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Interesting compiled list of ebay sales of old computers

Also remember the more rare a computer is, the less likely you are to find documentation, software, other users and so on if you are inclined to use or know more about your stuff. If you just consider your collection a set of valuable artifacts it doesn't matter if they work or not, just that they look pretty and nobody else has a similar one.
 
carlsson said:
Also remember the more rare a computer is, the less likely you are to find documentation, software, other users and so on if you are inclined to use or know more about your stuff. If you just consider your collection a set of valuable artifacts it doesn't matter if they work or not, just that they look pretty and nobody else has a similar one.
Click to expand...

Hi
It is true that it is hard to find. I found some tapes from another fellow
that had a machine but they were all for the system with a hard drive
instead of the floppy. I also located( with help of a friend ) some tapes
from someone in Austria. He had them on ebay as just paper tapes and
no other description. They looked a lot like the tapes for the machines
I had and were.
I got some limited documentation from the first fellow but no circuit
diagrams. Finally, I located some manuals from a fellow in Australia
and had them shipped up to me.
Since then, I know of only 5 other of these computers. Only two are
known to work but two may be brought back to life over time.
I had to write my own disassembler to figure out how to modify the
code to work with the floppy drive instead of the hard drive. It was
not as simple as CP/M2, in that each application knew such things
as how big each physical sector was. I not only had to write the low
level driver but had to patch each application to know the size of the
sectors as well.
It took time but was a lot of fun along the way. If I'd just got a C64
or such, it wouldn't have been anywhere near as much fun.
Did I mention that I had to fix it first without the aid of schematics.
There is a different level of satisfaction from getting something like
this running.
Dwight
 
Well c'mon, Dwight, don't keep us in suspense. What is this rare and wondrous mystery machine? Are you referring to the aforementioned Olivetti M20, or what? Pix would be nice too.

--T
 
Terry Yager said:
Well c'mon, Dwight, don't keep us in suspense. What is this rare and wondrous mystery machine? Are you referring to the aforementioned Olivetti M20, or what? Pix would be nice too.

--T
Click to expand...

Hi Terry
There used to be a photo of my machine on the web but I can't find it
right now. There is a good photo of one on Sallam's web page at:

http://www.vintage.org/nicolet/nicolet.htm

This one has the Bruker label on. It was OEM'd by them.
There is a story I put together at the time I got it at:

http://www.dvq.com/docs/Nicolet/dwight.pdf

Here is an interesting story about the history of this
machine.

http://versci.com/index.html

Olivetti M20s are much more common.
Dwight
 
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