What is the Home Computer Hall of Fame?

It's an archive. It's a virtual museum. It's a nostalgia trip. It's somewhere where people can look wistfully at a plastic box with less processing power than a TV remote and say things like "I learned to program on one of those, they were brilliant". Basically, it's somewhere where sad people (like me) can sit and remember the good old days of home computing.

Take a look at a typical modern home computer. Most likely it's a sleek laptop with hundreds of gigabytes of disc space, several gigabytes of memory and more processing power than it knows what to do with. Now look back a few years. Hard drives were unheard of (and floppy discs were rare), 128K of memory was huge. A modern home computer has over 200 times as much memory just looking after the graphics system as my first computer (a Dragon 32) had main memory.

By modern standards, these machines were primative, but there was something about them that made them far more enjoyable than the current selection (or lack thereof). That something needs preserving and hopefully the HCHOF and other archives like it can help.

Where does this information come from?

Originally, it came from magazine reviews, adverts, manuals and promotional literature that I'd collected. Now, it comes from people I've worked with (thanks especially to Mark and Keith) and people who I've never met before who, from time to time, send details of machines I've never heard of or fill in the information I've not been able to find elsewhere. To all of these people, thank you.

If you have information on a machine that's not listed here, can fill in any missing details, have a web page that you feel should be mentioned, or simply want to say "hi", please drop me a line at the email address below.

hchof@gondolin.org.uk