Such an amazing project. I used these as inspiration / reference for a set of analogue clay sculptures that turned into concrete / wax / resin casts a while ago.
I always meant to mail a set to rocky bergen as thanks. Such a fun chapter of my life. They took forever. I spent a lot of time with those wonderful paper models.
I love that they even got the ridges on the top rear part of the commodore 1541 floppy drive, which have the nice property of resonating with a high pitched squeal when you drag your fingertips across them, annoying the hell out of your sister.
Wow, this brings memories... When I was a kid in ex-USSR, I've spent enormous amount of time gluing together things resembling PCs and some of the house AV equipment! Very crude, not alike the ones on these pictures, mind you.
My dad had noticed and bought me a real ZX-80 first, then some one of the ex-USSR PC knock offs ("Poisk-1" if that makes any sense to you), then the real DX-4 100 MHz PC!
I did the same thing when I was little.
I used to draw computers, peripherals, keyboards, mice. Often based on what I saw in computer magazines, books or on television.
Beautiful work. Even more impressive is the fact that it looks like you didn't spend much time in the UK and you have some classic British boxes. Glad to see you did the "calculator" keyboard on the PET rather than the later more conventional keyboard. Would like suggest the ZX-80 and the Research Machines 380X. Some of the early Sun, Interlisp, Xerox, and SGI machines would be fun if you wanted to venture in an adjacent direction, as would a scale PDP-11. Very well done!
The paper model of the Mac 128K reminds me... Paper models (cars, emergency vehicles) were one of the first things I made on that original Mac. (I might've made a fake newspaper first.)
I had a HyperCard stack of paper airplane designs that I must have printed hundreds of times. A cursory search didn’t turn it up and I have no idea where it came from. Maybe it’s lost to time.
I love these things. One project I'd love if some museum did would be to 3D scan important artifacts as precisely as feasible so we could duplicate them.
Of course, to make paper models we'd need to simplify those models a lot, but the possibility of printing replacement parts for irreplaceable computers would be an immense service to preservation.
The 5"1/4 floppy disk next to the Commodore 1541 disk drive with "Bruce Lee" manually written on it just cracks me up. I've spent countless hours on that game on the C64 :)
Beautiful work. They bring back fond memories of my first company after college. They had a computer lab available for after-hours learning/play stocked with a number of these computers including the Apple II, the IBM PC, the ZX-80, the Pet, and some weird computer by a company named Cromemco. Lost a ton of hours there.
Related: I released a few models of vintage computers to be 3D printed. Commodore PET: https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:4974963 and BBC micro: https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:4974343. I modelled basically almost any computer that was famous back then, but most of the models I gave to a friend of mine to print and sell over Etsy, during covid job losing drama.
The Atari ST was such a beautiful machine for its time. It still looks great today, with those diagonal lines and that crisp gray color, among a sea of beige peers.
That is really cool! With the size of mini LCD displays these days, it might even possible to make one with a working screen. Ironically, microcontrollers are so powerful today, a tiny embedded board could actually be more powerful than the original.
Even an ESP32 is probably more powerful than every single one of those computers, with the exception of the GameCube. You can emulate NES games on that micro-controller.
Seeing these always makes me wish there were RPi enclosures that let you build working mini versions of these classic computers. There's something very comfy to me about the idea of playing a text adventure game on a tiny IBM 5100 or HP 85.
If you're ok w/ 3d printing them, there are a ton of models on all the free model sharing sites of various computers... most wouldn't need much work to accomodate a pi or something even if they weren't originally designed for that.
If you want something actually nicely injection molded like the PiDPs (which are well worth the price imho, if you're interested in them) I don't know that you're going to find a better deal. I suspect it's too niche a product to scale to being economical at lower prices.
3D-printed would be fine, except those are just statues. Aside from mounting points and IO holes for the Pi, models for an actual enclosure would need to be subtly adjusted so the holes for the keyboard and screen match up with available off the shelf components to add in.
There are quite a few options that already accommodate a pi, if you don't want to customize... see my other comment upthread for a couple, but that's just the ones I happened to have bookmarked, there are a _lot_ of results if you just search for pi cases on thingiverse or something.
I bet these could be useful background props for low budget film makers. Sure, they aren't going to look like Hollywood sets but they would get the point across if someone needed to build a laboratory set on a shoestring budget.
This reminds me of the work of Thomas Demand, although he only builds the paper models for the purpose of creating a photographic image (and destroying the models after that).
I loved my PC Jr. -- my first computer. Spent way too many hours on it, and the reason I do what I do today. Had a number of books on BASIC, and even upgraded the RAM from 128k to 256k (I may have even gotten it up to 512k)!
As much as it was the slowest turd of a PC ever, I do have a soft spot for it since it was my first "real" computer. It would need to be running Crossfire on a cartridge.
There were two memory upgrades. The first was a card that plugged into the motherboard. The other one was an expansion module that plugged into the side of the computer (and multiple of those could be used). My PCjr had 384k of RAM, using both the internal upgrade and one sidecar.
I never bothered using the keyboard wirelessly. The cable was good enough and it saved on batteries. I was fortunate in that I had the revised keyboard, not the original chiclet keyboard.
If you want to do better than "copy paper" you could run heavier stock paper through a color laser printer.
In my poor, college days, I would have entertained chopping a manila folder to Letter size and running it through the straight-feeder of a Color Laser-jet.
I literally just printed on 220gsm card in a laser printer's feed tray today. Worked great.
Before I had a pack of card, I was indeed cutting up manila folders. I only had ugly colours (that's a rule for manila folders, apparently) so it wasn't ideal, but it worked well in a structural sense for what I was up to.
Hidden lines were removed though only on a per model basis.
EDIT: But you don't have to believe me! You can visit https://bbc.godbolt.org/ and see BBC Micro Elite running in an emulator. Do a Shift+F12 at the BBC Microcomputer 32K prompt to boot the disk.
IIRC it did hidden line removal on the BBC if you had the second processor, and non-removal on a plain BBC.
I can't remember if the required 2nd proc for elite was a Z80 or another 6502 though; a part of my brain remembers it as needing the Z80, but that sounds like it'd be weird.
I have a Brother laser printer that I got back in 2009-10 or something. It's never had a problem with cardstock, though I guess I've never thought about it. What problems do printers have with cardstock?
OKI 3x2dn (the x in there essentially means the amount of paper trays). We had run thousands of A4 pages of cardstock through the thing printing atendee badges for our convention.
Off-topic, but damn are googles and bings of today useless finding weird shit like this. Try searching some variation of "baked beans" and "sinclair spectrum". It's like every time I tried searching for a combination of <hugely popular/monetizable term> and <niche term>. It ends up ignoring the niche term. Pluses and quotes be damned, we'll give you ten million sponsored recipes for baked beans! What happened to the IDF part of TFIDF?
>In 1968, Alan Kay outlined the Dynabook, calling it a "children's computer." The device was never made commercially, but he made a model out of cardboard. In this 2002 Japanese Documentary (NHK Japan), he shows this model.
American computer pioneer Alan Kay’s concept, the Dynabook, was published in 1972. How come Steve Jobs and Apple iPad get the credit for tablet invention?
.jpg){kind=link}
I always meant to mail a set to rocky bergen as thanks. Such a fun chapter of my life. They took forever. I spent a lot of time with those wonderful paper models.
https://tombetthauser.github.io/computerbuddies/