ELWOOD'S COMPUTER PAGE

This page is best viewed using Opera - a better browser than Internet Exploder any day! ELWOOD'S ONLINE COMPUTER MUSEUM
My personal collection of personal computers.

Go here to see some fascinating pictures of the Laburnum Centre at Cadbury's, Bournville where I worked from 1978 to 1982.

Year Picture Software Mem Mhz Description & comments

1977 Tandy TRS-80
Invaders Game

16k 1.78 After seeing a Sinclair ZX80 that a friend of mine had bought in 1979, I was determined to get a computer of my own. This was right at the start of the home computer explosion, and there wasn't much around at the time. The one I eventually chose was the model 1 level 1 TRS-80 which cost me all of Ł299 in late 1980 (I had to go one better than my friend!) It originally had a mere 4k of memory and a very simple BASIC language which I picked up very quickly, then forked out another Ł150 in April 1981 to upgrade it to level II and add an extra 12K of RAM to bring it up to 16k. (This was when I was earning about Ł25 a week!) I wrote a "Space Invaders" program on it later in the year after I had mastered level II Basic, and even managed to make sound effects for it (the Model 1 didn't have a sound chip - the sounds were produced by modifying the sound output for loading and saving programs to cassette tapes.) If you download David Keil's TRS-80 emulator for the Model 1, you can load my program as a virtual cassette tape and have hours of fun with the old blocky graphics!

1980 Sinclair ZX80
1k 3.25 This is the tiny little electronic wonder that introduced many computer enthusiasts to the joys of home computing in the UK in the early 80's. Costing just Ł100 (in kit form) and boasting an amazing ONE Kilobyte of memory (about two screens' worth), no floating point capability (integers only) and not even capable of showing any kind of movement on-screen (it had to blank the screen to re-draw the graphics), nevertheless it sold like hotcakes. Clive Sinclair has received more than his share of brickbats in his time but this was one of his greatest triumphs, and for that we should be grateful.

1980? M4
640k ? This amazing dinosaur was given to me as a leaving present from my programming job in 1990. It was already about 10 years old then. I can't find any information on it on the Net, but it has two 8" floppy drives and a built-in green-screen monitor (no longer working). It is technically a very early "desktop" computer. Trouble is, with one of these on your desk there's no room for anything else. I mean - just look at the size of that keyboard!
The second picture shows the relative sizes of floppy discs ancient & modern. From left; 8" (128k), 5 1/4" (360k), 3 1/2" (720k), Zip (100Mb), then a 2 gig and a 4 gig memory card. So the smallest in size has 32,768 times the capacity of the largest!

1981 Sinclair ZX81
1k 3.25 An update to the ZX80, this one cost a mere Ł70, could do floating point calculations (essential really for any computer), and was capable of showing moving graphics - albeit slowly. FAST mode was used for calculation and SLOW mode for graphics. Like most of these early micros it used an ordinary TV set as a monitor, as shown here. But, hey - a computer for seventy pounds! The future started here.

1981 Tandy Color
4k 0.9 Radio Shack's successor to the TRS-80 - a 'COLOR' computer! 8 colours altogether (9 if you count black); not a great deal but still better than plain white text on a black background. 16k RAM and cut-down BASIC. Nice though.

1982 Sinclair Spectrum
16k 3.5 By 1982 the home computer craze was picking up speed, and the "must-have" gadget for that year was the Sinclair Spectrum, so naturally I just had to get one. For its price and size, it was an incredibly powerful computer in 1982, with colours and sound and a whole 16k of memory as standard. I spent many happy hours programming this thing to do all sorts of weird and wonderful things, but unfortunately none of my labours seem to have survived. The BASIC language was provided by our old friend Microsoft.

1982 BBC Model B
32k 1.8 The "standard" micro computer for the 80's, as defined by the BBC, and they should know... shouldn't they? Of course it was rapidly superceded by GUI (Graphic User Interface) machines such as the Atari and Amiga below, and even the MSX range which came out not much more than a year later. Sorry BBC, you jumped too early. It was an excellent machine for its time though, to give it credit.

1982 Commodore Vic 20
5k 1 4k RAM, 16 colours. Very popular in the early 80's.

1982 Dragon 32
32k 0.9 Note the screen boot-up display: "(c) 1982 by Microsoft". They wrote the operating systems for a lot of these early micros before developing Windows. There's just no getting away from them!

