Apple II & Unitron Clone

The computer that launches Apple to the fame was the famous now  apple II,  I'm not going to start here talking about this computer or company , mostly because there are a lot places in internet where you can find information about the model.

Those computers wheren't so frequents in the South of Spain because there were too expensive compared with the Sinclair/Amstrad and similar computers that most of the young people started in computers.

I was lucky to receive two computes when I started to collect old computers, full with floppy drive unit, extension cards (including a serial card and modem) and a lot of programs, I will try to boot again both computers soon, but first I need to find a old TV to connect the machines.

Both computers seems to work, at least the keyboard light works when both computers powers on , but I still need to test them again.

One of the curious thing is that one of the computers is not named "Apple", but it is branded "unitron",  but as you can see from the pictures both of them are equal, and in fact the floppy drives, extension card and so on are compatible.

Looking at http://www.museo8bits.com/unitronap.htm it seems that the unitron where clones made in Brazil, so it's interesting how the computers come to Spain.

Macintosh Portable

In the last year of the 8x, Apple had a good customer base, and they have successfully moved from the Apple II series to the original Mac, so it  was time to  think in the executive people that were moving from some place to other, so they launched their first "Portable" computer.


This "ancestor" of the Ipad weight about 7Kg, so it was not  usual to see people using it in the airports to read their  emails ;-) (FaceBook was not invented so people don't use this computer to updade their profile ;-)

Internally this Mac has a lead-acid battery , that unfortunately in this model is not woking...

But we are looking for a replacement, it would be nice to see which documents and presentations has this Mac inside ;-)

Philips P3105

This was the third computer that I got , after the beloved Sinclair Spectrum and a CASIO FX-750 calculator with a BASIC interpreter. It was bought in Summer of 1989 , and it was a big jump , compared with the old spectrum , not only in size, but also in the use of disk and the hard disk
(20 Mbytes).

The CPU was an intel 8088 , that can run at the "normal" (4.x Mz) and "fast" (8.xMz,) speed , and has a program to change the the speed internally , the 3.5 drive (720 Kb) where added the same
year, and it was an "high density" drive, but the floppy controller only support the double density
(720kb).

The monitor was monocrome (orange one), with a mixed CGA/Hercules card and an amazing memory of 768 Kb, (640Kb of normal RAM used by MS-DOS and another 128Kb that only with MS-DOS 5.0 and the special software "Qemm" where possible to use for driver.

The Operating System was old MS-DOS 3.30 ,and also in the following years I upgraded the machine to other Operating Systems up to MS-DOS 6.2 , installed the "stacker driver", (to duplicate the hard disk space), and played a lot with it.

I remember also to play with the minix 1.x operating systems (booting from the 360Kb disk drive) and also booting the MS DOS 1.1 , that don't provide the "subdirectory feature (it was mostly a clone of the CPM operating system, other software that runs in this machine was the microsoft windows (from 1.x to 3.11), the GEM Desktop (digital research clone of MacOS graphical environment) and so on.

Macintosh SE 1/20

This was one of the first apple machine that I saw when I was at the University, this little "portable" machine was used mainly for the University staff (students only got access to normal 8086 Olivetti computers and some i386-sx machines, and when they discarded the machine I could manage to get it.


The handle on the top allow to carry the machine from some place to another very easily and as you can see it has the normal SCSI and sound connectors.

The machine still boots , with a old operating system (I don't think it can be upgraded to any other version ). the CPU is the old 68000 , without the 32bits extensions and so on, so obviously no "MacOS X" inside.


Amazingly Microsoft word 5.0 from 1992 can run on in and the visual aspect is more or less similar to the modern Microsoft programs, so perhaps "Word processors" are the most stable software in modern computers.

Sun Ultra1

This computer was adquired about 1995 , and ceased to work about 2004 , it was one of the first machines with a 64 bit sparc CPU . The machine have only 64Mb of RAM , not so much now but enought for a small server (HTTP, SMPT/pop3, FTP) that can also used as personal workstation.

The machine has two internal hard disks and a cdrom , and was updated with an external/low cost SCSI disk to accomodate the "/home" of the users.

The mouse was an optical one, typical of Sun, but not usual for normal Pc users, and the mouse pad was required in order to work with it.

The operating system was solaris 7, unfortunately the system disk is broken so we are waiting for some folk to provide us with a new one .

HP9000 model 850

This is a old machine (it's still running a old HP-UX 6.X operating system) that was used for a long time as laboraty system for C programming and also as central mail server for the computer department.

The machine was shutdown in 1999, after detecting that the operating system was not Y2K compatible, and there were no patch for it ;-), the operating system was from 1988, so it was a long time running.

The operating system lacks of all the Gnu commodities and modern system commodities (no bash, no color ls , user password in the /etc/password file, etc), etc and obsviusly few "normal" init daemons, and was configured to use TCP/IP and X.25 network.

The system is still capable of running (it's currenlty shutdown due to the energy problems in the room ;-), and after changing the password (nice password recovery help in google) I was able to setup a network and connect using telnet to the system.

The first module in the top is the tape unit (sorry , We don't have any tape to test) , the second is the CPU itself and the last one is the Hard disk unit, a lot of noise but they still boot, also we have the monocrome orange terminal that was used for connection to the system.

We are looking for a "modern" HP-UX (at least Y2K compatible) that could be installed in the system, and if possible a spare hard disk to not delete the original HP-UX 6.X operating system (it's a relic by itself ;-).