Retrocomputing

A Computer Museum

Why and how?
D.retro
Bart van den Akker
<p>The HomeComputerMuseum is founded in 2018 after its initial plan in 2016. The idea of an interactive computer museum while being a social company and fully independent of subsidy. In 2020, right after a move to a bigger and more permanent location, the unsubsidized museum had to deal with corona. Against all odds, the museum survived and even grew faster than ever before, becoming world's largest museum on social media and collaborating with museums all over the world. This all with a social impact by helping people with a distance to the labor market. The museum has an unique collection which can not be found anywhere else and it only keeps on growing in impact. Currently (early 2022) being the computer heritage expert for the Dutch government.</p>
The HomeComputerMuseum opened its door on March 17, 2018 and went nearly bankrupt by the end of 2018. But we pulled through and from the beginning of 2019, we managed to turn it around. Starting with a collection of roughly 35 computers, 4 active board members, 3 volunteers and an empty building without electricity we built the museum. By the end of 2021 we have over 500 computers in the active museum and another +/- 2500 computers in storage. 1500 CD-i titles, 2203 boxed PC games, over 4000 unique software titles and over 3000 manuals. Open 7 days a week in a 1090m2 location in the city center of Helmond with 40 volunteers and 6 board members. All without big sponsors and no subsidy we are researching the history, sharing the history, recreating the history by allowing everyone to use the old computers. From the only working Aesthedes2 (which is repaired by in-house technicians) to the computer used for the movie Titanic. We do digital heritage (read old media) and offer repairs to both new and old computers. We created a functioning business model that is world renowned and ready for anything to come and we love to share what we went through and why we are considered as an essential part of the Dutch heritage.. all in less than 4 years.

Additional information

Type devroom

More sessions

2/5/22
Retrocomputing
D.retro
<p>A brief introduction to our devroom and the schedule ahead.</p>
2/5/22
Retrocomputing
Steven Goodwin
D.retro
<p>In 1982, David Horne wrote a version of chess which managed to fit inside the memory of a 1K ZX81. Although it wasn't a complete implementation, it was impressive enough to be remembered now, almost 40 years later. But running it in 2022 requires at least an emulator, ROM file, and the .P file, which limits the appeal to retro enthusiasts and excludes the intended audience - chess players!</p> <p>So, I modified the EMF emulator (and the game) to run as an emulator-as-a-service, so that it can ...
2/5/22
Retrocomputing
Stephan Hohmann
D.retro
<p>The 'serial port,' usually carrying RS-232, has once been the window to the world on capable systems. This talk is a brief history on it, its use cases and its current state. Is it still relevant? Do we still love it? Are there alternatives?</p>
2/5/22
Retrocomputing
Sergey Panarin
D.retro
<p>Operating system of Apple-1 written by Steve Wozniak is an engineering piece of art – 256 bytes only! We will explain how it works using the original 6502 assembler source code along with our own rewritten in Python version so every software engineer could understand how It works. It should be useful for engineers who want to know basics of operating systems.</p>
2/5/22
Retrocomputing
Christophe Ponsard
D.retro
<p>The history of calculation, information processing and computation is very rich. It is driving the industrial revolution and digital transformation of our world. This history is composed of many events related to conceptual and technological breakthroughs. In order to help in the analysis (by researchers) and explanation (to citizens), the NAM-IP Computer Museum is actively developing the "Trajectware" Open Source framework based on a the structuration of illustrated events in the form of ...
2/5/22
Retrocomputing
Maurits Fennis
D.retro
<p>The lecture will discuss reverse engineering e-waste. It will shortly present the open source hardware tools that are used internally at Unbinare and how these are used when the aim is to reduce e-waste.</p>
2/5/22
Retrocomputing
Carsten Strotmann
D.retro
<p>Sometimes good working hardware is obsoleted by missing update support for the operating systems. Using outdated networking software from these systems on today's Internet is a security risk (to the user and the Internet as a whole), and old software might fail altogether (old SSH clients can't connect to modern SSH server, Webbrowser can't load websites using modern transport encryption, TLS).</p> <p>pkgsrc is a cross-platform package manager maintained by the NetBSD project. With pkgsrc, it ...