4.9.12

Oldenburg Computer Museum

So We-Myself and Neff- dropped the girls at the Botanical Garden and then headed off to the OCM. Which is a small but rather good 'hands on' museum of micro and home computers from the 70's onwards....or, in other words, "Heaven" for sad old men like me.


First thing we saw on entering was a ZX81 and I even managed to write a simple 3 line program in BASIC from memory

10 PRINT "HELLO WORLD"
20 CLS
30 GOTO 10
RUN


Told Neff all about the ZX81, how my own Dad had bought one, how we thought it was the DAWN OF A NEW AGE, how much the bloody thing cost my Dad even second hand and how fucking hopeless the keyboard was. Try explaining to a modern  12 year old how earth shatteringly exciting just the idea of a 16k RAM expansion pack was....after you've first explained to him what a 'k' is...

1k NEFF




THEN he kicked my arse with a quick round of 2 Player Bomber Man on a 'later' AMIGA.

In general it was amazing how quickly Neff adapted to 20 year old computing technology. It was obvious that he had been brought up in a world built of keyboards and mice, of touchscreens and www's. A lot of the time he was telling me what key I needed to press.




the first laptop.



I got chatting with the Curator-kindred Spirit/Fellow Sufferer/Brother in Affliction. He wants all my old stuff-they are desperate for anything from the "Silicon Fen" era of GB 8 bitness etc...Acorn, Dragon, BBC etc. The museum will even pay postage if it costs me too much. So I shall be emptying one or two of my cupboards when I return. Told him I had recently turned down a transit full of old Acornness and he almost burst into tears when I told him it all had been allowed to get wet and was then scrapped.