The oldcomputers.co.za site is my way of sharing my passion for old computing equipment, books and software. Most of the items in the collection are pre 1996 and have been collected from many sources. Included in the collection are some more recent games consoles that I have taken a liking to over the past years. Where items have been donated credit has been given to the source. Notably Bruce Ziller, Jimmy Yulverton and the nice people at Interactive Systems Designs. Recently Frontier Electronics also donated a number of items to the collection and thanks goes to the nice people there.

The first computer that I programmed and played games on was an IBM 5150 back in the early 80's. This machine was in use until around late '91 when I finally upgraded to a 286 machine. After that the annual upgrades continued until I moved to an Apple Mac during early 2006.

The items that are part of the collection have been repaired and restored in order to put them back into working condition along with accessories and software so that they can be appreciated for what they meant at the time.

The site is divided into sections based on the platform of the computing equiment and then categorised according to the type of hardware, accessory, book or software.

So why an online website you ask? Well the idea started with me wanting to catalog the items that I had already collected and to allow people, from whom I had purchased items or where items had been donated, to view these items. Finally the website will hopefully bring other people interested in the preservation and operation of older computers and software together.

I would however say that the ultimate goal of this collection will be to do presentations to schools and eductional instituations with a view to discussing the history of personal computing and to bring about an awareness of the differenct technologies that have either made it to the main stream or failed for some reason or another.

My current general purpose DOS games machine is a Pentium 1 running at 120Mhz with 16meg RAM, 2GB hard disk, Sound Blaster Pro, CD-ROM, 1.44M stiffy, 1.2M floppy and Matrox 2MB PCI card. Sure this is a bit more than the games require but it does allow for running the oldies and the later DOS games on the same machine.

Have fun looking around the site and please feel free to email me via the CONTACT button if you see some information that is wrong, just want to comment or may have something that could be of interest to me.

Thanks

Tim