brought, and then everything else was pretty much new build.
 
Hak Foo said:
Honestly, as someone in both hobbies, I don't quite get the appeal of vintage-irreplacable keyboards for the sake of use as modern-PC daily drivers.

With few exceptions, true vintage boards have terrible switches and terrible layouts. Most of the things you'd want in them can be achieved in modern boards with fewer compromises, most likely for cheaper. They are making a freaking NEW BEAMSPRING now. What more do they want?

I could see it somewhat if it were done as a respectful celebration of the old gear-- like the guy who puts an aftermarket air-conditioner in his classic (Camaro|Trabant) which he only drives 500km per year and just wants to show it off to friends and other enthusiasts. But I suspect there's a lot of "just throw out that cable harness and toss an Arduino in" behaviour going on, alongside the "split the keyboard from the terminal" behaviour.

I do think that the huge font of competent new gear has made harvesting vintage stuff less compelling. If you can buy decent keycaps with any layout and legends you want, you no longer have to scrap old typewriters and terminals for them, or futz around with dissecting a 40-year-old PCB for the precious switches that actually pretty suck. I went to a keyboard enthusiast meeting last month, and was actually pretty amazed how little vintage stuff was there. One broken Model M, a few ADB boards on converters, the Pingmaster I brought, and then everything else was pretty much new build.
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I've toyed with the idea of trying to build a 60s microswitch replica. I still have spare keys and parts from the one I used for my TVT. Then I'd buy that TV and put them together on display. If the CRT could be had a minimal amount of money, since it's now basically worthless. I tried putting in an offer of $200 but the seller told me to get bent. He's one of those I guess.
 
falter said:
Nabu seems to be basically a get rich quick scheme for some. Lot of flippers buying up units. And then selling alongside original boxed units for twice the price!
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For those that acquired one at the original offering prices (myself included), it was bargain. Even after the addition of a floppy controller and serial board, at under $200 USD delivered it's a very competent z80 development platform.

Back to the topic on hand, there have been instances of some buying the Nabu for it's keyboard only, and subsequently selling the the Nabu itself sans keyboard. They certainly aren't rare by any definition, but still.

At any rate, it looks like my TVT will need to be paired with a run of the mill ASCII keyboard in one form of or another when I get around to restoring it.
 
I'll give the NABU a bit of a break as it's not often decades later you find hundreds of brand new units available and being sold by someone who doesn't care if he saturates the market with unsold stock. Second and third-hand resellers are to be expected simply because resellers will always be scummy resellers and idiots with money will always exist but for now at least the hyper-fixation on the system and it's almost complete reverse-engineering in less than six months means I doubt we'll ever have questions about sourcing parts, documentation or code for it in our lifetimes, compared to other platforms.
But yes once the hype fades people will want to recoup their losses because a boxed computer is still a boxed computer bought on FOMO and the only genuinely resellable thing that you will likely sell in a market flooded with other FOMO used-twice boxed NABU's is the keyboard....
 
I'm just surprised people are reselling while they original seller is right there selling units at half what they're asking. That's vintagecomputermuseum levels of brazenness.

I wanted a NABU years ago - just the Canadian in me and the novelty of the tech. I don't think the computer itself, apart from how software was delivered to it, is all that special hardware wise? And nearly everything software wise for it I think was a port. I think it's very interesting historically. I just.. I don't know when something gets hyped I kinda lose interest for a while. Never did build an A1 replica. Before pellmill came along and started selling these I narrowly lost an auction for one.. think it was $200 or something it went for. Glad I didn't win it now! I've bought a few of them.. mainly for spares, etc. At some point I'll break it out and try using it but for now I'm content to focus on other things.
 
The NABU is essentially a Coleco Adam: Z80 CPU, TI sound and graphics chips, nice keyboard, limited software library, requires multiple tethered components to be usable.
 
vwestlife said:
The NABU is essentially a Coleco Adam: Z80 CPU, TI sound and graphics chips, nice keyboard, limited software library, requires multiple tethered components to be usable.
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What's kind of fun about the NABU is how it simultaneously manages on a technical level to be both interesting and profoundly uninteresting. It's "interesting" in its role as a very early example of a networked "cloud-hosted" computer platform, and it's "uninteresting" because its hardware recipe of a Z80 CPU plus TI9918A video plus AY-3-8910 or SN76489 sound chip was dirt common. (ColecoVision/ADAM, MSX, various Spectravideo machines, Memotech MTX, Sega SG/SC-series... there were even multiple add-on boxes for the TRS-80.)

I guess I don't know if there are any absolute game-breakers preventing this, but it kind of feels like it's only a matter of time until someone manages to come up with a hardware mod to turn those spare NABUs into full MSX compatibles. Although, given that someone has already demonstrated a ColecoVision game running on one with very minimal changes, actually turning one into an ADAM compatible might be feasible. For what that would be worth. (An SD card emulating one of those terrible tape drives would be hilarious.)
 
