Restoration Philosophy

Take on projects you love, and you can finish

I only take on computers that have something about them I love. This can be a computer that I used in my past, a computer that I saw at a time in my life when I couldn’t afford it, or one that I thought caused fundamental change in a then fledgling industry that was changing the world at blinding speed. It’s largely subjective on my part, but it is my collection.

I only take on computers that can be returned to 100% functionality and close to 100% cosmetic appearance. I believe the computers in my collection are things of art. They are functional (sometimes a bit more functional) than they were when the rolled off the production line. They also evoke emotions for people that used them, and my goal is preserve that emotion in a machine that looks like you just unpacked it from the box 30 years ago.

I preserve the functionality as well and try to future-proof each computer. This means that most rotational media is removed and replaced with solid state media. I save the original drives for posterity but my goal in make them usable 100 years from now. For those computers built with only floppy drives, I strive to find new-old-stock drives and augment them with solid state media making both 100% functional. This means trying to source new-old-stock drives that were never actually used in a computer but replacements that sat on shelf for 30 years. This is very difficult and takes time to source these items.

I will do minor modifications to a machine if they were, A) common in the day (for instance adding a reset switch to C64 or a drive select toggle to a 1541 Disk Drive). I will on occasion add something that is subtle but enhances the functionality (for instance the RGB LED’s I add to SPARCstations that show power + drive activity). These kinds of modifications are subject to personal opinion of course but the goal is to keep any modications like this tasteful.

I will fabricate new things that enhance the experience of using the computer. For instance CRT’s are increasingly difficult to find and fix, therefore I often create retro-reimagined LCD displays for computers that never existed into the LCD era.

My goal is not to have a collection, but the have the best collection of the computers I care to care about.