Avian’s Blog

Peek&poke is a retro computer club and a vintage computer museum in Rijeka, Croatia. They celebrated their first anniversary yesterday. I went with Dunja and Martin from Cyberpipe's computer museum to take part in the festivities.

Here are some highlights from their large collection:

Despite its appearance, Timex Sinclair 1500 is closer in capabilities to the original ZX81 than ZX Spectrum. Not surprisingly, it wasn't a big commercial success.

And speaking of Sinclair, they also have the infamous C5.

The collection also includes a number of computers from the former Yugoslavia, although they are in minority. When you look at the specs one thing becomes apparent: it looks like a popular approach to future-proofing computer designs was to include support for several processor architectures. This Croatian Ivel Ultra for example can run software written for MOS 6502 and Zilog Z80.

I've seen plenty of obscure systems, like this Didaktik M from Czechoslovakia. It's another Sinclair clone.

Even the sheer number of calculators they have is impressive, and I'm told that only a part of their collection is in the exhibit.

Last but not least, here's an interesting IBM laptop (Thinkpad 701 "Butterfly") with a folding keyboard so that it's wider than the base when the computer is in use but shrinks to fit inside when you close the lid. (watch the video at YouTube)