Today, personal computers become outdated mere months after they’re released; consumers wanting the latest and greatest quickly forget about last year’s models. But there is a growing subculture of collectors who search high and low for the most archaic computers they can find. By gathering these pieces of obsolete technology, they hope to record a part of history that has become almost ephemeral. Sellam Ismail, founder of the Vintage Computer Festival, has based his livelihood on old computers with his Vintagetech consulting firm. He brought to The Screen Savers a replica he built of the PDP-1, the first computer used to play the first video game, Space War. We visited Sellam in the Green room and asked him about his hobby and career.
What is Vintagetech?
Vintagetech is a consulting firm I started in 2001 to basically leverage my private computer collection. It kind of came about by accident – a person who was hired by a law firm approached me to borrow some computers that they needed to invalidate a patent. That’s when I realized there was a new way to have the collection pay for itself because I put a lot of money into it. So I sat down one night and brainstormed different ways I could exploit the collection from a commercial point of view – I could loan it out to film production companies for props, doing data conversions of old tapes and discs that people couldn’t read anymore, along with appraisals and sales brokering.
When did you first start collecting vintage computers?
Probably when I was in my teens, in the ‘80s. It started the first time I got a piece of hardware that I had no real use for having in a practical sense, but just wanted to have it because it looked interesting and I wanted to play with it. It was probably this old teletype from the ‘70s that my brother dragged home a construction site – he had a bunch of these old terminals, so I took this really cool-looking one that had integrated tape drives. I just kept it and didn’t really do anything with it until a few years ago when I used it to read some old tapes that someone had written in the ‘70s and needed to read the data.
What do you personally get out of acquiring these outdated pieces of equipment?
I’m a big history buff – I’m really fascinated with the past. And I combine that with my love of computers. Growing up in the ‘80s, and especially for kids growing up in the ‘90s, their first exposure to computers was the PC. But there’s this huge history leading up to the PC starting in the 1940s when electronic computers were first started being built -- that’s just incredible when you think about how far we’ve come in such a short time frame. It’s really fascinating to dig into the past and see the evolution – you can literally see it and it’s still contemporary. If you compare computing to civilization, it’s like watching civilization develop in the span of a lifetime. You can comprehend it as opposed to trying to comprehend thousands of years of human development. Computing history is so compressed, but it’s come so far in its development compared to human history. And most of the early artifacts are preserved and the people who built the earliest computers are still around in many cases, and you can actually catch them at a talk at the Computer History Museum.
How do you go about finding them?
The easiest place to go to is thrift stores, although these days most of the older stuff is cleaned out. Stuff tends to get moved out of people’s garages and attics in a 10-year cycle, so anything from 10 years ago is what you’ll find in thrift stores. So most of my stuff comes from thrift stores, flea markets, swap meets, electronic surplus stores, and increasingly from the Internet where now you can just go to auction sites.
What was your biggest score?
One of them was the original Apple Lisa. The Lisa predates the Macintosh, and the very first Lisa that came out had these custom disc drives that Apple designed. They were 5.25” disc drives, and they were different from standard 5.25” drives – they were double-sided, but they had to be flipped in a different direction. What happened was, those drives ended up being so unreliable, that Apple swapped them out for free to everybody who bought the original Lisa. So very, very few original, unmodified Lisas are still in existence today – a lot of the Lisas you find are called Lisa II’s, which is really just the upgraded Lisa with the then-new Sony 3.5” disc drive. So one day I was at an electronics flea market and a friend and I were going through some old computer books, and a guy walked up and overheard us talking, and he said “Oh, I’ve got a Lisa.” So we asked him if it had the 3.5” drive or 5.25”. He said, “I think it’s got the 5.25.” drive.” And I was quicker than my friend in giving him my business card, so I ended getting it. I know of less than a dozen still in existence.
Do you have a dream computer you’d like to locate?
Yeah, I’d like to have an Apple 1. There were only 200 made and when Apple came out with the Apple II, they offered an upgrade where you could send in two Apple 1 boards and get an Apple II in exchange. I talked to Steve Wozniak and Mike Scott, who was then president of Apple, and of the ones that were returned, all but one were destroyed. So out in the wild, I estimate there are less than 50 – and over the years, I’ve been tracking them so I have a private list that I keep just to know who has them and where they’re at. I’ve personally brokered the sales of four of them, and I’ve held about 10 in my hands, but it’s elusive and it has a real mystique about it. People who have one know there’s something special about it, and the price is prohibitive… but one of these days I’ll get my hands on one.
What computer did you bring in to the show?
Today I brought in a replica of the front panel of the PDP-1, which is Digital Equipment Corporation’s first computer, circa 1961. I actually built a full-scale replica of the PDP-1, which was commissioned by the National Science Museum of Tokyo, Japan. That’s installed right now in an exhibit that they put together on the history of video games. They couldn’t get a PDP-1 from the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif., which has probably the most if not all the remaining PDP-1s in existence – there were only 50 made. So I proposed to do a functional replica, and they said give us a price, and I priced it all out and they said let’s do it. So I had a friend design the front panel controller for me, and I wrote the code to hook it into the simulator, and it’s a functional replica of the original. What I brought today is actually just the front panel of the whole replica – I built a second front panel for demonstration purposes. Then I built replica joystick controllers that are modeled after drawings from the recollections of one of the guys who originally worked on the first version of Space War. So you can actually play Space War on a regular display with the original controllers.
