Hey. This site is a rudimentry outpost of my projects and personal collection of retro PCs, all-in-one computers and portable machines. It's entirely built on Joomla 5, using the default template and minimal plugins - really just to keep things simple for you and for me.

My aim is to share information about vintage machines and my journeys to restore them. I try to write run-through's of projects to restore and preserve old hardware (mainly by IBM and Apple), links to videos and links to software and images which can be difficult to find or may save you a lot of time. Everything here is my own work (with some very limited exceptions where the machine was never released or is impossible to buy) and everything here is for sale. Anything listed here might not be cheap, but that's because it'll be one of the best examples left in the world.

I am using modern methods to tackle old jobs, combining previously-published information by other people which may be somewhat out-of-date and hopefully making it easier to understand or tackle some of these efforts yourself or simply combine a lot of disparate information into a one, short article. I have a full-time job and a family, so this is all done in my spare time. I have a very good ebay rating and if you'd prefer to buy something I've listed for sale in the ebay marketplace, let me know and we can work something out.

My school years were informed by a 'computer room' of 386 and 486 computers, the occasional compact mac and my first notebook in 1996 was an IBM Thinkpad 365. I'm entirely self-taught in machine hard and software troubleshooting hard-earned through a 25 year career in IT. I generally learn by doing than studying. Over the last few years I've developed some skills and knowledge desoldering and repairing damaged PCBs, primarily caused by leaking eletrolytic capacitors, corrosive expired batteries or brittle plastics. 

I do have a somewhat special interest in the dead-ends, the unexplained segues, the outsourced hardware and, for want of a better word - the crap stuff which doesn't survive very well, either because nobody bought them or because of some terrible flaw. On these hallowed pages, I will cover not only the iconic great machines but the awful dead ends and rusting, dicrepid awfulness of the 1980s and 1990s. For some reason I also have an infatuation with all-in-one (AIO) machines which were often wonderful and futuristic but compromised. This includes the weird and wonderful 'internet appliances' of the very late 1990s and early 2000s where everyone was selling AIO appliances to replace your kitchentop cook book. For some reason dotcom millionaires assumed what the world needed was less cookbooks and more slow, dialup, DSTN, desk hogging pieces of bloatware in their kitchen. Just incase mum emailed.