[intro sounds] Hello!.. and welcome to the Home Computer
Museum, in Helmond, in the Netherlands. This place is amazing! There's so many machines here. Rare ones too, which we need to have a look
at. We need to all these machines. All of them. Yessss. On the 1st of February, Octav1us and I, flew
out to Eindhoven in the Netherlands, and then, thanks to Bart... "OK, so we've been picked up at the airport. This is Bart." -"Hello!" "Who, what's your position at the museum?" -"Err, I clean the toilets"
"He cleans the toilets, at the museum..." Drove about 10 miles to Helmond, where the
Home Computer Museum resides. We had been invited to the opening of the
museum's new, larger premises on the 2nd, and given that a return trip on Ryanair was
about £50, and the museum looked AMAZING, I thought, why the hell not? We also had the opportunity to take a look
around when it was closed, giving us free reign over these incredible and rare machines... There's some organisation here, so, here we've
got a row of Atari STs. We've got the original detached keyboard version
of the ST here. Next to Commodores, Commodore 64s, Tandy Colour
Computer 3, look at all this equipment! Tandy 1000. This is a huge gathering of machines. Apple IIGS. This thing. Look at this! Looks like it's out of a Nuclear... Amiga 2000. Apple Mac 20th Anniversary, over there. We've got TRS-80. This is a rare...this is a TRS-80 Model 16B,
which came after the model II. Don't touch that! That's MY computer. Here's one of the original TRS-80s, which
apparently, some bloke, owned from new in 1978-79, and he didn't get rid of it until
2001, and it came here, and it has been fully upgraded. Look over here, there's a Commodore Kim 1. There's a Sinclair MK14. There's an Acorn System.... The consoles, are very much kind of relegated
to the sidelines. This is more of a computer museum. But, there's still an area dedicated to it. Which, you know, is nice! Then we get a massive line of IBM PC Compatibles,
and the like. So, this is a row which dates most operating
systems up to XP. We've got XP here. We go back to Windows Millennium edition,
unfortunately. Windows 2000, 98, 95, OS/2, Windows NT 4,
and it's paired with relevant machines to match each operating system. It goes all the way back to Windows 1. A Laser Turbo XT Machine. So, we're going to take a look at this museum,
and look at some individual computers in more detail, and get a feel for what's going on
here, because, this is a good place to be. Plus, we've got one of these bikes, which
we never really had in the UK, but apparently they were popular in the Netherlands. I tried one. I nearly died. <grunts> <ARRRGHHHH> <Laughter> THE SEAT! [Pumping sounds of the citadel] Woahhh! -Woaahh! Look at this! This is the Piece'de'resistance! The highlight! -What year is this from? -90s? --It's errr. We bought it 2 days ago. --It's an original! [Back to pumping sounds of the beat] -Look at this! That is... the highlight... it's better than
that doughnut, we found yesterday! -It really is! Look at that! -It's AMAZ! Real Life Spice Girls. The Official Story! -Is! Look, it's all the stories about all of the
girls. We should make a video on this! Boyfriends, Spice Portfolio
-Bit of Spice. Can't go wrong. Just having a meal! Look at that. -Look at them. They're all hanging out. That. Look at this! There's pictures drawn by them... look at that. -They're the fans. Not them. Ohhhh
-They were like 20 at the time Ohhhh, ok [PUMP] Evidently, there's a lot of wonderful toys
here. I could spend a week just looking at them,
but I decided to catch up with Bart van den Akker in the archive area to discover how
this museum came to be, whilst also being distracted by the incredible number of items
there were back here as well. [Soothing jazz] I'm a weird guy. I started with Tandy, so... my first computer,
I ever touched, was a TRS-80 Colour Computer II. Then, a few years later, we received our first
IBM clone, which was also called 'Clone'. -'Kloon'? Clone? It's basically, the dutch translation for
clone. -Oh is it? It's just called 'CLONE' Yes! -It's like, what shall we call it? Just CLONE. <laughs> -That'll do! --Just whatever, like. I was always interested in computers, and
at some point, I saw this Philips P2000C, standing there, and I thought, let's try it. See what I can do. I was around 10. So, I bought it for 10 Guilders, and dragged
it home. 10 Kilos, on my bike. -On a bike!? --That's amazing! And then suddenly, people starting giving
me all these computers, and at first, it was the first computer I got, I think it was an
MSX. Then somebody gave me an Amiga 600, and that's
where the sh*t happened. Because that was the most beautiful machine
I've ever seen. Amiga 600. By the time I was 16, I had 35 computers. -When you had friends over, were you just
like...which computer do you want to use?? You think I had friends?! -Well, you know, it was a bit of a long shot. -So, how did you get the funds together to
start this? I did a Kickstarter, and it failed. Out of the blue, I got a call from a guy,
and he said, I really loved your idea. So I'm going to invest the full amount of
money, in you, so you can get this museum up and running. And, together with my own money, and a I got
