A look at the wonderful, weird world of retro phones

How many of these do you remember?

Somewhere in my collection I actually have a Motorola ROKR E1, the disastrous result of a joint venture between Apple and Motorola. There's also a Nokia 9300i, Nokia 770, Nokia 7380 and Nokia N91. Yeah.. I own a lot of phones. Quite a lot of them are weird.

These were the days before the iPhone and Android, where the biggest smartphone fight was still between Microsoft and the all-powerful Nokia. But most people had old-fashioned dumbphones instead.. a lot of which were clamshells. Do you remember them?

Need a new PDP-11 or VAX?

As a former VAX 11/750 admin it give me a little warm glow to discover that there's still a company out there making PDP-11 and VAX compatible systems, only with more modern components in a unit that you can fit in a rack rather than a whole room.

These systems are really aimed at military and government customers who can't migrate mission critical systems (often literally mission critical) to other platforms. You can assume that these boxes are probably not cheap.

Of course, you'll probably want a terminal to go with it.. and the old DEC VT520 (now made by Boundless Technologies) is still available for a fairly hefty $550 a pop.

You can do it in software too with an emulator called CHARON which has a free version for noncommercial use. You can't stick your ancient Qbus cards on that though.

Now, if this Multics emulator ever gets made then that would be super awesome.