Met old Stuart at MCM last weekend. The queue for him was enormous.. and it was purely because he was talking to everyone in it for bloody ages. And he's lovely in reality too. And despite looking sweaty and knackered, because he presumably was after meeting people for like 20 hours over three days, he seemed genuinely really interested in talking to every one of his fans. Absolutely top top bloke.

So. Box one, mystery black box of wires appears to be magnetic core memory, little tiny magnets laced (by hand) on really fine wire. For years this was the best computer memory you could get; it was also non-volatile because the little magnets kept their polarization. One wire to magnetize the core one way or the other for one or zero, and another to sense one or zero. Simple. Hard as fuck to make, now it could probably be made by machine but there's no call for it anymore. Texas Instruments speech synthesizer is for the TI99/4A computer which was a really neat machine with a whole host of capabilities like, well, speech synthesis. The thing was hugely expandable; you could get an expansion chassis for it and both fixed and removable disk drives, a mouse, etc. They also had a cartridge port and could run programs that way, usually games of varying merit. They were never very successful, though.

I feel like this "computing history archive" could really just be the back room of your house.

I absolutely love these archive box videos. They're kind of like loot crate videos that I actually give a shit about. Thanks for the upload Ashens.

It must be fun to know all these things and what they do.

More Ashens is Confused at Outdated Technology seasons 1-12, please.

It's 2am I have school in the morning Oh look an Ashens video!

But it WAS a quantum leap, in that it was practically the shortest leap possible.

So this is basically a giant advertisement for the Centre for Computing History. And I still legitimately find it fascinating.

The weird device is a PARCtab. It was unveiled in 1988 and labeled as "ubiquitous computing" by parc(part of xerox)to demonstrate what they though how people would interact with their handheld devices in the future. It is often considered a precursor to the more popular PDA handheld device. There wasn't enough mainstream appeal at the time to sell it so it was for the most part confined to the status of being used as research testbeds.

Thanks for another video from this awesome place. we have been for a day out to the museum and it was brilliant .the staff are really friendly and helpful and my two autistic children had a lovely time playing on all the computers and consoles . my oldest son was in heaven as he is a massive fan of retro gaming and your channel.

I really wanna go digging through that archive. I'd spend all day going "I remember that!" and then putting the thing back.

These are slowly becoming my favorite Ashens videos

i love how Ashens makes this really interesting i dont think i could stomach this if this was a video by anyone else.

You just made my boyfriend's day with your discovery of that TI-99/4A Speech Synthesizer; his family had it and the computer that it went to, and he played so many games on there, even did minor programming on it as young as 3 years old (a prodigy, he), so that dragged him down memory lane by the ear. Congrats, man.

This really has become my favorite series, which is bittersweet because I know it can't last forever. Someone find this man some more boxes of old obscure electronics!

DK Tronics keyboards were used on the ZX81 as well as the ZX Spectrum. This is why they keyboard has stickers as the layout was different.

Wish I could get there, Stuart, melad. Got this rather large bit of water in between me and said destination.

My dad's friend gave us an old commedore 64 when I was around 6 (I'm now 30, so it was already an old computer then). I basically compare every keyboard now to the Commedore 64 keyboard. It was so satisfying to use. I played the lemonade stand game like nobody's business with that keyboard.

Clint Basinger would love this.

Only Ashens could make me laugh with a video like this. "Whispering about cheeses...."

I had a plus d interface from mgt, it was a disc/printer interface for the spectrum. Pressing the button would allow you to dump save game states to disc or tape. Quite an interesting bit of kit.

XEROX PARC. Shame we don't know what the device was. For those of you non computer geeks in the audience, PARC stood for Palo Alto Research Center, XEROX's Research Center in, well Palo Alto, where they developed magical space wizard technology, like OO, and what was essentially the modern desktop computer, graphics and all. They probably could've gotten rich off of it, but they didn't know what they were doing, and decided to stick with copy machines.

seems like such a cool area to visit. reminds me of something i'd see in my grandpas closet

Heh I remember back about 12 or 13 years ago trying to run Half Life 2 on my crappy computer with a 900mhz AMD Thunderbird and a Voodoo Banshee for graphics. The game ran at a blazing 12fps. I was so determined that I still played it, regardless of how shitty it ran.

