Welcome to my computer museum !

This website shows the items that I have in my computer collection. If you want to go through the collection really quick, just keep pressing the Group-NEXT button. If you have some time use the Item-Next button. Or use the Browse button gives a list with hyperlinks of all items in the museum. Below these buttons you can always see where you are in the collection, these are all hyperlinks for more precise navigation. The museum is built up like a tree with groups, sub-groups etc. to group items that are related.

The museum-website is generated by a tool called GGGallery that I wrote especially for the museum but can used for other tree-structured photo-collections. It is a Windows GUI application,  more information can be found www.tonh.net/gggallery

What is in this museum

Computers of course. However while collecting computers I encountered a lot more interesting stuff that were not computers but were related to computers and these are included as well. Also I have only stuff that I have some memories off but that does not mean it is a limited collection, the rule was however that something only could became part if it would set me on fire to a certain level. Not all items are still working (though most are), it is mainly the look of an item that I thought was important for me.

The collection consist mainly of computers, peripherals, electronics and books&magazines, as you can see in the navigation-corner to the left.
The time-span of the collection is about from mini's and the first homecomputers to the first PC's so (very) roughly 1975-1985

Who am I ?

My name is Ton den Hartog, I live in the Netherlands and was born in 1960. I have been hooked with computers since around 1978 and have seen a lot of the stuff that has been in use in this industry. With the museum I can finally own the stuff I could not have in those days. I have not included everything I could lay my hands on, I have only included items that I myself have some memories of. So the coverage of the museum heavily depends upon how well I read BYTE magazine 20 years ago...

Because I have studied electronics I also have quite some interest in hardware, so the low level of computers is also well represented giving some very interesting sections in the museum. I think however even non-hardware people will recognize of lot of the items they will encounter.

How I got hooked to computers

In May 1977 the Dutch hobby-electronics magazine Elektuur published a project to build a small computer based on the SC/MP CPU. On the  main board the user interface was no more than a row of on/off switches to set the address and data bus and the feedback was only with 8 LED's. With this you could binary enter programs in the memory and show if something was happening. This article stole my heart,  I read the magazine to pieces on a beach of the Italian camping where my parents had brought me and my sister for a vacation. Poor parents... I did never build this project but its introduction to microcomputers changed my life and I have been hooked to computers since.

At the time of this article I was at college and microcomputers were way too expensive for me. Five years later, when I was at the HTS during my apprenticeship, my parents allowed me (study goes first !) to buy a KIM-1 computer. My friend Carlo Totté on the HTS also had a KIM-1 and he introduced me to a man in Delft who imported the KIMs from the USA. When I showed the KIM to my parents for the first time they were amazed, is THAT a computer, they wondered ?
I have written quite a few programs for the KIM, the first ones doing the assembly and calculation of branch-offsets myself. For a short time I have used a self-written program to enter ASCII characters on the hex keyboard and display text on the 7segment display so that I could run BASIC and the MicroADE assembler on a bare KIM. But soon I bought a serial terminal that made the KIM into a quit a usable computer.
The last year at the HTS, for my thesis, I wrote an elevator emulator (including all mechanics) in assembler on the KIM. 

After the KIM, I wanted something with graphics and a disk drive. I bought a Sinclair QL. The joy of being able to type DIR at a keyboard and have the QL's micro drives spin automatically and show a listing of all files on the tape was tremendous improvement compared to the cassette recorder interface of the KIM ! After the QL there have been only boring PC's :-)

How the museum came to life

In 1998 my friend Michel Janssen made me very happy with a beautiful Apple IIe that I gave a very special place in my living room. About two years later, in an optimistic moment, I placed a request for a PET 2001 in the nl.markt.comp newsgroup as the PET was also a computer I wanted to have. Soon I could pick up a PET in Utrecht and you could say the museum really started at that moment. I got the taste of collecting old computers and started to make serious work of it. This has lead to the current state of the museum.

In the beginning of 2001 I started to make photos of the museum items for the sole purpose of getting an overview of all I had got. To view this I created the first version of the museum website, a simple sequence of photos generated by LView. Later I added the tree-structure by hand and a little help from Frontpage in the first self-made museum-website. But now I use the Windows GUI tool GGGallery that I wrote myself to fine-tune every last feature of this website.

Enjoy !

Ton den Hartog (to contact me see the Contact page)

A webpage