It looks like "keyboard pics" is going to be a regular feature (well as long as I keep finding old keyboards anyway... maybe after that I'll ask for pictures to be sent in from viewers, a kind of "readers wives" affair).
This grubby little beauty comes off of my first ever PC, an AST 486 Advantage! (DX CPU I think). The Commodore was older but it wasn't originally mine. The rest of the computer is long gone (although I think the screen might be still floating somewhere). There are so many memories associated with that AST machine. "Memories" is an apt word really as I was always plagued with memory problems. The thing had 4mb ram but games always wanted more "upper memory" free. Nowadays I'd just google the solution but back then I had condemned myself to weeks of desperately runing a DOS program called "memmaker" in a futile hope that more "upper memory" would magically free up. Creature Shock was one such game. Some time later when I upgraded and finally got a chance to play it, I really wondered why I bothered, as Creature Shock is classed as one of the worst games ever made.
The AST Research Inc. company itself is long gone now too. The name AST came from the initials of the 3 co-founders, and as far as I can remember, there was a video of one of them introducing the machine when you started it up for the first time. It was some dude with a mustache anyway. The machine was bought on one of those ESB hire purchase things back in the mid 1990's. I can still remember the ad in the newspaper. There was a selection of softwares that came with it on cd-rom's. MS Encarta, MS Cinemania, MS Golf... and an AST multimedia cd-rom. Oh god I loved that AST disc, it had the cheesiest music ever. I'd love to have a copy of it again!
Some final notes: I remember when AST sponsored Aston Villa football club in the mid 90's, and Commodore once supported Chelsea. What was with computer manufacturers sponsoring football back in the 1990's? The AST PC was the first computer I played Doom on, such precious memories surround that, with the glorious Soundblaster16 (genuine)FM music, ah yes good times indeed :)
Other featured Keyboards: [Commodore] [Digital] [Nokia]
I have a good few Macintosh keyboards at home (I think).
ReplyDeleteI must root them out.
Although I'm not much of a Mac fan (as one can see from my early posts in 2005) as long as they've got history attached, I'm interested. :)
ReplyDelete