If I ever manage to make a trip to the UK I will definitely be visiting this museum.

4:29 There's a local store that has a big crate of older ISA modems. Micro Genius is a famiclone, by the way. It's actually pretty good if I recall. 6:05 Looks like something that would've come out of a Xerox Alto. 6:32 Speak of the devil. 7:42 Philips CDi inspiration much? 8:58 The TI99/4 had a speech synthesizer if I recall. A KZfaq user called bd594 has one of these, I believe. 10:20 I could use a card like this for my G3. 13:20 Elite was a good game as well. Gotta love the ingenuity of people in the late 80s early 90s compared to now. 16:47 Is that the Frieden mechanical calculator CuriousMarc fixed for the computing museum?

I had a BBC acorn electron, it was my first PC. Many hours spent playing hopper. Good times!

the handheld device is called The PARCTab, it were a prototype for a early PDF like thing under their "ubiquitous computing vision" to show people their vision of the future. it was showed off with the PARCPad that was pretty much the same but book sized and featured a "touch screen"

We did actually have the Amstrad 8256 or a close relative in the US. As I recall, the Sears department store sold them. I never saw one in the wild, or heard of anyone buying one, but I saw them in many stores at the time.

I spent HOURS on that stupid pool game as a kid. I had completely forgotten it until i saw him pull it out of the box. Memories. This is why Ashens is the best channel.

This is probably my favorite ashens series to date

love your videos on old tech like this, it's like a window showing the times of yesteryear. bravo

Plrase do more of these, easily my favourite series on the channel!

I still have my old ZX Spectrum in the DKTronics keyboard with a 16K memory expansion and the Micro Drive. Them were the days

Good old Hurricane Higgins. He was my favourite player when I was a kid.

I had a dktronics keyboard for my Spectrum 48K in 1985. The duplicate higher cutouts at the back are so you can fit an Interface 1 underneath inside as well. The sticky labels on the keys were prone to twisting and coming off!

Good job, Ashens! You guessed correctly on the concave/convex option! (All teasing aside, that's how I always remembered it, personally-- conCAVE, being dipped-in, like a geologic cave. Convex, by process of elimination, being the one that bulges out.)

I LOVE these computer history videos. they are some of my favorites.

I was there when he was recording thees. I heard the staff say to eachother: 'Is ash still recording upstairs?" I asked them who's ash and they explained ashens.

At lot of this stuff is waaaaay before my time but it's really great to be able to see the history of British computing and gaming. I'm gonna make it a point to go to that museum one day.

in the iMac 3dfx box - the card with the sodimm socket is an iMac CPU daughter card. That generation of iMac had an expansion slot - the next generation did not. But it did have a Radeon which helped. Since the CPU board was socketed, it meant you could upgrade that too.

The black dome at 2.50 is a Sinclair QL add on. It looks like the extra RAM module. Probably 512K

The Xerox three-button thing is a Xerox PARCtab. One of the earliest examples of a PDA, and definitely one of the first of its kind with wireless networking. That black half-globe is actually the infrared wireless network interface.

Haha. As soon as he said "Texas Instruments" I thought "I'll bet it's the speech synth!". Those things were good fun. I think most people who had a TI had that module. I don't remember why the front flipped open like that. Maybe I never knew. I still distinctly remember the strange way it said "Excellent Shot, Commander" in the game "Moon Mine".

This might be my favorite series ashens does

I have a PCW and I didn't know that test device existed. The board with slots and and switches is a VIC-20 multiple cartridge device. The Dragon 32 joysticks were analogue. The speech synthesiser is for the TI99/4A. The Plus D is a Spectrum disc interface. I have an Acetronic, which has a Radofin board in it.

I found a fully working Amstrad PCW 8512 being thrown away in Canada while I was living there. I rescued it and played around with CP/M for a while until I was able to afford a PC. So yeah, they had made it over to Canada at least :)

I hope these never end. They're so fascinating.

