Week off - home/office rejig. Retro man cave creation
So, I finally managed to take a week off... no work stuff was done during this time period (at all). Very hard to resist, but I forced the scenario. How? Well, I took a photo of my home/office work desk area, attempting to fix two old PCs and get the netgear pci cards to work (I failed). How did this prevent me from doing work/work? Well, here is the photo in question:
....and when I looked at it I realised I had subconsciously made a "Sam cave" (rewind many years ago to a nice old gentleman who I once knew, ex-marconi, fixer of PCs, loved drinking guinness / whiskey, wore sandles all year around, bearded, pot belly, coded in C - the stereotype before the stereotype was made cool - he had a home/office that had a desk and his chair in the center, everything else was stacked around him. There was only his chair, that, I'd like to believe is so that you could enter the room, stand near the door, but not get too comfy or outstay your 10 minute welcome, anyway, great guy, helped me loads back in the late 90s / early 00s. R.I.P.), so how does this stop me doing work/work on my week off? Well... I decided to empty the entire room, into 2 other rooms, sort through a lot of stuff, put some items in the loft(s) and modify the layout so that I can actually use the space properly. It had just kind of evolved before. By removing all the items, it meant that I had no work laptop within easy reach :-)
In the event of putting stuff back into the room, I decided to change the layout and have a big central space and make sure that the 2 chairs could actually be used - in fact, have 2 distinct desk areas. One for doing work/work on and one for doing non-work stuff on. I did look at buying new desks etc...but then saw the prices, wow! that wood shortage has caused prices to sky-rocket! I would be looking at spending around £800-£1000 just to replace what I already had. Okay, the existing desks are a bit bent out of shape (they are 10-12 years old), the have some "patina", but they'll do...besides that sort of money can buy lots of nice retro hardware.
Okay, so you may not think there is much difference between the above photo and the following - but there seriously is. What you cannot really appreciate from this perspective is the size difference, the mental space in the room now. Yes, there are more things up in the air, in fact there appears to be more things in general - but they are all plugged in and they all work too. Also, to give a little perspective, in the photo below (take on my very poor Huawei phone that has a pi$$ poor camera), that flamed motorbike you see at the top is from a PlayStation 2 game and is showing on a 32" LCD TV screen
I also decided to make a bit more of a display / show of the hardware that I've accumulated over the years. Previously, I had the IBM PC 110 devices just tucked under where my Mac laptop sat, they were within arms reach, but they were just out of sight. So now, I've decided to put them out on display - I have 5 of them (google them or search on eBay, they sell for around $1700 even with a broken LCD screen!) - This also forces me to remember that a very nice man called Kevin has sent me a prototype adapter to plug in a new screen into one of my spare devices, I have the adapter for a few months now, but done nothing with it - I will now have a reminder and more importantly the space to do the fiddly work!
You may ask, "Why are these PC 110 devices so great?", well... they are a beefy 486 PC that can run a whole variety of Operating Systems, all from Compact Flash cards - NO MOVING PARTS! awesome.
Here's a few photo images of the layout / content (from my halfway decent Samsung S6 phone that I found whilst emptying the room!)
To get the real perspective, I'll have to make a VIDEO, but I'll hold back on that until I've got everything laid out and sorted out as I actually like it. For instance, I have the DOS PCs just to my right, above the Atari ST 1040F, which is connected to the TV further to the right, which I'm not sure is the right place - also the Amiga 500+ is using the original Philips monitor that has a refresh rate to screw your eyeballs up with, so I might change that.
I'll also do a section by section breakdown of each "area" - there is a LOT going on, see if you can spot them all (apologies for the darkness, should really take photos at night when the super bright LED light is on):
ATARI ST 520FM with 4MB RAM and UltraSatan HDD
ATARI ST 1040F with 40MB NEC Slimline HDD
AMIGA A500+ with 20MB HDD (and I believe a 2MB RAM upgrade)
ELONEX miniPC - Pentium MMX 32MB RAM 2x2GB HDD
IBM NetVista PC - Pentium 4 64MB RAM 2GB CFCard HDD (very unique)
DELL Optiplex Gn+ PC - Pentium MMX 64MB RAM 4GB HDD
Iomega 100MB Zip drive x 2 (work great and used between ALL machines)
SINCLAIR ZX Spectrum+
PANASONIC CF-29 Toughbook
TOSHIBA Satellite Pro 4300 series laptop (my old AvantGo laptop)
DELL Inspiron 1501 laptops x 2
COMPAQ Contura Aero 4/330
SONY Vaio PCG-C1XN x 2
ATARI Portfolio + Parallel connector
HP 200LX 1MB RAM / HP 200LX 2MB RAM
OpenPandora - Worlds smallest Linux PC x 2
SONY AIBO ERS-111
SONY PlayStation 1 (my original from 1995)
SONY Yaroze PS1 Development software (and hardware)
SONY PSOne with 5" screen x 2
SONY PlayStation 2 (my original from 1998)
Microsoft XBox 360 (my original from 2012-ish)
SONY PSP-1000 Black
SONY PSP-1003 Black
SONY PSP-2003 Black
SONY PSP-2003 White
Nintendo GAMEBOY transparent (my original since 1996)
IBM PC 110 Palmtop - fully working screen + 20MB RAM
IBM PC 110 Palmtop x 4 (various RAM specs, all have broken LCDs - 1 will get fixed soon!)
IBM PC 110 Palmtop CDROM-Drive PCMCIA x 2
IBM PC 110 Palmtop Docking Station x 4
IBM PC 110 Palmtop 3.5" Floppy Drive
IBM WordPad z50 Laptop (Windows CE)
Gateway 2000 486 laptop (super rare) + 2x3.5" Floppy Drive
APPLE Macbook G4(?)
FUJITSU Stylistic 3500 Tablet (Windows 2000)
COMPAQ iPAQ Pocket PC 3760 / 3970 (my originals since 2002))
PALM Vx PDA (my original since 2002)
PALM m105 PDA
HANDSPRING Treo PDA (Colour+SIM - very rare, my original since 2002)
SONY Walkman Cassette player WM-EX180
SONY CD-MD Sound System (my original since 1998)
SONY Net MD MZ-N910 Player (my original since 2003)
PICADE (Raspberry Pi 3 arcade machine)
WALTHAM 5" TV-Radio-Cassette recorder with a SONY PSOne plugged in
Grand Theft Auto PC version 1 for DOS (my original since 1997)
HP ML350 Server with 6x73GB SCSI HDDs (beast of a server from 2005-ish)
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Wow! and this is not including stuff that I have up in the loft(s) and stuff that I have just put back up there too... hmmmm.... maybe I should start a YouTube channel, each ("boring") episode will be focused on each machine / item? Could do a history of the device, the history I have with it - after all, I only have these items as they have a connection to a time & place with myself. I mean, I got those PSP devices since 2006-ish and have flown all around the world with them - they have awesome battery life! I could charge up 2 of them and literally play Grand Theft Auto non-stop for the11-hour flight from London Heathrow to San Francisco.... anyway, potential food for thought.....
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Yes, I have created a Retro man cave, one that actually works though, well, one that has everything in it that works and the ability to be able to actually "use" everything as well. This hardware might be old, but it still all works. Bit like my brain.
If I had the extra space I would totally have these 2 full-size arcade games machines in this room somehow - maybe I should look at knocking the wall through?
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