Old Skool Blog

I’ve moved this blog to a new hosting site (Bluehost) and hope to start posting more regularly. Some posts and comments didn’t survive the transfer process for some reason, but it mostly looks okay.

Wow. It’s 25 years since the first virus was released into the wild. While the Elk Cloner wasn’t technically the first virus, it is generally accepted as such because it was the first to spread widely on personal computer which were starting to become popular and widespread.

I’m glad to say that in all the years I have been using computers, I have only ever had one virus attack my systems. I can’t recall which particular virus it was, but it was on the Amiga and managed to infect several of my floppies before I discovered it. At the time it was easiest to just ditch the infected disks, though I think there was some crude “cleansing” tool which supposedly could have fixed them. Apart from that one virus though, I have been able to avoid viruses thanks to common-sense guidelines and using a virus scanners where possible.

I have, however, seen some particularly nasty infections, some of the most persistent being MS Word macro viruses. I was working in IT support in the mid to late 90’s when macro viruses started to appear. One of the early macro viruses was somehow introduced into our network and turned out to be a very difficult thing to eradicate. While we could clean all infected files on the network and on our users’ PCs, if someone had emailed an infected document, the virus could lie dormant for quite some time before reappearing and reinfecting everything again. In those days virus scanners couldn’t scan and clean email attachments until they were opened, so the virus could lie in wait for months at a time until someone opened an old document in their email and there would be another round of scanning/cleaning files.

Over the years virus scanners and viruses have become more and more sophisticated. To think, it all started from a silly prank on an Apple II!

A while back I wrote about the Micro-Comp, a small single-board Z-80 computer I built from a kit many years ago. For those who are interested, Talking Electronics still has copies of the magazine which contains all the instructions and PCB layouts required to build the Micro-Comp. The magazine is called Six BD679 Projects and can be ordered from Talking Electronics’ web site. Unfortunately the Micro-Comp kit is no longer available, so if you’d like to try your hand at building one you’ll have to etch your own board. Talking Electronics do appear to have some Pic-based trainers that mimic the layout/functionality of the original Micro-Comp - I might look at getting one of those to tinker with at some stage…

I am often amazed at the price some items go for on eBay. For example, take this Vic 20. It comes complete in its original box, has an 8K RAM expansion cartridge, two reasonably common game cartridges and a couple of books. Now Vic 20’s have been less common recently, with only about one or two units appearing on eBay a month, but still, $227.50 (at the time I posted this the auction still had 6 days to go) is absolutely ridiculous! The seller even states that the box is “very worn”, so it is hardly worth extra just because it is in a box. Obviously this is a case of someone who really wants a Vic 20, but just hasn’t done any research on recent sales. $27.50 would be a reasonable price, maybe even $30-40, but over $200 is just plain silly.

Then there are the sellers who try to rip buyers off. Take this guy for instance: $25 postage on a cassette! The most it would actually cost him is maybe $3-4 including a padded post bag.

Sometimes you just gotta laugh…

One of my other hobbies is electronics and it is always a bonus when two or more of my hobbies combine. For example, a couple of years ago I saw a kit for a “Classic TV Pong Game” in my local electronics store so I had to get it. It was a long while before I got around to building the kit, but when I did I was treated to a pretty neat version of Pong. Now I have many different Pong clones stashed away in my collection, but there is something to be said for soldering all the bits and bobs on yourself. I’ve always wanted to try design my own Pong clone out of discrete components - evidently some of the early Pongs were built using discrete components but I have yet to find any schematics.

Anyway, here’s a picture of the kit fully built (I will try to take some images of it in action ASAP):

Work has eased up a little bit, but things are still pretty full on so I haven’t had much chance to get back to my hobbies. Having said that, I have managed to add to my collection - another Mattel Aquarius complete with mini expander, RAM expansion, tape unit and a couple of cartridges; an Oric Atmos, which joins the Oric-1 I picked up late last year; and a CGL M5, which is a rebadged/renamed Sord M5. I can’t wait until I get some time to power up these systems, hopefully that won’t be too far off…

Updates are going to be a bit less frequent here for the next few weeks due to some pretty heavy work commitments. It looks as though I am not going to have much spare time at all during this summer, so my old skool computing hobby will have to take a back seat until things cool down a bit.

