2,200 Vintage Computers Are Being Liberated From a Barn in Massachusetts

June 29, 2023 6:24 AM

For more than two decades, the biggest retro computing story in recent memory sat like a sleeper cell in a Massachusetts barn. The barn was in danger of collapse. It could no longer protect the fleet of identical devices hiding inside. A story like this doesn’t need the flash of a keynote or a high-profile marketing campaign. It really just needs someone to notice. And the reason anyone did notice was because this barn could no longer support the roughly 2,200 machines that hid on its second floor.
posted by Etrigan (24 comments total)

Wow - this is amazing, and I am an old Canadian nerd who was 11 in 1983, so was into anything computer-related from that era - we had ICON networked computers in high-school - but I have never heard of the NABU. Talk about alternate timeline possibilities if this had been successful.
posted by rozcakj at 7:25 AM on June 29, 2023 [3 favorites]

Great read. Despite being a Canadian computing nerd in the early 80s, I don't remember ever hearing about NABU, either. I recall a network called Alex... can't find a link.

Retro-computing is not something that grips me, though I can see the appeal of a "quest" and a community formed around resurrecting such a beast. And 2,200 NIB devices available...
posted by Artful Codger at 7:35 AM on June 29, 2023 [1 favorite]

Fuck it, I just bought one. Guess I got a new hobby!
posted by slogger at 7:37 AM on June 29, 2023 [24 favorites]

I saw this on the Taylor and Amy Show a while back. Through some combination of their wonderfully honest shtick ("we were told to get this" ... "everyone's doing it") and how new-in-box everything looked, I just assumed it was some sort of "modern" retrocomputer art/design/demake thing.

I had a hard time believing that something that unknown could suddenly appear with such pristine new-old stock, but I guess this explains it.
posted by RonButNotStupid at 7:44 AM on June 29, 2023

Same as @slogger, I pulled the trigger and bought one yesterday. Should be a fun project!
posted by SNACKeR at 7:57 AM on June 29, 2023 [4 favorites]

The real fun here is exploring SurplusTraders.net. They used to own the 73.com domain which was pretty cool in itself. Like, you could own a number?

[Stefon voice] Anyway, this company scoops up everything it can find. Medical equipment, auto parts, old pagers, payment terminals, entire ATMs... Do you need a pair of 2-Megawatt natural gas generators for the house? Done! How about a million hazmat suits?

So instead of spending a few hours trying to hack an old MSX clone and give up, spend it exploring this website!
posted by JoeZydeco at 8:05 AM on June 29, 2023 [11 favorites]

(By the way those generators are 21 tons each, so some shipping charges may apply)
posted by JoeZydeco at 8:29 AM on June 29, 2023 [7 favorites]

This is a fascinating little piece of history. It reminds me of Halt and Catch Fire in more ways than one.

So many aspects here are interesting. The tech is interesting (proto-internet over cable, the modern restoration effort), the business is interesting (games-as-service, a failed venture, a forgotten product), and the people are interesting (Pellegrini, Sures, and Binkowski all have fascinating stories).

Sures talks about his family history with the business (2 uncles and a dad) here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FFaWJu3hDP4

Leo Binkowski (the young programmer in that news segment) has a series of recent videos on the NABU here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QlpZFAX4MZo

It says a lot that "thousands of a forgotten model of never-opened computers found in barn -- oh and they're selling like hotcakes" is not even the most interesting part of the story.
posted by Flaffigan at 10:18 AM on June 29, 2023 [3 favorites]

So that's why a bunch of NABUs came up for sale a few months back! I was wondering where the heck they came from as I followed with great interest the effort to reverse engineer the communication protocol so they would be more than just useless bricks. The odd baud rate on the serial port (odd as in not quite the same as what standard UARTs will do) made it much more difficult than it otherwise would have been.
posted by wierdo at 10:36 AM on June 29, 2023 [3 favorites]

For sale: one NABU, never used.
posted by slogger at 10:56 AM on June 29, 2023 [12 favorites]

JoeZydeco, you have no idea how hard I'm trying not to get a quote on a surgical microscope right now
posted by phooky at 11:11 AM on June 29, 2023 [6 favorites]

I'd go for the volume discount and get 50.
posted by JoeZydeco at 11:31 AM on June 29, 2023 [3 favorites]

Oh man I sort of remember this thing but it is real hazy but especially the ads with Johnny Hart drawings and the Doug Henning ad. I don't think I ever saw one in person.
posted by Ashwagandha at 11:42 AM on June 29, 2023

There's a throwaway line in there that implies that Johnny Hart's involvement led to the production of Quest for Tires, which, while somewhat obscure, achieved far more popularity than the NABU ever did.

(SurplusTraders.net continues to amaze. They also seem to have a lot of "want to buy" postings. Like, if anyone has about 500 or so Palm m105s kicking around, get in touch.)
posted by phooky at 12:30 PM on June 29, 2023 [2 favorites]

Now, gather around all you young folks, put down your smart phones, and let me tell you about the greatest job interview of my career.