1982 Commodore 64
64k 1 .

1983 Mattel Aquarius
4k 3.5 No longer working (power supply knackered).

1984 Yamaha CX5M
Hitch Hiker Suite
1, 2, 3
Voice data .VOG 16k 3.6 Now this was more like it - a computer and a synthesiser in one instrument! I was really getting into computer programming at the same time as composing so this was a godsend. It was quite tricky to set up and manipulate, but the sounds it produced were superb. It was also the first instrument I owned which had MIDI, but like the guy who invented the telephone said, it's not much use without a second one to connect it to...
(BASIC language supplied by Guess Who... yep, Microsoft again!)

1985 Atari ST
512k 8 Bought second-hand from a friend - this is a very early model ST that uses an external power supply and doesn't even have a built-in floppy disk drive.

1985 Atari ST mk.II
512k 8 This is the model with the built-in floppy drive and power supply. It was given to me from a friend in the late 90's but I never used it.

1986 Yamaha CX5M Mk.II
32k 3.6 A rare model - the mark II CX5M, with more memory and... well, not much else really. But that extra memory does help. The computer does display colours but I used a monochrome monitor here.

1986 Psion Organiser XP
16k 0.9 A smart little handheld fully programmable computer which I used a lot in the 90's. Unfortunately my original one got lost (it fell out of my pocket!) and with it went all my stored programs. Luckily I had printed most of them out so it only involved a few hours of laborious typing to program them all in to my replacement. XP version on left, LZ on right.

1987 Commodore Amiga A500
1Mb 7 By 1987 the Commodore Amiga was the computer to be seen with, so I saved up and got myself an A500. It had a mouse and something called a GUI (Graphical User Interface) which was fascinating, and a huge leap from the old command-line BASIC computers that I was used to. 512k of RAM initially.

1987 8088 PC "Adam"
640k 4 My first PC, nicknamed (appropriately enough) Adam. 640k of memory and a 20MB hard drive, with a single 5 1/4 inch floppy drive. It still works perfectly. Processor speed 4 MHz. Yes, that's Mega, not Giga! No sound (apart from an occasional beep), no graphics, just a monochrome monitor (yellow on black). No Windows, just MS-DOS version 3.3. Still, I learned C programming and dBase on it back in the early 90's.

1988 80286 "Bill"
4Mb 20 A robust 286 PC I picked up from a car boot a few years ago. I loaded it with Windows version 1.01 (very rare nowadays) which you can see running quite happily on it. Windows 1.01 should really be called "Window" (singular) as it does not support moving/overlapping windows at all! It's not much more than a simple file manager.

1989 80386 "Andy"
2Mb 16 I bought this 386 AT second-hand in the early 90's and used to play Battle Chess on it; also Graham Cluley's excellent text adventure game Jacaranda Jim, which I never solved as I couldn't believe I had to kill the rollerskating postman to do it! (Sorry if I've given away part of the the solution there...)

Here it's running the hard-to-find Windows version 2.03.

1989 80386 "Sandy"
8Mb 33 Nicknamed "Sandy", this 33 MHz 386 was given to me by a friend recently. Here it's running Windows for Workgroups version 3.11.

1990 80486DX "Fred"
3Mb 67 "Fred" - a 486DX running here with Windows version 3.0. Fred's lost the front panel of his CD drive but otherwise works fine.

1990 80486DX "Derek"
32Mb 67 "Derek" - an incredibly well-built Nixdorf 486DX running here with Windows 95. I just can't bring myself to throw away perfectly good machines like this, even if they are obsolete.

1990 Tandy 1400 Laptop "Tom"
640k 7 "Tom" - A very early laptop computer. Currently not working but I intend to try to get it fixed. I can't figure out what the problem is with it - it was working when I first acquired it.

1990 Commodore Amiga A500+
2Mb 7 The A500+ with 2 megs of RAM and a 40 Meg hard drive bolted on to the side which also had an extra 8 megs of RAM bringing the total up to 10. No longer working unfortunately.