I'm assuming NABU chose the unexciting hardware design for the computer to make it relatively easy to port software, since only they alone would be willing to do that. I might buy a couple of the project boxes with power supplies.. those might come in handy for other machines I have.
 
Eudimorphodon said:
I guess I don't know if there are any absolute game-breakers preventing this, but it kind of feels like it's only a matter of time until someone manages to come up with a hardware mod to turn those spare NABUs into full MSX compatibles.
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Someone has already developed a loader that allows many MSX games to run on the NABU with no hardware modifications. The guy has posted his work on discord, and a brief overview is given here.
 
Part of me wanted a NABU but missed the first drop, out of the concept of "here's an interesting novelty perfectly preserved." But I could never articulate a strong appeal for one to me.

The problem is that it feels like it's a "hollow" experience, like a lot of the "new nostalgia" machines under development. What we're likely to see here is the same-new, same-new-- we'll see a bunch of demos and a few games designed as "high examples of 8-bit aesthetics and limitations." It will never grow the same software and hardware ecosystem that develops when a platform is "reasonable mainstream kit people already have."

Much of the nostalgia for 386 I grew up on isn't just playing Railroad Tycoon, it's creating a spreadsheet in Lotus 1-2-3 to analyze the disc space usage of my terrible GW-BASIC programs, and reading through the phone-book size manual that came with GeoWorks 1.2. I'm sure many people here have similar stories about an Atari 800 or C64.

For the NABU, there is no corresponding story. Nobody is going to write a spreadsheet or word-processor, or use it for those products as a matter of preference. People won't bother with "cartridge switcher" or "interface that massive 10MB hard disc" addons because all software that exists for the platform fits on a 4Gb SD card you can throw into a $12 adapter.

I can see a stronger argument for it if we can get to a full MSX conversion. I want a MSX for the sake of "if I ever see a weird game I want to play, I want the right kit to do so" and actual MSXs are pretty spendy and rare in the US. OTOH, I feel like I'd get warmer fuzzies out of an Omega than this, because then you get the Ikea Effect factor of building it yourself. (I'm pretty damn sure I'd have never spent six months on that CH375/6 interfacing stuff had I not started the project with a few days behind a soldering iron)
 
This seems to have become a NABU thread...

The things about the NABU that interest me:

1. It's new OLD stock from 1983/84 (not something new emulating something old)
2. It has a great keyboard - Alps SKCC (like I'm typing with now)
3. It's Canadian (like me!)
4. I'd never heard about it before 2022 (strange when I lived only about 400km from NABU headquarters in the 80's)
5. It was designed to be networked

I've already satisfied all the nostalgia from stand alone computers, but what I haven't satisfied is nostalgia of networked 80's computers - like my experience with the Burroughs ICON.

See how I got the topic back to Burroughs? (didn't see that one coming, did you?)
 
As a pre-eBay 2022 Nabu collector, it was proof of some Canadian technology from the 80s that looks to have been built upon the videotex technology. Videotex only sent textual data and graphics through the phone system but to send full applications via cable was an evolution. The hardware evolved as well because the first Nabu computers were S100 based. They then shrunk them down to a TV component device that could live in your TV/stereo system. I am very happy that the eBay seller sold a bunch of these because it got people working on recreations and solutions and I was happy to help in reproducing some of the original boards.

When the hype dies down (and it will like any immediate "craze"), we will be left with some great projects and uses for the Nabu PC.
- it was a cable device and the previous network was recreated by multiple projects. I hear people are still working on the cable adapter box but for what, I don't know.
- the original hardware was recreated in the floppy controller and serial cards and the original Nabu CP/M is running great
- there are enhanced hardware projects like the F18A for video that works with the Nabu PC and there are hard drive projects existing and being worked on.
- there is a MAME port and development that is ongoing.
- there is software being ported or made to run natively on the Nabu PC.

When I first got mine, it was a doorstop. Now there have been some great projects and continued projects to enhance it. I am just happy to see it run, quite frankly, and that's all to an awesome vintage computer community.
 
falter said:
Nabu seems to be basically a get rich quick scheme for some. Lot of flippers buying up units. And then selling alongside original boxed units for twice the price!
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I picked up four when I could because two is one and one is none. I like to tinker inside and outside the box and I’ve screwed up repairs before. I carry the remains of an Atari ST that I butchered attempting to hack in a drive as a stone weighing on me, too ashamed to ask for help or let anyone see it in it’s present state.

As profiteering on demand, there aren‘t all that many to start with, right? Everyone wants a Nabu but nobody wants the lonely and useless Network Adapter! I’d love to have a few of those on-hand, great project box.
 
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