Originally published at: Thousands of vintage computers emerge from storage barn | Boing Boing
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Of their own volition?
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Storage barn?
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The retrocomputing community has been quite abuzz about this.
Not only is the Nabu an obscure Canadian retrocomputer that even the Canadians had never heard of, it’s actually good. Normally forgotten computers are forgotten for a reason, but this thing is a real gem in terms of its graphics and performance capabilities.
A community has exploded around it over night as a result. You can already get video adapters, networking tools, floppy drive simulators, and a modern OS for it. Everyone is shocked this thing exists. It’s like our earth passed through a time rift and an alternate history 1985 computer was accidentally phased into our reality.
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I’m not into retro computing, but I can totally see how people would freak out over new-old stock.
I remember like 10 or so years ago a handful of vintage RotJ action figures, on card, were sold at a K-Mart on clearance. Evidently they moved some shelving and they were under there since the 80s. Crazy stuff like that is always cool.
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I still kinda wish I’d bought those two Amiga 1000s in the box for $50 each at the Commodore sale in Markham, Ontario nearly 30 years ago.
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Dammnn, $50? No way I could’ve resisted, I really wanted an Amiga growing up.
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Nabu found in an old barn??
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… don’t put it on your head unless you want to serve the Lords of Order 
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I think I recall those from back in the day. At the time, like the Telidon terminals, they seemed too locked in to that service, and I don’t think that they were at all cheap in 1983.
Trying to create a dial-up system was expensive, and X.25 services like Datapac weren’t much better for predicting operation costs.
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Datapac! I worked on Unitel’s competing Infoswitch X.25 service in those days. Based on Telefonica TESYS hardware . Good times 
only time I saw Telidon was in hotel rooms. And maybe trade shows. It was always horrible, or so I thought
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I had a look, and wow. That Nabu really is vintage. Check out the AM radio!
[ducks. runs.]
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Superior technology rarely wins out based on its own merits; the winners are those with the best marketing.
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I’m not deep in the retrocomputing hobby but wouldn’t they need capacitor replacements? I was recently gifted a vintage portable PC and when turning it on something blew up inside, which I assume is a capacitor (the machine still kept working though).
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That’s a slide rule, isn’t it?
Or calipers for checking floppy disk size.
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I believe the slide rule was called a “math co-processor”, back in the day.
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“Log on” is clearly derived from preparing to do logarithms.
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It depends. It’s mostly the 16 bit and early 32 bit machines that do, because they were made during the capacitor plague. The older stuff generally doesn’t.
So much stuff was made during the plague that people now believe all capacitors go bad, when in fact it was just a bad run during a certain period of time.
In any case, if they do, it’s generally just the big filter caps in the power supply which are easy to replace. Retrocomputers don’t use much for electrolytics outside the power supply, and even then they usually still work if they go bad, they just get a little more unstable without the power filtering.
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The machines have awoken!
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