1990 IBM PS/1 80286 "Alf"
1Mb 10 An IBM PS/1 dating from 1990 which I picked up at a car boot sale for the princely sum of two pounds in about 2005. It has Microsoft Works hard-wired into it somehow - whatever I do I can't seem to get rid of it.

1992 Commodore Amiga A600
1Mb 7 A cut-down version of the Amiga A500+.

1992 Commodore Amiga A1200
3D Labyrinth

18Mb 50 My super-duper Amiga with 68060 processor, CD drive, zip drives, built-in micro hard drive and a total of 18 MB memory (a lot for an Amiga). Here it's running happily with my favourite screenshot of Madchen Amick from the Star Trek TNG episode The Dauphin as a background. (I thought I'd explain just in case anyone wanted to know who that incredibly gorgeous girl was!) I created a lot of the screen icons myself, including the HMV "Nipper" logo for my record collection database.

This was my main computer throughout the second half of the 90's, and was way ahead of any other PC for years. It can out-perform a Pentium I, in fact there was nothing like it until the Pentium II was introduced in the late 90's. It's such a shame that this marvellous machine was made obsolete by the PC revolution and the total domination of Intel and Microsoft which we're stuck with today (unless you're an Apple fan I suppose). The Amiga was a real hobbyists's computer, and by all rights should still be with us today. I blame Bill Gates for its demise, although Commodore should have done more to raise its status as a serious PC and not just a games machine. Anyway, here's my 3D Labyrinth game written in Hisoft BASIC, complete with sound effects.

1993 Pentium 1 "Donald"
64Mb 75 "Donald" - a 1st generation Pentium running here with Windows 98, showing Excel 97.

1999 AMD Athlon "Larry"
128M 1000 My backup PC, an AMD Athlon 1GHz PC running Windows XP Pro.

2000 512M 3200 My main workhorse PC - a Pentium 4 with dual core 3.2 GHz processor. It does the job. (Picture not uploaded yet.)

2008 Asus Eee Notebook
1Gb 900 My newest toy, a neat little notebook with 1 gig of memory and 20 gigs hard drive space, complete with wireless Internet access, webcam and loads of other goodies, and all for a fraction of the cost of my first computer (taking inflation into account). We've come a long way in 30 years.

2010 Omega
1Tb 50Ghz And finally - my dream machine! I might just about be able to make some space for it in the garden shed.