These are honestly some of your best videos to date and I've been watching you so long we actually had a brief KZfaq message conversation concerning the Airphone 4.

I had an Acorn Electron.and so did my then best friend (we used them to help with Computer Studies because the programming language was BBC Basic, the same as the BBC Model B systems at school). I can confirm that they did not come with turbo switches or sound jacks.

I got quite excited when you uncovered the Hurricane there.

These are easily my favorite videos because I am massively interested in retro technology and own quite a few retro gaming consoles and personal computers

The TI Speech Synth is for the TI-99/4A. It uses the same chip as a Speak and Spell. It's extremely fun to program.

I remember playing Lemmings on an Acorn computer in school in the early 90's.

I like how he says "It whispers to me about the cheeses of the world" it's a nod back to his 10th anniversary special where he says youtube was a mouse in space that beamed down visions of the all the cheeses in the world.

Well I finally got to go to the Centre for Computing History, mentioned your channel too! That place is truly amazing. They have a Sega Mega-Tech!! The 50hz CRTs were painful to look at at first, took a little while to get used to them again. Enjoyed playing with the Amstrad Mega PC, Acorn Archimedes machines, NES, Famicom (which sadly was not playable, had that as a kid not the NES) Dreamcast with Sonic Adventure, Dragon32, Commodore VIC20 and 64 and the Mastersystem. Played around with BASIC on the Apple II and fombled the Amiga 500. They also have a replica of a 1970s office and some very large computers. Sadly couldn't find a Virtual Boy or Sega CDX. The guy told us they have plans to completely change the foyer area and put something called a 'Mega Processor' in there but that's all he knew. We are going there again!

Dr. Ashen... Loved this video. With that in mind, PLEASE more of this! old computer stuff is why I'm subscribed!

me and my brother actually bought a massive collection (around 20 big boxes) of stuff like this 15 years ago for £80 and split it between us, ive been selling a lot of it on ebay recently and already topped a £700 return & still got a fair bit left, my favorite piece's that ive kept for myself is a commodore amiga 600 and a 128k zx spectrum with a few hundred games!

The item in the playmobil bag at 5:50 looks like Magnetic-core memory! A very early computer RAM chip from the 1950s, used until the mid 70s

The DKtronics keyboard did house the Spectrum motherboard. If I remember correctly, the second set of holes was to allow an Interface 1 to also be included.

That Plus-D unit looks like something I had for my Spectrum +2A. It connected to the expansion port on the rear and hooked up a 3.5" disk drive (only took the 720Kb disks if memory served). When you hit the red button, it flashed the entire memory onto the disk, so you could avoid having to load the game off the tape next time you wanted to play it. You just had to remember to press a key on the keyboard to tell the machine if it was a 48k game or a 128k game.

Oooh! I have a Ti-99/4a right here that I still use every once in a while! Extremely underrated classic computer! Would love that speech synthesizer at 8:55

The song that plays during the montage of the computer museum at the end of these videos always reminds me of Tubba Blubba's theme from Paper Mario for the first few bars...

Seeing that Amstrad testing PCB...man we've come a long way in such a short time.

My ZX Spectrum back in the day had one of those DKTronics keyboard on it instead of the rubber keys. As far as I recall the spectrum motherboard went inside it and everything lined up ok on the back. Mine looked a little different to that one.

I like that matey isn't even hitting a cue ball, he's just going straight for the red.

I love these archive videos. It's a fantastic bit of intellectual improv on your part and I'm always left wanting more. Were I in the UK I would definitely go to this museum.

I love these, they remind me of the older Ashens videos

Just when I'm getting sleepy, here's a legit reason to procrastinate on even going to bed!

Love the longer videos!

The 'big mass of wires' is Core Memory. A type of magnetic memory used by very early computers.

I don't think I've ever watched this channel while not toasted out of my mind

Ashens, that Voodoo card was for the original iMac, it goes in the mezzanine slot.

