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by MisterTea 62 days ago
The first computer I touched was a Franklin Ace 1200 which my father bought. It had a joystick and a Sakata video monitor. The first game I remember playing is Short Circuit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FoY8iWJAgVQ. It was replaced by a Canon 8088 then by an AT&T PC6300. I don't know who my father sold it to but he kept the Sakata and it floated around until I realized you could hook a Nintendo to it. Then it became our gaming/VCR monitor. That monitor is still in my mothers basement.

Years later I'm working for a small business out on LI who never threw anything out. I got really lucky and obtained a full Franklin Ace 1200 with Sakata, Mits Altair 8800b and an IBM System 23. All in boxes. All manuals and software. Crazy. I took the whole haul home. I need to setup a museum/computer room one day.
2 comments
justin66 62 days ago
> IBM System 23

Not to discount the awesomeness of the others, but that's a real prize. Talk about a strange artifact of its time and place!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_System/23_Datamaster

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sleepybrett 62 days ago
My uncles dairy had a datamaster in a back office that they used for the books, etc. I wonder what happened that that, it's no doubt stuffed into some haybarn loft.
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ern_ave 62 days ago
8 inch floppies! wow.
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icedchai 61 days ago
My uncle had a business with an IBM minicomputer: a System/36. It was the size of a large freezer. It also used 8" floppies! It took a "magazine" of 10x 8" floppies and could swap between them. It looked like the system in the top photo here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_System/36
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justin66 62 days ago
Yeah, that's extremely cool. The wiki page had me at:

The Datamaster was IBM's only 8-bit microcomputer and one of the few to use the EBCDIC encoding.

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MisterTea 62 days ago
The machine came with a few new boxes of 8" still in the cellophane.
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technothrasher 62 days ago
I managed to score eight NeXTcubes from a small company getting rid of them one time about 1997. Similarly with all the manuals, boxes, software, etc. I wanted to share the treasure, and offered the extra to a bunch of my friends. Only I mathed wrong, and ended up promising all eight away. Oops. But at least I've still got my extremely early serial number C64.
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