I remember the first old computer I purchased was a Sinclair ZX81 which I discovered at a ‘Trash and Treasure’ market probably around 1988. I think I paid $15 or so for the ZX81 and a power supply (no box or manuals) and the machine is still in good working order. That find started me on an “on again, off again” affair with collecting old computers that has become more of an obsession today.
In the early days there was no eBay to buy and sell old skool computers. Instead you had to trawl through market stalls, thrift/second-hand shops, pawn brokers, classified ads and so on. Finding old computers was more about the hunt than the acquisition - you had to live in an area with plenty of good thrift stores (unfortunately for me there weren’t many around where I lived) and you had to get in quick with the classifieds in the papers. My main source in those days was a paper called the Trading Post. Each week I would get the Trading Post early on a Thursday morning and scour the computer listings for interesting looking finds. Then I would start making calls and if I was lucky I would be able to score a bargain. Due to my location I had to arrange to have the computers delivered by post or courier and payment would be by mailing a cheque. Turnaround times would be in the order of 1-2 weeks. These days I can win an eBay auction, pay via PayPal and have the items in my hands within 2-3 days. Quite an improvement!

I quite enjoyed the hunt back then - not that I actually purchased much. My PET 2001 came from the Trading Post, as did the Commodore 128D (which I foolishly sold for next to nothing years ago) and a few other odds and ends. Pickings were slim however, which made the few rare finds all the more enjoyable.
A couple of years later, 1989 or 1990, I started dialling bulletin boards and ended up running my own for a while. That is when I discovered FidoNet and the various “Echo Conferences” including a couple of “for sale” groups. These opened up a few more possibilities for finds, but still, pickings were slim. A couple more years on and I finally had access to the internet and Usenet newsgroups. This was where I really started to realise that collecting old computers was a hobby that a small group of enthusiasts were really exploring. I can remember reading posts describing how to find rare games in thrift stores, what days were best to go hunting, tricks to get cheaper prices, and lists describing the rarity of different systems and game cartridges. Many of the posters were collecting Atari 2600 systems and games and the hobby was just starting to become more popular.

Then along came eBay and things started to really take off. My first eBay purchase was in 1997 when I won an auction for a collection of 10-12 Atari 2600 cartridges. I made a couple more purchases then left the hobby for a few years. Nowdays old skool computing is a thriving scene and there is more and more equipment available to be had. Just look at the number of auctions in the vintage computing categories of eBay! Thanks to eBay, I now have a large collection containing computers that I would never have been able to find locally. I can buy a computer from a guy in the US and it will be shipped here in a week or so. I can then buy some software for that computer from a seller in the UK. Then, using the web, I can find technical details, schematics, scans of manuals and all manner of information about my new acquisitions. It has certainly made collecting a lot easier.

However, the growth in the old skool computer market has come at a cost. With more and more people getting into the hobby, prices have predictably risen. While my first ZX81 only cost me $15, today you would have to pay many times that to secure one on eBay. Then, should a newspaper or tv show do a story on collecting, people look in their attics and dust off their old computers and think they will become rich by selling off these ***ULTRA RARE*** computers on eBay and list their goods at unrealistically high starting prices. So it is starting to get harder to find good quality gear at bargain prices. Where a seller may have listed a single auction for a computer, software and manuals, these days he will list 25 auctions - one for each individual item, all starting at $19.99 (or some other outrageously high figure). With luck they will relist their auctions at lower starting prices when they fail to get any bids, but it does make it awkward to score a complete set of manuals or software especially if you have to bid against another collector.

So while eBay has helped to grow this amazing hobby, by making old systems more available to a wider audience, it has also lead to inflated prices in some areas. Still, that won’t stop me regularly checking the new listings in my favourite categories!

After spending way more time than I really would have liked, I managed to get an image from my ZX80 on the LCD TV. Unfortunately, the ZX80 is an NTSC model, while my LCD TV is, naturally, PAL so I get a rolling picture, which is hardly usable. I then dug out my PCI TV tuner card, found a spare slot in my PC and tried to get the card working. However, it appears that the card is dead - I could not for the life of me get anything working with the card. Upon further reflection, using my PC won’t really be a viable long-term solution owing to its location, which just wouldn’t be terribly convenient. So I have decided to get a USB TV tuner for my Mac.

The tuner I have decided on is the Miglia TVMax, which has built-in hardware compression and a nice array of inputs which would make it almost ideal for my needs. Now I need to find a reputable online retailer because the NTSC model is not available here in Australia. So who would you recommend? Preferably someone who ships internationally.

A few days ago I started to see blog posts about three new Atari 2600 keyring games appearing all over the blogosphere. These games can be found over at ThinkGeek.com and sound really neat - mini joysticks (or paddles) that contain two or three classic Atari 2600 games.

Then I stumbled across this thread over at AtariAge.com… Bugger! These sounded like a nice idea - shame about the implementation.