The Archive of Retrocomputing at Kingston University - 21st-28th August

Hi all,

A gratuitous plug for an event I'm involved in at my day job. We've done computing history events before - there was one last February, Creating the Everything Device - and we do outreach events and pop-up exhibitions at university open days, but this will be the first time we put out pretty much everything we've got at one exhibition.

My interest is really that period when (I suspect) most of us were growing up - the early 80s, that period of time where computers really made the transition from being something you found in libraries and big companies and started appearing in people's homes, in kids' bedrooms. Today we don't separate the idea of a "home" computer from regular computers, but those home computers of our youth, those Spectrums, the Commodores and Ataris we had as kids, really were the first "personal computers" in a literal sense - they were the first computers that everyday people had a literally personal connection to.

So this event will be the biggest we've ever done - 60+ machines, all up and running (subject to them holding up for 8 days!), mainly focusing on home microcomputers and games consoles of the late 70s through to the early 90s. The Syntax Era, if you will (geddit? ). It's a British event in the UK, so naturally we've got Sinclairs of every stripe, Commodores, Ataris etc. Apple were not mega-popular in the UK until the Macintosh era, but I will have the Apple //e you guys got running representing on your behalf. If I can get the thing running over the next week there's also an ITT2020, too. There will be some unicorns, the hard to find machines, like the Commodore MAX. Some of my favourites are those glorious firefly machines made by small companies with a dream and some brilliant engineers, but that lasted about ten seconds on the market. The British market was absolutely full of them. Machines like the Enterprise, the Memotech MTX, the SAM Coupe, with bullish slogans like "with obsolescence built out". Oh, and a plethora of games consoles from the early 8-bit and 16-bit eras.

Were I a KU corporate shill, I'd also say something like we'll be hosting the event out of KU's iconic Town House building, which has won numerous architectural awards including the EU Prize for Contemporary Architecture and the "coveted" RIBA Stirling Prize for the UK's best new building. But I'm not a KU corporate shill so I won't say that 

Now I know there's probably not many Brits on here. But if you are a Brit who is within a train ride of Kingston around the end of August, or you're interested enough to make a special journey to come and see us, we'd love to see you. I think there will almost certainly be SOMETHING there you won't have seen before, at least up-close and in the flesh - and if you do come along and find there's not something you've never been hands on with before, I'd love to compare notes with you!

Naturally I've attached a gratuitous load of pictures at the bottom, but you can find out more - and there are more pictures - at https://www.arcatku.org. We're in our infancy, but we're looking to grow this as an actual retrocomputing group operating out of KU in a more formal sense. There's a lot of support within KU for this event and other outreach activities like this, events that bring in people from the community and further afield, so I think that any collaboration ideas would very much be something of an open door!