Tony is a Geek

Okay, this will be a QUICK post... honest... I was watching a YouTube video about a new Retro-Museum being opened in DERBY.... ...and I was thinking, well, there we go - when we pop along in the motorhome to the Peak District we can "pop-in" on a Saturday 10-4pm for a visit. Then my missus said, "you could probably open one of your own".  This got me thinking. I then decided to take a little look up in the loft(s)..and whilst I had sold off an entire room of Amstrad related retro-hardware about 10years ago (I dread to think what that lot would be worth now - but hey-ho) I found quite a few boxes of interesting machines that I had bought back in the 2007/2008 timeframe. As I said, I'll do a more indepth post on each setup etc... in the future, for now here is a taster; there are quite a few Spectrum machines (something I never had as a kid), a few Toshiba MSXs and a few Atari 800 XLs.... with lots of peripherals. Yes, that is 2 x 5.1/4" floppy disc drives - ...

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 welco...