Computer Help and Support

Those keyboards are simple and very well built so they probably work. It's the old inexpensive clone keyboards that die in storage as the old rubbery plastic components disintegrate and the cheap capacitors self destruct.

I also have a few XT machines and clones in my garage. One of my XTs has the old full height floppy drives.

My oldest computer is one I built in the later 'seventies. I sometimes wish I'd saved earlier computers, but no, not really... they took up a lot of room and didn't do much. When I was high school I spent many hours converting a small reel-to-reel tape recorder into a data drive that never did work very well.

I got rid of a lot of interesting hardware years ago, most of it as e-waste. Some of it was taken off my hands by fellow enthusiasts and hoarders. If any of it had any $$$ value I don't want to know about it.

My stash of old computers is still large, including various Atari 800 machines and an Amiga that was used in video production, mostly advertisements for local television. The Amiga was very expensive when new but worth nothing when I got it. I e-wasted the high quality but bulky CRT monitor it came with.

For a few years I was repairing old CRT monitors but that's a useless skill these days.

Any old computer stuff, including CRT monitors, can be made to work with modern computers using a two dollar micro-controller and junk box components but I always end up thinking "why?" even after I've wasted time doing it.

I have every interesting computer I've ever used emulated on my Linux Desktop machine. Whenever I update to a new machine I transfer everything over. Bits on a hard drive take up a lot less room than computers in my garage. My oldest files are from the 'seventies.

I could set up one of my old Atari machines if I had a sudden urge to write a Turbo-Basic XL program but it's a lot easier to click the Atari icon on my Linux desktop and write it in the emulator.