a little money from, the local city council. Got a little bit of money, not much, but in
total we had about 25,000 euros, to start the museum. It was really hard work. Absolutely, it was crazy, and I had so many
pains. Physical pains. -Yeah, I bet. As soon as people knew what we were planning,
people started to donate by themselves. So I think, by the time we opened, we had
400 computers. The last count, we did, we were at 1,500. -Woah. Is this the only storage area you have? Yep. -Looks like you're probably going to need
to expand it again, quite soon! It's getting quite full. -That's what I was looking at. --Oh yeah! yeah! This is a heavily modified Commodore Vic-20,
and it was made, entire case was made by a guy, and he really, really did his best. -Wow. Everything is, so so neat. -Look at this cardboard fan holder. It's amazing. And this one, was meant to copy. The only purpose it had was to copy cartridges. -Oh really? Yeah. They went to fairs, and just copied cartridges. -So was this, used in the 80s, was it? Just to.. Yeah "Did I hear you right, did I hear you saying,
that you're gonna make a copy of a game without paying??!" [Beats by blae] There's just so much to see here. Too much to condense into a reasonable length
video. I mean, look at this Commodore Media Tower. This is a device from 2006, shortly after
the Dutch company Yeahronimo Media Ventures, had nabbed the Commodore brand from Tulip
Computers. It comprises of a dual screen tower, with
a Windows based PC running below the surface. The idea was a one-stop media kiosk, serving
up music and films, all downloadable on request. A user would walk up, choose what to download,
connect their Commodore Navigator media device and off they go. It wasn't successful, and only a handful were
made, which makes it all the more desirable. Behind that is device for printing vinyl characters. I love it has all the individual font cartridges
inside. You know, this is the eclectic kind of random
and rare old technology, chucked together, in one place, that I really like. A bit like a larger version of my office... But rather than darting about, I thought it
would be interesting to focus on a few specific machines from the shop floor. So I roped Bart in to give us a run-down,
starting with the very machine which kicked this whole collection off; the Philips P2000C. It runs CPM.
-it runs DOS with an expansion card, right? Yep. There's an 8088 expansion module, you can
put in, with 512KB of memory. It has two Z80 CPUs. So it boots up using one Z80, the other Z80
is used for I/O and video. And from CP/M you can start special command,
and then you can boot into MS-DOS. Drives are 640KB, so it's also quite interesting
as they're really special drives. Because they can read -everything- you throw
at it. -So they're double sided, double density. Yeah. -So what games did you have with it? Do you remember? Yep. I had a few games. I still have them, because, they're basically
the only games that ever came out for this machine. I had a game called Maze. I had a game called Ladder, because, that's
a CP/M game. All CP/M games. Chess, and one sort of adventure, text adventure. This is a Dai Computer. It's a Belgium computer actually. It's a computer that's really rare to have,
even in the Netherlands, or Belgium, they're considered extremely rare. We also have this disk interface, with it,
which is even more rare. The Dai Computer, was originally intended
to be a Texas Instruments TI-99. Because Texas Instruments refused to make
the TI-99 available for Europe, so they asked the Belgium people, can you make a computer
for us? Intel 8080. The machine has 48KB of memory. Has 16 colours and 4 voiced audio. For that time, 1979, 1980, really extremely
powerful machine. But Texas Instruments decided, that they are
going to release the TI99, so they said to the Belgium people, thank you, but no thank
you, we do not need it. So they had this machine, and they didn't
know what to do with it, but yeah, ok, let's release it! So they did. They released the Dai Computer, as it's own. When Dai decided to release this one, it used
Texas Instruments chips, and Texas Instruments found out that they are releasing a computer,
which was basically intended for them. Making Texas Instruments, refuse to deliver
chips for this machine. Mean-while, in the Netherlands, we had Teleac,
as it's called. They were making a course, and we're still
talking about 79, 1980, so before the BBC, and they decided, we're going to make a course
using this computer. So Teleac only had 1,000 computers delivered,
from Dai, and Dai couldn't deliver anymore, so they went to another computer, the Exidy
Sorcerer. The Dai kept on going, for another two years. 1982, the original company went bankrupt,
then InData took it over and sold the computer for another two years, and in 1984 it was
completely gone from the market. The InData version, is a colourful logo. You see "Dai" in several colours. The original one is a green one. So if you see the difference between those
two. That's the story behind the Dai. So, here we have the Exidy Sorcerer. For those people who are reading along, yes,