Elwood's Home Page

*Year*	*Picture*	*Software*	*Mem*	*Mhz*	*Description & comments*
1977	Tandy TRS-80	Invaders Game	16k	1.78	After seeing a Sinclair ZX80 that a friend of mine had bought in 1979, I was determined to get a computer of my own. This was right at the start of the home computer explosion, and there wasn't much around at the time. The one I eventually chose was the model 1 level 1 TRS-80 which cost me all of Ł299 in late 1980 (I had to go one better than my friend!) It originally had a mere 4k of memory and a very simple BASIC language which I picked up very quickly, then forked out another Ł150 in April 1981 to upgrade it to level II and add an extra 12K of RAM to bring it up to 16k. (This was when I was earning about Ł25 a week!) I wrote a "Space Invaders" program on it later in the year after I had mastered level II Basic, and even managed to make sound effects for it (the Model 1 didn't have a sound chip - the sounds were produced by modifying the sound output for loading and saving programs to cassette tapes.) If you download David Keil's TRS-80 emulator for the Model 1, you can load my program as a virtual cassette tape and have hours of fun with the old blocky graphics!
1980	Sinclair ZX80		1k	3.25	This is the tiny little electronic wonder that introduced many computer enthusiasts to the joys of home computing in the UK in the early 80's. Costing just Ł100 (in kit form) and boasting an amazing ONE Kilobyte of memory (about two screens' worth), no floating point capability (integers only) and not even capable of showing any kind of movement on-screen (it had to blank the screen to re-draw the graphics), nevertheless it sold like hotcakes. Clive Sinclair has received more than his share of brickbats in his time but this was one of his greatest triumphs, and for that we should be grateful.
1980?	M4		640k	?	This amazing dinosaur was given to me as a leaving present from my programming job in 1990. It was already about 10 years old then. I can't find any information on it on the Net, but it has two 8" floppy drives and a built-in green-screen monitor (no longer working). It is technically a very early "desktop" computer. Trouble is, with one of these on your desk there's no room for anything else. I mean - just look at the size of that keyboard! The second picture shows the relative sizes of floppy discs ancient & modern. From left; 8" (128k), 5 1/4" (360k), 3 1/2" (720k), Zip (100Mb), then a 2 gig and a 4 gig memory card. So the smallest in size has 32,768 times the capacity of the largest!
1981	Sinclair ZX81		1k	3.25	An update to the ZX80, this one cost a mere Ł70, could do floating point calculations (essential really for any computer), and was capable of showing moving graphics - albeit slowly. FAST mode was used for calculation and SLOW mode for graphics. Like most of these early micros it used an ordinary TV set as a monitor, as shown here. But, hey - a computer for seventy pounds! The future started here.
1981	Tandy Color		4k	0.9	Radio Shack's successor to the TRS-80 - a 'COLOR' computer! 8 colours altogether (9 if you count black); not a great deal but still better than plain white text on a black background. 16k RAM and cut-down BASIC. Nice though.
1982	Sinclair Spectrum		16k	3.5	By 1982 the home computer craze was picking up speed, and the "must-have" gadget for that year was the Sinclair Spectrum, so naturally I just had to get one. For its price and size, it was an incredibly powerful computer in 1982, with colours and sound and a whole 16k of memory as standard. I spent many happy hours programming this thing to do all sorts of weird and wonderful things, but unfortunately none of my labours seem to have survived. The BASIC language was provided by our old friend Microsoft.
1982	BBC Model B		32k	1.8	The "standard" micro computer for the 80's, as defined by the BBC, and they should know... shouldn't they? Of course it was rapidly superceded by GUI (Graphic User Interface) machines such as the Atari and Amiga below, and even the MSX range which came out not much more than a year later. Sorry BBC, you jumped too early. It was an excellent machine for its time though, to give it credit.
1982	Commodore Vic 20		5k	1	4k RAM, 16 colours. Very popular in the early 80's.
1982	Dragon 32		32k	0.9	Note the screen boot-up display: "(c) 1982 by Microsoft". They wrote the operating systems for a lot of these early micros before developing Windows. There's just no getting away from them!
1982	Commodore 64		64k	1	.
1983	Mattel Aquarius		4k	3.5	No longer working (power supply knackered).
1984	Yamaha CX5M	Hitch Hiker Suite 1, 2, 3 Voice data .VOG	16k	3.6	Now this was more like it - a computer and a synthesiser in one instrument! I was really getting into computer programming at the same time as composing so this was a godsend. It was quite tricky to set up and manipulate, but the sounds it produced were superb. It was also the first instrument I owned which had MIDI, but like the guy who invented the telephone said, it's not much use without a second one to connect it to... (BASIC language supplied by Guess Who... yep, Microsoft again!)
1985	Atari ST		512k	8	Bought second-hand from a friend - this is a very early model ST that uses an external power supply and doesn't even have a built-in floppy disk drive.
1985	Atari ST mk.II		512k	8	This is the model with the built-in floppy drive and power supply. It was given to me from a friend in the late 90's but I never used it.