In 1984, I was studying in the newly-minted Technical Writing program at Algonquin College. Summer rolled around, and it was time to get a summer job. I got a call that NABU Networks was looking to hire a student in the Documentation department for the summer. We arranged an interview for Tuesday morning. Over the weekend, I went to the library, got a copy of NABU's annual report, and read it cover to cover. And I found a mistake in it. There was one spread on which there were four pictures... 1, 2, 3, 4, and the captions were out of order... 1, 3, 2, 4. So, when I got to the interview, I gently maneuvered the conversation around to copy editing, and making sure everything in a publication is correct. Then, trying to keep the disingenousness under as much control as I could, I mentioned that there is a mistake in the company annual report. I pulled a copy out of my briefcase, opened it to the page that I had bookmarked with a Post-It note and showed it to the interviewer. He stared at it for a moment, and then said, "My God, David, you're sharp!"

I did get the summer job... it was fun - there were some real characters working for NABU at the time.

(Do you remember how exotic Post-It notes were in 1984?)
posted by Multicellular Exothermic at 12:48 PM on June 29, 2023 [29 favorites]

Wow. this article made me pleasantly nostalgic for the world of computers from the 80s. That was a great era, and I still miss my computer that was one of the original laptops. Oh ms-dos, how I miss you.
posted by bluesky43 at 1:51 PM on June 29, 2023 [2 favorites]

Do you remember how exotic Post-It notes were in 1984?

So exotic they were not yet skeumorphized into a desktop app. If Wikipedia is to believed, GEOS holds the honor of being the first, although I am not sure how "sticky" they were.
posted by credulous at 2:22 PM on June 29, 2023 [2 favorites]

I'm kind of annoyed with this article. It pretty much footnotes Zbigniew Stachniak, the founder/maintainer of York University Computer Museum (YUCoM). Without Zbigniew, these 2200 computers would be landfill and there would be no story.

YuCoM has been running the NABU Network Reconstruction Project since at least 2011 (see World of Commodore 2011 - NABU Network Reconstruction at the York University Computer Museum). The recent interest wouldn't have gone beyond "can run z80 code" without YuCoM's work. As the only place with a working NABU network, they deserve much more credit.

I have a NABU PC, which for $reasons I got for free. It's still in its box, which makes a great side-table for my Pi-Top 4. What struck me on opening the box was the blinding white very ozone layer-unfriendly 1980s polystyrene packaging and the insta-hazardous waste yellow cadmium plating on the computer chassis. Otherwise:

• The computer will take a lot of work to get going. All it has is a tiny boot ROM to look for a non-existent network. It needs much additional hardware to make it even close to being an MSX.
• It needs an Atari-style joystick. The kit would have originally come with two of them. The reseller isn't including them.
• The keyboard is far more lovely than it has any right to be.
• Most of the tutorials are loud , over-long YouTube wobblyvision videos (complete with greets to all their retro friends, ffs) that could so easily have been a small README file.

posted by scruss at 2:49 PM on June 29, 2023 [1 favorite]

I was around then. For a while I was even selling Unitrons, an Apple II clone. The last thing I want now is an 80s- or even 90s-era machine cluttering up the place.
posted by morspin at 3:12 PM on June 29, 2023 [3 favorites]

Oh ms-dos, how I miss you
I miss MS-DOS like I would miss a festering sore that's finally healed over. But those were days when all it took to be cool was being able to type out a few commands that 99% of people had no idea even existed, so I do miss that.
posted by dg at 3:42 PM on June 29, 2023 [5 favorites]

I also have a NABU, which I have hardly used because I am way over committed on retro projects, no slight against the NABU. I just had to have one once I saw the over-engineered industrial design on it, despite already having 3 MSX computers. Also the oddball nature of the whole thing and loading software into it with a preserved snapshot of the NABU network was just so irresistible to me.
posted by zsazsa at 9:23 PM on June 29, 2023 [1 favorite]

>The computer will take a lot of work to get going
Thanks for the info @scruss - the keyboard is what sold me on the purchase. It looks delightfully solid and chunky.

>I also have a NABU, which I have hardly used because I am way over committed on retro projects
@zsazsa I'm in a similar state - bought a PET that I'm still getting fully working, and now a NABU. But it's waited 40 years, it can wait a few more if it takes me that long to get to it.
posted by SNACKeR at 7:32 AM on June 30, 2023 [1 favorite]

> Most of the tutorials are loud , over-long YouTube wobblyvision videos (complete with greets to all their retro friends, ffs) that could so easily have been a small README file.

Dammit, this makes me think "writing docs? I can do that"
posted by Pronoiac at 12:46 AM on July 1, 2023

I had heard vague rumblings about this selloff, but when one showed up on Adrian's Digital Basement youtube channel, it kind of exploded all over the retro scene.
I've been following DJ Sures videos about exploring it and making an emulated server to get the system running similar to how it would have been back then, plus adding CPM with cloud functionality. There's a lot of info on DJ's Nabu site.
posted by Marticus at 8:07 PM on July 2, 2023 [1 favorite]