it says CompuData, but I will tell you why. Exidy is from 1978. Exidy was known for it's arcade machines,
and after the Commodore PET and Apple II and the TRS-80, Exidy decided to get the best
of all worlds together in one package. It's a Z80 based machine. It could run BASIC. It's runs CP/M if you want to. It's all running in ROM packages, you can
put them in the side, called PAKS. It also has the S100 expansion unit. So it's fully S100 compatible buses in there,
and it also houses a disk controller inside, meaning you can actually connect a disk drive
to it, as you can see here. These are hard sector drives, so these are
really rare to get, and really hard to copy, but we still have them. But, for some reason, Exidy never got really
good sales, in North America, where the company was. But, as I just told about the Dai computer,
the Dai couldn't deliver, and they had to search for another company. They chose Exidy Sorcerer as the system for
the course, so, on the television, books and everything was on the Exidy Sorcerer. So, the Exidy Sorcerer, was imported to the
Netherlands, and the company CompuData was made just to import these machines. In America, basically, Exidy stopped producing
computers, and sold all the rights to produce computers, to the Dutch people, to CompuData. CompuData then started to produce these computers. In 1983, the successor of the CompuData System
one, or, the CompuData Exidy Sorcerer was the Tulip System One. So CompuData changed their name to Tulip Computers. This one, unfortunately, is not working. It is doing something special, quite extraordinary
though. For some reason, it can't find it's normal
RAM, so it decides to boot on it's video RAM, meaning you can't do anything. As soon as you do something, try to load CP/M
or try to put in a BASIC, it will use that memory, and it can't find it, so it will crash,
so.. hehe. So over here. This is the very first computer that ever
said Tulip, and it still says CompuData. That came out exactly one month before IBM
entered the market, in the Netherlands (1983). So this is not an IBM PC Compatible. Came out running CP/M 86, but soon they decided
to run MS-DOS. That's probably the end of that. It is a very odd system. It has a very strange video output. It has a really strange output for the disk
drive, so when booted up, it will just ask for a disk drive, and I don't have a disk
drive, so it's effectively not doing anything here. [Sponsor] So, on my travels, I discovered that the Dutch
love these sprinkles on bread, for breakfast, and I might have developed a small addiction
to them, which is why I want to thank this trip's sponsor, SurfShark VPN, because with
them, I can get cheap flights back to the Netherlands.... Oh yeah. You see, depending on where you're logging
in from, things on the internet are often very different prices. If I was to buy plane tickets from the UK
to Eindhoven, I might find that they're £80, as it reflects the price those residents are
willing to pay. BUT, if I was to login from a different country,
perhaps India, I might get a significantly cheaper price. And that's just one of the benefits that Surfshark
VPN can bring you. You see, when you log into their VPN (which
is incredibly easy), you can effectively access the internet appearing as if you were in a
completely different country. This not only brings savings, BUT it also
makes it virtually impossible for you to be tracked on the internet. So if you want some Dutch sprinkles, or anything
else for that matter, click the link below to use coupon code NERD and get 83% discount
and 1 month extra free with Surfshark VPN. Let's get back to the sprinkles... errr, I
mean museum. Let's get back to that. [Sponsor end] [Musak] So let's recap on our learnings so far (not
the sprinkles). We've learnt that the Dutch, actually beat
the UK with their BBC learning project. We've learnt the Dai had some problematic
importing issues. We've learnt that the Exidy Sorcerer did pretty
well off the back of it, and we've learnt that the Dutch brand, Tulip Computers, who
bought the Commodore name, were formally known as Compudata. I've enjoyed learning about all of this. But if there's one Dutch computer that I really
wanted to know more about it was this, giant hulking thing. -Like, I don't know how to do anything
What is this?! -What's this keyboard?? This is actually a Dutch computer, and, the
original... -How do you pronounce it? A, A Aesth-ed-es? I like your pronouncia... I don't know, because, the guy who created
it is dead, so. -Oh ok! I call it Aesthedes, because I have no idea. This is created by a person called Mr. Claessens,
he was born in 1922, and in Eindhoven, he created his first design company, just to
design and draw. Then he moved to Hilversum, and in Hilversum
in the 70s, he found out that there were a lot of requests for digital design, so computer
aided design. And, there was no computer back then [that]
was able to do that. We're talking about Apple II, PET-2001, Tandy
TRS-80. They were just not capable of doing design. So, he found a few very, very smart people,
and he put together a computer, with his idea to have designers sit behind the desk, and
