Merger on the Leyton Orient Express :)

More about Merger on the Leyton Orient Express :)

I remember as a teenager in the 1970's making a number of trips to a large second-hand computer warehouse somewhere in Essex, past Maryland and Stratford, on the route to Southend, and looking at various old mainframes on sale for about £200 (!) each. (They originally would have cost over £100,000). I longed to buy one and run it, with its Hollerith card reader and top-loading disk drives. Unfortunately, as I was living with my parents at the time, there was no possible way it would have fitted in, and anyway it would have needed three-phase power and a concrete floor. So I bought random odds and bits, like a keyboard and a ferrite core store, none of which actually got used in the end -- they were among the recycled junk in my father's shed when I moved back in after my parents died in the mid-1990's. But I did have a bit of fun pulling them apart (the hardware that is, not my parents, lol) and learnt a bit of hardware tech along the way. I preferred software, though, because printouts and listings (and boxes full of floppies) take much less room than tons of mysterious hardware :)