Earlier this week, the Journal Sentinel reported a story about UWM’s Retrolab, a computer museum maintained by history of computing professor Thomas Haigh. I had some retro hardware and software to donate, so we decided to stop by and check the place out. László wore his suit coat, of course.
The lab has many working models of vintage computers and we could get hands on with several of them: a TRS-80, Commodore64, Atari computers, an original IBM PC, and a large collection of Apple machines. Among the Apples, were some real nostalgia powerhouses (the dual disk Apple IIe, for example) along with some I’d never seen in the real world before: a Lisa, a IIc, several iterations of the original Macintosh, and the Apple-adjacent Next Step workstation. There are many more we didn’t get to try out.
Some of the retro storage mechanisms were pretty cool to see up close, too. There was a fun nostalgia to flipping over the Oregon Trail disk, too. (Hole punched for double storage!) If you zoom in you might be able to see a cassette tape reader for a computer in these pictures, too.
Professor Haigh is currently working on a restoration project of an ASR-33 teletype machine. If you don’t know what a teletype is, the National Museum of Computing in England has a video of what all they have to do to get it working, as well as how it worked. It was very cool to see one of these up close.
You can learn more about the Retrolab on Tom’s website, and if you’re local, you can visit when it’s open.
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