start to design without any knowledge of computers. 1980, the first machine was released. The first Aesthedes, having 10 Motorola 68000
CPUs. -Woah. It had three colour monitors, the same monitors
as they are here. You can display 16 million colours. There are three green screens on the bottom. They show data, and the original Aesthedes
had an 8 inch drive. This one, the 2nd one, has the 3.5 inch drives. And this one has 68020s inside, including
the FPUs, the 68882. -How many does it have? Four. -Four 32 bit processors? Yep. There's also a keyboard in here. Don't say, this is not a keyboard. The main keyboard is, one over here. -Wow. How clicky is it? Not. -Oahh, it's a bit squidgy. The original Aesthedes cost no less than 300,000
Guilders. We're still talking about 1980 at that point. -What does that translate to? Errr, roughly. I'd say, half a million euros. -And that's without inflation? That's WITH inflation. -That's with inflation. OK. Which is quite significant. -So, the idea is, you've got the drawing area
here, and then all these, are for effects. It's the hardware version of Photoshop. -So we've got a bank of DRAW, buttons here,
so we've got POLYGON, POINT TO, MEASURE, FRAME BUFFER, PAINT, SMUDGE, PIXEL, so yeah, it's
got all the functions you would expect on PhotoShop, but on a MASSIVE keyboard. I actually found it on the Dutch eBay, and
I picked it up. I can tell you, it doesn't fit in my van. But, we drove all the way from near Amsterdam,
or Hilversum to here, which is normally a trip of 1 1/2 hour, with my van sticking out,
with this computer in the back! THERE WE GO! -And this, how much does it weigh, did you
say? Two hundred and seventy kilos. -Two hundred and seventy kilos. Yeap, including the monitors, yes. Now hopefully, we start this year, is going
to fix this, and get it up and running. -Which would be amazing. Yah -To see it in action. Yah, and it will draw a LOT of power, I can
tell you as well. -Yeahh! Haha. You're gonna have to put your prices up! Yeah! Probably. The logo of Heineken, and the logo of Amstel
beer, on the bottles from the early 80s, is made using Aesthedes. -Is it? Yep. -Wow. And this was sold especially to car manufactures,
to design. I know Volvo had one, Volkswagen had one. -So, do you know how many roughly there were? I have no idea, but given this has serial
number 1,483. -Quite a few then. More than I'd expect. Yep. But I'm not sure if.... I don't know which number they started with. Maybe they started with 80, and then only
sold 3. I have no idea, but, the company still exists. Mr Claessens died, and I got it from his daughter,
who had this in storage, and we try, that's one of the goals we make, is to fix this machine
and get it up and running, so you can design like it's 1985! -Excellent! Now, at this point, we've probably climaxed. In all senses. Of course there's much more to see and do,
but really the best way is to experience it. Because this place really is an experience. They haven't got all the wall paper up yet,
but a lot of these machines are in era themed setups. What really makes this place, isn't just the
computers and their stories. It's also the 70s chairs, coupled with the
vaneered 70s desks. Or the matching table lamps and cassette caddies
sitting alongside these unwieldy jugganaughts. The moment you sit down in that space, it
feels like you warped back several decades, and that's really what it's all about. The emotions that these beige and yellowing
boxes produce. Sometimes you just need a striped chair to
invoke a feeling of undeniable 70s exuberance. If that's not enough, then you could always
have a blast on a game created in 1979, Akalabeth: World of Doom, for the Apple 2. This is an incredibly rare game, and actually
the pre-cursor to the Ultima series, created by Richard Garriott and featuring one of the
very first implementations of a dungeon in first person 3D. And that sort of thing isn't out of the ordinary
here. Rare machines, rare games, rare accessories,
rare chairs, even rare table lamps. It's all here, waiting for you to salivate
over. If you're local to Helmond, or thinking about
going to the Netherlands, it's worth taking a trip yourself, just to get down and dirty
with these glorious machines. I've got to give a huge thank you to Bart
for inviting me over to the opening, and to the volunteers at the museum for doing such
an excellent job. It was really great to meet everyone involved. If you want a more detailed insight into our
exploits, including visiting Helmond castle, you can find a full vlog of the trip on my
Patreon page.. JESUS Christ! -Join my army. <laughs> No, you're alright. <childish snigger> with access given for all supporters. Alternatively, if you want to see what wild
and questionable antics we got up to for Octav1us's video, I'd suggest checking out her channel
and clicking the subscribe button. Oh no, you're going to the wrong platform! It's on platform four! -Where's the platform?! Platform four! It's there. Platform four. No, you missed the train. -I'll catch the next train. No, you're on the train track! You're literally walking across live tracks! In the mean time, thanks for watching and
have a great evening. <clicking> -NOSTALGIANERD- -FOLLOW ME ON YOUTUBE- [Funky music out]