The thing in the playmobil bag was a RAM module for a 60s era mainframe computer

Every time I see these videos I wish I could hop a plane to the UK and spend the entire trip here! So many retro electronic goodies, it'd be like a dream!

6:29 is called a Xerox PARCtab at old times that was used as an office handheld tablet or something that has a bunch of applications supposed to "help you" with your daily office work, and the screen is indeed a capacitive touch one xD

Fantastic stuff Ashens.I hope there will be another one soon.

That Xerox PARC thingy... I believe PARC stands for Palo Alto Research Center, as in the place where Steve Jobs got the ideas for the Apple Lisa and the Macintosh. That thingy just after the Sam Coupé interface is a +D disk interface for the Spectrum, the successor to the Disciple disk interface for the Speccy.

The 3 button xerox parc device in the 2nd box was a PDA, it had a stylus.

I've been really enjoying this series of videos!

I really want to visit this place if I ever find myself in the UK.

Old computers always kind of amaze me because at the time I was born there were a number of different operating systems but the Big Three of DOS, Linux, and Macintosh had already been established. It was only later I learned that Amiga was still going strong at the time. It seems like a lot of old computers tended to have proprietary operating systems, which I guess is why they ultimately failed when general-purpose OSes like the Big Three were released.

I had that very same dktronics keyboard for my 48k spectrum, ah what memories! And you put the spectrum inside (minus its rubber keyboard) btw. I then lost my rubber keyed case and eventually lost the dktronics one too, it could even be that very one!

I had the Amstrad PCW when I started uni in 92, a pressie from my dear old step-dad. Did what it said on the tin...

I get so excited when Ashens uploads I sound like that screaming goat vine

Lol any one else been around with me since the 2008 beginning? I got my first psp and was looking up reviews and bam i found the op station and its never been the same since. Im quite happy he got his big break.

I would absolutely love to visit this place. Sadly, I am on the other side of the Atlantic.

i bloody love these videos

I had one of those pool games in the early 80s, so I'm guessing that the one in the museum was re-branded for the UK. The marks on the cushions are diamond-shaped, and I think snooker tables use round marks.

I visited with my wife a couple of weeks ago, hoped I would get to see the boxes... :)

One of the upsides of my Dad having worked for TI for 15 years, and now Raytheon (at the same facility) for another almost 20 is that we have a few surplus TI 99/4A computers, and many accessories including an entire expansion system, a speech synthisizer, a modem, and quite a few games and programs. Of course, we hardly used any of it at all at all because I was 5 when we got it, and it takes a comically long table (the likes of which Bruce Wayne keeps in his dining room) to set it up on. Also, by the time I was interested at all in computers it was the mid 90s, and all that stuff was horribly outdated. I've thought about trying to dig it all out of the garage and figure out how to use it just for a laugh, but I can't even remember how to use DOS anymore, let alone whatever language the /4a's used.

I love it when I see a new Ashens video!

+Ashens I would love to visit there... But there is a major problem... I WOULD NEVER BLOODY LEAVE!!!!! THAT'S HEAVEN TO ME!!!!!

I bought a SAM Coupe in my last year at high school (I'm now 42) along with Defenders of the Earth on disk and I remember that I had to put some specific command in before I could load the disk as it seemed to be a very early form of DoS. Not sure if it ever got sorted...I sold mine a couple of years ago for about £250 to someone in Italy on eBay...

Nice. A Micro Genius IQ-501. I found one of those a few months back for $5 Canadian at a local thrift store with both controllers. Very cool Famicom clone. They mostly sold them most often in regions where Nintendo didn't set up shop, so for example, in soviet russia they had the micro genius labelled as the Dendy. As far as Famiclones go, they're top quality. They'll play any famicom cartridge as they're pin compatible. Even Castlevania 3 should work. I like the design of the thing, feels almost like a tape cassette deck.

It's hard to see but the mass of wires on 5:54 is probably a ferrite RAM unit. It used tiny magnetic rings on wires to store data before modern RAM chips.

ashens, i love these boxes. please keep doing them

Damnnn i want to visit that museum one day...

You're correct about concave and that's the same reasoning I use to remember which is which!