Rob Hyde
8 June 2023

Working toward opening

Posted in: History ETA

It's been a little while since we've put together an update - and that's been caused by the University being quite busy. We've also been working quite hard on the collection getting prepared to have the space open.

We've moved the whole collection around on campus, and have been cataloguing what we have, which is taking quite some time to do.

So the actual archive portion of ETA is up and running rather nicely!

old equipment on storage racking
We now have an organised system of racking for the equipment in the Archive
many old keyboards on the rack storage
We have many keyboards!

However.... We have been making progress.

Displays are now built, and we've started to prepare equipment to be on show.

Display cabinets with glass doors
Display cabinets assembled

And we've fitted lighting to all of the units (although this isn't the final look - we were just sizing up!).

Display cabinets with lighting fitted
Display cabinets with lights fitted.

Some of our colleagues left us some interesting donations with very cryptic messages:

A mark 1 Sony Playstation - with a label telling us it is broken
A cryptic message to say that this Sony Playstation doesn't work. 'Will not power on' was very accurate! It had a dead Zener diode inside.

And some interesting equipment has come to light:

A reel-to-reel tape recorder.
Brenell mark 5 reel tape recorder - we think from 1959.

We've even found some older equipment that still bears our own departmental labelling.
We haven't had a media resources department at the University for quite some while!

Posted in: History ETA

Respond

  • (we won't publish this)

Write a response

Read next

  • Rob Hyde
    15 December 2023

    Ending 2023

    So we're coming towards the end of 2023, and we've been reflecting on our first couple of months of being open. We've had 9 weeks of operation in 2023 - and nearly 200 visitors in that time. Considering we only...

  • Rob Hyde
    29 November 2023

    More things on display - ZX Spectrum

    We spent a little time this week getting a ZX Spectrum going, and finding out a tape drive. Unfortunately when we plugged it all together.... it seemed that there was no input into the Spectrum. The tape player was a...

  • Rob Hyde
    23 November 2023

    Another working display - BBC Micro

    One of the machines on the workbench this month has been a BBC Model B (32k) - which actually looks quite tidy inside. However, like all BBCs, we can't put it into use before checking the power supply (and particularly...