(Times) Where do old computers go to retire? The ones that retire in Israel go to the Personal Computer Museum, which has over 70 models of the “pioneers” of personal computing, from the ’70s onward. Among the machines on display at the museum, located in Haifa, are computers that were popular at the dawn of the computer era alongside machines rarely seen then, let alone today.
The museum, established earlier this year, was the idea of Yariv Anbar, director of Mediatech High-Tech, a division of the computer training and development group Matrix. Anbar had been collecting old computers for 18 years when he got the idea of putting them on display. Unfortunately, nobody wanted the “junk” Anbar was peddling — so he decided to open up his own museum, presenting the models he collected. Many of the computers work and have been set up to perform for the public. “I got my first computer in 1983,” Anbar said. “It was a Mag 2000, which was a clone of the Apple IIe — of course no one could afford an original in those days. The computer connected to a cassette player and a television. A few years later I got a PC, and of course I was very excited.” The PC, made first by IBM and later by a wide variety of clone makers, took the lion’s share of sales, but many other companies tried to come up with competitors. (MORE)
