The last couple of weeks i’ve spent some time at the Danish Data-historic Society in Ballerup, Copenhagen, figuring out the history of a Danish Built computer we had donated.
The machine consisted of a white metal box with no markings on it, two floppy drives and a generic composite monitor. The machines had two Zilog Z80 processors, and the floppy drives where 800k with the capability to read several different cp/m floppy formats.
It was built by a young high-school teacher and his wife in their home in the early 80’s, he just finished engineering school and took up teaching to earn some money, and when it was announced that the schools was about to start teaching computer-courses he’s colleagues suggested that he’d build some computers for the school, and so he did!
Only around 400 computers where ever produced before the creator realised that he would not be able to compete with the big players on the market.
When i got my hands on this computer, i could not find any public records about this computer or the company, i searched through every public register i could find, and got in contact with the previous owner of a company who imported portable computers in the late 80’s and up until the 2006, but this was a dead end.
By pure luck we discovered the email that was sent to us when the computer was donated, contained the address of the “factory”, and armed with that address i was able to look up the old company registration, find the name of the CEO, luckily he had a relatively unique name so i could easily find out where he lived, and contact him.
So i did, and luckily he agreed to help me, first i interviewed him to hear the story about these machines, which is more or less what i shared in the beginning of this article – and secondly, he promised to help me get the machines working again.
Which mean i now have yet another project for this spring!