Rich's Random Retro Reviews

Another one of my saved searches on eBay is for BeOS related things. Unfortunately these days  this search seems to pull back Bang and Olufsen stuff - which I definitely cannot afford but every now and again, something properly BeOS pops up.  This little beauty came up for auction and was listed at £4.99. Within the last 30 seconds, it still had no bids, so I put one in for £4.99 and waited. I wasn't too bothered if someone else bid on it but I thought it would look cool in my CD wallet, next to other obscure software CDs. Turns out I won the auction so I paid and a few days later this turned up.  Now I did have a 7300/200 that was another buy from eBay a while ago - which in theory this would have run on, but I had to have a cull of machines in early 2022. I was up to about 11 Macs at that point and I was getting moaned at as they were everywhere - in the garage, under the bed and anywhere else I could store them. So this will have to sit th...

I've had an eBay saved search for a particular item for what must be the last nine years. It has been for our very first PC we had back when I was 13-14. No, not the Packard Bell - they're relatively easy to come across, no this was a Digital Starion 917. Digital as in DEC - as in Digital Equipment Corporation. As far as I'm aware, DEC PCs weren't sold here in the UK - or if they were I certainly don't remember ever seeing them in magazines or in shops. Ours was bought from a US military PX (Public Exchange) that as a member of the Royal Air Force, my Dad was allowed to use when we lived in Germany. They sold food, clothing, footwear and many other American things we couldn't get in the German or British stores.  When visiting the store once, they had a really decent deal on a PC, which my Dad took advantage of. The PC was the aforementioned Digital Starion 917 and he bought the matching 17" monitor to go with it. Until that point we had been using an LC475...