Computer Collectors Adore Chips Off The Old Block

Entering Dave Fisk’s store at Argonne Village is like stepping into a time machine.

“Welcome to Jurassic Park,” Fisk says, motioning toward his wares. His dinosaurs don’t have fangs and scales. They have bytes and chips.

Fisk is one of a surprisingly large number of computer buffs whose disks don’t spin over Windows 95. Instead, they’re plugged into the past, using machines long deleted from product lines.

And they won’t reboot for anyone.

“I still love the Amiga,” Fisk says of his favorite machine, unveiled in 1985. “It’s a passion.”

His Great Escape store mostly carries used computers made by now-bankrupt Commodore. Cassette tape drives are on the floor. An old Apple IIe, two disk drives, a joystick and printer are all on sale, too - $25 takes the package.

He sells a few modern PCs, but the bulk of his business is still old Commodore 64 and Amiga stuff. Boxes of used software line the walls.

“I have such dedicated Commodore and Amiga people, it’s unreal,” Fisk says.

Fisk once received a call from a man asking for an Amiga internal disk drive. He was ordering for someone he was talking to in Greenland over short-wave radio, and the guy in Greenland was communicating with some one else via computer modem. Fisk isn’t sure where the drive ended up.

But he had it in stock.

Why do folks keep using their old machines? After all, there are Pentiums and PowerPCs to be had.

“Many of them use Windows 95 at work, and want to come home to a machine that’s easy to use,” Fisk says. Today’s 16 megabyte, 166 megahertz monsters can be complicated.

The Amiga doesn’t seem that different from today’s machines. It has a mouse and uses 3.5-inch floppy disks. Folks who still love and use the Commodore 64, though, put up with 40-column screens (which display only half the letters per line a printed page would), cryptic key-entered commands and slow 5-1/4-inch disk drives. Their processors trudge along at one megahertz.

Members of the Spokane Commodore User Group still love to talk C-64.

“A hacker would rather have a Commodore 64 than anything else,” announces Floyd West, 53. A few weeks ago, the janitor and a dozen others met at a picnic at Sullivan Park to discuss why the 64 kilobyte computer is tops.

“It’s like a Volkswagen Beetle. It’s a classic, efficient design,” founding member John Samuelson says in between bites of hot dog. Someone talked of the big score spotted at Goodwill: a pseudo-portable SX-64 computer. Just $100.

To the diehards, a big, muscle-bound machine isn’t nearly as fun to use. It’s no challenge.

Samuelson - a slender, bearded 33-year-old - is also into ham radio and model trains. “We’re all pretty much gadget freaks,” he says from beneath his R/C Hobbies cap.

West, then, is the gadget god. In his North Side home, one small room is set aside as a retro silicon shrine. Eight computers line the walls. Software boxes, old computer magazines and circuit boards are piled waisthigh. Shelves are stacked, floor to ceiling, with 5-1/4-inch disks.

A mess? Yeah, but West knows where everything is. And he has no high-tech pretenses. “I like old, cheap stuff, is what it amounts to,” he says. “I like to try things with a computer that I think will work. And if I blow it up it’s only about $20.” His idea of multi-tasking is firing up all his machines at once.

He has an old IBM XT clone, a Commodore 128 and an Amiga 500. His basement is the real vault, though - that’s where he keeps the Commodore Vic-20, a 16 kilobyte computer from 1980.

West loves to show the things off. “Watch what happens, observe and understand,” he says mystically as his Commodore bloops like R2-D2.

Shawn Hafen’s Atari Falcon isn’t all that old. It was discontinued in ‘93.

It primarily sold in Europe. That’s what the 21-year-old bookstore employee loves about it.

“I guess the reason I like Atari is it’s harder to get software for it,” he says.

Huh? Well, he loves the chase. He and friends had to chase down parts to assemble the machine, too.

The keyboard was German; Hafen had to rearrange some of the keys. He had to swap out the power supply; it wasn’t rated for American voltage. He rewired a Microsoft PC mouse so it would work.

Hafen runs a Web page, and spends hours in his Browne’s Addition apartment listening to the machine-gun drumming of techno music and surfing the Net.

“Right now, (software is) going through an explosion,” he says, excited. “People are really bitter at Atari (for dropping its computers), but they’re using that energy to come up with new stuff.”

What Hafen really hates, though, are wisecracks.

“When I tell people I have an Atari, they say, ‘An Atari? What do you do, play “Pong” on it?”’ Hafen complains.

Ron Hoffman remembers those “Pong” days.

About 16 years ago, the Spokane electronics technician was shopping for his first computer. He saw the Atari 800, all 48 kilobytes and 256 colors of it, and was blown away.

These days, he uses a high-octane version. His Atari now has 320 kilobytes of memory and is wired up to a 40 megabyte hard drive. “For the Atari classic, as we call ‘em, that’s a lot of storage space,” Hoffman says. He runs a bulletin-board system on it. And though everyone told him the “old workhorse” couldn’t pull it off, Hoffman found a way for it to display ANSI graphics on-line. That’s a graphic format used by today’s PCs.

“I know the thing like the back of my hand, so it’s like an old friend,” Hoffman says.

All the users of old machines aren’t attracted to them because of nostalgia or masochism. Tim Moore, who also owns PCs and Macs, still fires up his aging Apple II+ clone when it comes time for database work. “I haven’t found anything better for a database than AppleWorks,” he swears.

Tom Sandborn of Spokane militantly defends his love of the Texas Instruments 99/4A, unplugged from the market in 1983. He calls today’s machines “wasteful behemoths” that squander memory. By the time his Pentium gets fired up, “I could have a letter done” on the TI, he says.

And tubes came cheap. “You didn’t need expensive monitors or any of that nonsense,” Sandborn says. “You just hooked it up to the television and away you went.”

Fisk isn’t ready to give up his Amiga, either. A German company bought the rights to its operating system after Commodore went under, and an American company recently bought the rights from them. Fisk thinks the Amiga will be back. “Amiga people are the eternal optimists,” he says.

A word to skeptics: Don’t push Fisk’s buttons.

“What do you mean I have to do what Bill Gates said with Windows 95?” Fisk says, raising his voice a little. “My Amiga could do in 1985 what Windows 95 does now, only it did it with a quarter meg. And it was smoother.”

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Photo