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We have been trading since 1989, and over that time a good deal of hardware has passed through our hands. Some of it we kept. We threw away far more than we saved, usually because at the time it was simply taking up space that a rack needed, and we have regretted most of those decisions since. What survived is listed below, and much of it still works.
This is not a reconstruction bought at auction. These are the machines we ran, the machines our clients ran, and the kit we used to connect them to each other before there was an internet to connect them to. Our history tells their story, and a fair amount of what it describes is sitting on shelves in Lincolnshire.
What is listed here is only part of it. The rest fills two large rooms, sealed in argon-filled vacuum bags to keep it exactly as it is, and every so often something comes out for attention. An AlphaMicro AM1200 and its AM102 terminal have just been on the bench, broken, and are now working again before going back into their bag. The HP LH4s are the exception: they are not bagged yet, because they are enormous.
The same model, with an eight port serial card, ran our first dial-up trial.
The Communicators carried GEN email and storage to the field in 1998.
AlphaMicro was where one of our founders worked before 1989.
Racks of LH4s replaced our DEC AlphaServers.
Our first web hosting platform ran on AlphaServers.
Eight Pace Nightingales carried our first dial-up trial.
At its height we ran 80 of them, the largest Hayes Century operation in the world.
Hard drives, adapters, couplers and test gear, most of it in the argon bags.
GEN keeps a large archive of software, source code, manuals and documentation for legacy systems on the GEN WIKI. Only a small part of it is downloadable yet, because we have not had the time to curate it all, so if you are looking for something specific, ask and we will see if we have it.
If you are a museum wanting to borrow something for an exhibition, let us know and we will do our best to help. And we are always glad to hear from anyone restoring a machine of this vintage, whether you are after a manual, a disc image, a part, or simply confirmation of how something was meant to be wired.