Category: Uncategorized

Since 2025 word of the lab has been spreading and we’ve received several visits from journalists, which in turn has spread awareness of the lab among the local community and led to many new donations of equipment. Cael Byne, “UWM Urban Spelunking Episode 3: RetroLab,” UWM Post, September 5, 2025. Read and watch it here.…

Over time the lab collection has expanded with donations and the occasional purchase. But in May with class looming the next semester, I had to turn my attention to maintenance. Old computers don’t always stay working ever after being restored to full functionality. During a visit of the IEEE Computer Society student chapter it became…

We’ve added the quirky and little-loved IBM PCjr to the lab’s collection of functional computer systems. Here’s what we had to say about this little-loved machine in A New History of Modern Computing (pages 222-223). When I wrote those words I’d never actually seen one in person, still less had the opportunity to probe the…

A retired business school professor passed on a well preserved Gateway 2000 486 system in an original configuration, which would have been a $3,000 computer when it was sold exactly 30 years ago in September 1993 (there are date stickers on all the components, making this easy to pin down). That’s more than $6,300 in…