1986	Yamaha CX5M Mk.II		32k	3.6	A rare model - the mark II CX5M, with more memory and... well, not much else really. But that extra memory does help. The computer does display colours but I used a monochrome monitor here.
1986	Psion Organiser XP		16k	0.9	A smart little handheld fully programmable computer which I used a lot in the 90's. Unfortunately my original one got lost (it fell out of my pocket!) and with it went all my stored programs. Luckily I had printed most of them out so it only involved a few hours of laborious typing to program them all in to my replacement. XP version on left, LZ on right.
1987	Commodore Amiga A500		1Mb	7	By 1987 the Commodore Amiga was the computer to be seen with, so I saved up and got myself an A500. It had a mouse and something called a GUI (Graphical User Interface) which was fascinating, and a huge leap from the old command-line BASIC computers that I was used to. 512k of RAM initially.
1987	8088 PC "Adam"		640k	4	My first PC, nicknamed (appropriately enough) Adam. 640k of memory and a 20MB hard drive, with a single 5 1/4 inch floppy drive. It still works perfectly. Processor speed 4 MHz. Yes, that's Mega, not Giga! No sound (apart from an occasional beep), no graphics, just a monochrome monitor (yellow on black). No Windows, just MS-DOS version 3.3. Still, I learned C programming and dBase on it back in the early 90's.
1988	80286 "Bill"		4Mb	20	A robust 286 PC I picked up from a car boot a few years ago. I loaded it with Windows version 1.01 (very rare nowadays) which you can see running quite happily on it. Windows 1.01 should really be called "Window" (singular) as it does not support moving/overlapping windows at all! It's not much more than a simple file manager.
1989	80386 "Andy"		2Mb	16	I bought this 386 AT second-hand in the early 90's and used to play Battle Chess on it; also Graham Cluley's excellent text adventure game Jacaranda Jim, which I never solved as I couldn't believe I had to kill the rollerskating postman to do it! (Sorry if I've given away part of the the solution there...) Here it's running the hard-to-find Windows version 2.03.
1989	80386 "Sandy"		8Mb	33	Nicknamed "Sandy", this 33 MHz 386 was given to me by a friend recently. Here it's running Windows for Workgroups version 3.11.
1990	80486DX "Fred"		3Mb	67	"Fred" - a 486DX running here with Windows version 3.0. Fred's lost the front panel of his CD drive but otherwise works fine.
1990	80486DX "Derek"		32Mb	67	"Derek" - an incredibly well-built Nixdorf 486DX running here with Windows 95. I just can't bring myself to throw away perfectly good machines like this, even if they are obsolete.
1990	Tandy 1400 Laptop "Tom"		640k	7	"Tom" - A very early laptop computer. Currently not working but I intend to try to get it fixed. I can't figure out what the problem is with it - it was working when I first acquired it.
1990	Commodore Amiga A500+		2Mb	7	The A500+ with 2 megs of RAM and a 40 Meg hard drive bolted on to the side which also had an extra 8 megs of RAM bringing the total up to 10. No longer working unfortunately.
1990	IBM PS/1 80286 "Alf"		1Mb	10	An IBM PS/1 dating from 1990 which I picked up at a car boot sale for the princely sum of two pounds in about 2005. It has Microsoft Works hard-wired into it somehow - whatever I do I can't seem to get rid of it.
1992	Commodore Amiga A600		1Mb	7	A cut-down version of the Amiga A500+.
1992	Commodore Amiga A1200	3D Labyrinth	18Mb	50	My super-duper Amiga with 68060 processor, CD drive, zip drives, built-in micro hard drive and a total of 18 MB memory (a lot for an Amiga). Here it's running happily with my favourite screenshot of Madchen Amick from the Star Trek TNG episode The Dauphin as a background. (I thought I'd explain just in case anyone wanted to know who that incredibly gorgeous girl was!) I created a lot of the screen icons myself, including the HMV "Nipper" logo for my record collection database. This was my main computer throughout the second half of the 90's, and was way ahead of any other PC for years. It can out-perform a Pentium I, in fact there was nothing like it until the Pentium II was introduced in the late 90's. It's such a shame that this marvellous machine was made obsolete by the PC revolution and the total domination of Intel and Microsoft which we're stuck with today (unless you're an Apple fan I suppose). The Amiga was a real hobbyists's computer, and by all rights should still be with us today. I blame Bill Gates for its demise, although Commodore should have done more to raise its status as a serious PC and not just a games machine. Anyway, here's my 3D Labyrinth game written in Hisoft BASIC, complete with sound effects.
1993	Pentium 1 "Donald"		64Mb	75	"Donald" - a 1st generation Pentium running here with Windows 98, showing Excel 97.
1999	AMD Athlon "Larry"		128M	1000	My backup PC, an AMD Athlon 1GHz PC running Windows XP Pro.
2000			512M	3200	My main workhorse PC - a Pentium 4 with dual core 3.2 GHz processor. It does the job. (Picture not uploaded yet.)
2008	Asus Eee Notebook		1Gb	900	My newest toy, a neat little notebook with 1 gig of memory and 20 gigs hard drive space, complete with wireless Internet access, webcam and loads of other goodies, and all for a fraction of the cost of my first computer (taking inflation into account). We've come a long way in 30 years.
2010	Omega		1Tb	50Ghz	And finally - my dream machine! I might just about be able to make some space for it in the garden shed.