Rare Commodore Systems Found at Electronics Recycler
818,709
Published 2020-11-12
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HOW TO BUY one of the VIC-20s?
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keep your eye on www.twitter.com/1UponCancer
as information will be posted there in the next week or so.
For more info on the recycle shop that donated this equipment, go here:
recycleoklahoma.com/
All Comments (20)
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That's not the styrofoam squeaking on the way home. It's the VIC-20's excitedly chattering to each other about finally having a new loving home.
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Those "mystery" boards with the RCA, MIDI and DB25 ports are the internal boards for the rack-mount unit that accompanied the SMPL system. The DIN ports are MIDI, the leftmost two RCA ports are Roland Sync, the next three RCA ports are SMTPE timecode, and the remaining RCA and DB25 ports are interfaces to professional studio tape machines, to control the tape transport and transmit/receive SMTPE timecode to/from them.
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Back in the 1980's programmable thermostats were just coming online and were costly. Being handy, I ran my home furnace with an Atari 400. I added a full keyboard & modified it to 65Kb ram. With a real time clock and custom software to accommodate a personalized HVAC schedule it ran until I sold the house. It would also reboot itself after a power outage. It was fun building it.
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I'd keep the MOS KIM-1 as close to it's current state as possible, but of course gently clean it and take required actions to ensure no further degradation. I believe it's better to leave it with all it's modifications as it was clearly being used for something, that history is much more important than returning it to pristine factory condition.
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I think the only part of that museum piece I would even consider changing is the power cord. Everything else (even the green board) might be potentially significant to someone investigating it later.
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That mouse doorbell was brilliant!
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The video socket is meant for a video card called the TVT-6. It was created by Don Lancaster who designed the TV Typewriter. It could display up to 4000 characters on a television. A popular configuration was 16 lines by 32 columns of characters. Hope this helps.
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Just imagine all of the abandoned buildings that have been sitting for 35+ years loaded up with this kind of stuff.
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How could you resist pressing the middle mouse button
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If this man is happy by finding old computer parts, then I'm happy too
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Hey, I saw this laptop thing called the "Canon NoteJet 486" which is essentially a printer built into a laptop, in 1993.
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It is so nice that there are people like The 8-Bit Guy , who really do care about all of those old machines, how they evolved what steps did their creators took, their mistakes and success. All of that absolutely needs to be preserved and displayed to show how that technology helped shape man and society, and vice versa. It really puts tears in my eyes to see that it is being done today and they even inspire more people to do so. A truly amazing channel.
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"no problem, i have a spare working cpu" Of course you do.
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In the 80s I helped to develop a system to collect, measure, and process vibration signals from some massive machines used in the steel industry. The basis was a ZX 81 and all the programming was done in assembly and believe me, to program FFT on that was a challenge :)
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You guys find all the cool stuff out that way. Here in Idaho we never find stuff like that. I was lucky enough to find a C64 and a VIC20 at an electronics reseller a few months ago. Both of them work great, and with cleaning tips from your videos I was able to clean them up and both function just fine. Had to buy a power supply but well worth it to have some nostalgic Commodore stuff other than just my C128.
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The KIM is a piece of history in the condition it's in. It's something of a work of contextual art. Leaving everything fitted to it shows how it was utilized and will help future generations better understand uses for early "micro computer" tech.
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It's good to see a KIM-1 again. It was my first 'pc'; I purchased one at the computer fair in Chicago late in 1977 while I was attending IBM's base school for new CEs. I remember doing a show-and-tell to the class and instructors pointing out similar features to the IBM 360 we were learning. I also remember the instructors being amazed. They had no idea about the start of personal computing that I was showing them.
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"I just happened to have some VIC-20 RAM" has a million VIC-20s
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+1 for leaving the KIM-1 exactly the way it is -- it's as important to the history to users build them as it is to know what they looked like new in box. For a museum display, I'd have it on a desk strewn with test equipment and components, with a blurb explaining how the development process is often messy.
