Isaac Traxler's Museum

I have been collecting computer hardware for a number of years with the hope of either opening a museum one day or displaying them one at a time at a local library. I am concentrating primarily on microcomputers, their peripherals, and software.

While my wife is not real happy about the room all this "stuff" takes, she does concede that it is a worthwhile cause, so if you have old computer equipment or software, please consider donating to my museum. This is not a profit based scheme, it is merely an effort to save a little history that is quickly disappearing.

Currently I have 42 systems and 14 printers in the museum.

Return to Isaac Traxler's Home Page. This page has been accessed times and was last updated on . Please send any comments or suggestions to isaac@brmug.org


Museum Inventory


This page has been accessed times and was last updated on . Please send any comments or suggestions to isaac@brmug.org


Discussions of Selected Systems

The selections below have been written by Isaac to provide some information about some of the systems.

Tektronix 4051

The Tektronix 4051 is a Motorola 6800-based micromputer. Most versions came with 16k of memory but could be upgraded to 32k. The machine came with BASIC in ROM (supported variable names of a letter, a letter followed by one digit, and a letter followed by a $ [for strings]; all numbers were stored as real with 10-byte precision). This system includes a serial port and an integral cartridge tape drive (600k per tape). These systems also had two expansion slots that could hold I/O ports or ROM packs (Matrix functions, editors). These systems also had a screen dump port that could be connected to a behemoth device that imaged the screen on heat sensitive paper (I have one). I also have a spare cpu board. the systems also included a GPIB (General Purpose Interface Bus[also known as HPIB])port. I have one external GPIB tape drive. The most unique thing about this system is that it came with a classic Tektronix "Green Screen" (high resoultion vector display). This made it a tremendous graphics tool (the first computer I ever used).

A follow up to the 4051 was produced (4052) that was identical except significantly faster. This was accomplished by producing a custom cpu board based on multiple bit-slice technology cpu chips and then emulating the Motorola 6800 cpu.

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Digital GIGI

Also known as the VK-100, the GIGI was an early effort by DEC to produce a personal computer and a usable graphics terminal. The GIGI, like most PCs of the time, came with BASIC in ROM. Also like most of the PCs from back then, it had its own graphics standard (ReGIS).

The GIGI looked vaguely like an Apple II (much wider because it includes a standard VT100-style keyboard, but much less shallow because no slots were included). The GIGI could be connected to composite video or a RGB (BNC) monitor with sync on Green. It had a resolution similar to VGA, but displayed 80-column acceptably via composite to large TVs (we used them in classrooms for demonstrations).

The GIGI emulated a VT-52 plus a little more but not quite all of a VT-100 (if it had, it would have been a wonderful box). As TPU came along, the GIGI became very obsolete.

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