Why do a site about Antique Junk?

Back in the "good old days", when most of us hackers only had Commodore 64's or Atari 1200's, we dreamed of having high-end workstations. These were the coolest of the cool - some even had Graphical Interfaces, but even if they didn't, they had networking - and a connection to other systems. Often, we'd find a dial-up for a university or corporation, and with our pathetic 300 baud modems, connect to a system and see on the screen:

And we'd be in heaven! We're hacking a UNIX machine! (although, we encountered more VMS machines in those days). I'd fantasize about one day owning one of these mysterious boxes that actually ran UNIX or VMS. Back then, I'd never even seen that type of computer in real-life, all I'd ever known was my C64 and what you could find for sale in an issue of BYTE magazine. Popular Science showed huge boxes (mainframes), and I could only imagine what these things were.

All these machines, in fact, anything higher-end than a home machine was "Elyte". Elite was spelled many ways through the popular BBS's of the time, but the most common replaced the "i" with the "y". This was probably done because most people on BBS's couldn't spell to save their lives (I still can't spell!) - hey, we were all 13 years old at the time! Some other spellings include 3LyT3, eLyTe, etc., etc. And hey, if you had a 1200 baud modem back then, you were "K-Rad Elyte" and could get those "0-0day Warez", and post 'em!

Even later, as I grew into using PC's and Macs, there were always higher-end machines such as Silicon Graphics computers or the infamous NeXT (who could resist an all-black computer - so stylish, they were often used as props in Music Videos), I was always feeling that the really "cool" computers were just beyond my reach. With an initial pricetag of over $40,000, a UNIX workstation was not an easy purchase for the average working guy. Now that the "Wintel PC" has pretty much taken over the world, these older machines which once cost a fortune are now available for less than $500 in some cases. So, I've set out to obtain and preserve as many as I can, and put out as much information here as possible.

About Me:

Here's a recent photo of me when I appeared in a local newspaper. As you can see, I'm your average hacker/geek tech-head with a definite love of computer hardware.

I like all types of computers and equipment, though I'm partial to older systems and "big boxes". Even recent "workgroup servers" from Compaq that are wider and taller than the average PC are interesting to me simply because they aren't generic PC boxes. As you can tell, I've already seen plenty of those.

Even as a kid, I've always described myself as someone who'd "Put a computer into a rolltop desk" or own a "Digital Sundial", meaning that I have an appreciation for the antique, yet I'm fascinated by high-tech.

I'm more into the unusual stuff - the stuff that I have to explain to someone how it works, or how such-and-such a system, for it's time, was light years ahead of others.

The old 8-bit machines have a charm to them - and the Apple IIe is still the fastest machine I own - nothing boots up faster or loads an app faster - I'll have it go head-to-head with any Pentium III for boot-speed!

Anyhow, that's me. Here's a more recent image -- of me hard at work at Vanguard Media (http://www.vm.com).

Personal Links

Computer Inventory - Many people ask how many machines I own. I will attempt to list them all.

Volkswagon Vanagon - My other obsession, the "hacker-mobile".

In-Progress Links - Stuff I'm trying to organize.