Bluemeanie's Retro Computing

I always was fascinated by computer tape drives. Ultimately by those huge open-reel systems you see spinning in about every movie scene from the 60s to the 80s that takes place in a computer centre. Having learnt about the mechanics of those monsters (vacuum columns, reel servos, etc.), they are even more amazing. I am almost absolutely sure that someday, I will have one of those things standing in my living room. For now, my late 70s Telefunken M15A professional audio recorder comes close (53kg without the matching stand), but it isn't a computer drive. Although, I planned to have it under computer control (MIDI) for some time... ✇ I recently bought a 2001 Hewlett-Packard C6364A external SCSI tape drive. Why? I can't really tell. Maybe because it was only ten bucks, and it's a computer tape drive, a very small one. DDS type backup systems were common in the 90s and early 2000s. The medium is the same form factor as a DAT tape but uses a different formula and evidently t...

Last week I finally got my RGB monitor out of storage and now I can enjoy the nice colours the IIgs can produce. The picture is sharp and text is very legible and not as blocky as on emulators or LCDs. I realize that it may seem blasphemous to use a Commodore monitor on a IIgs, but the 1084S is one of the most versatile CRTs ever produced. It offers Composite, S-Video, analogue RGB and digital RGB. That means I can use it with every computer or console that outputs a PAL or 15kHz type signal. The monitor itself is from 1987, so it matches my 1987 IIgs perfectly. I will give it a good cleanup and change all capacitors, so that I can enjoy it for another 30 years. The second item I'd like to share is a 400k external disk drive for the original Macintosh. The drive is dated May 1984 as you can see in the second picture. I got it for "free" when I bought an Apple 3.5 800k drive for use on my IIgs. Unfortunately neither my IIgs nor my Mac Classic support this drive...