Mastodawn

Ernie Smith Jun 28, 2023

I have waited three months to share this with y’all.

In the fall of 2022, literally thousands of computers flooded eBay, with a brand name few knew, at a rock-bottom price of $59.99 plus shipping. A YouTuber did a video about them and the machines—2,200 in all—went viral.

Where did they come from? Why were there so many? I spent the last few months determining this answer. And well, it’s a story.

For @Motherboard, the story of the NABU Network: https://www.vice.com/en/article/ak3k34/2200-forgotten-vintage-computers-are-being-liberated-from-a-barn-in-massachusetts

2,200 Forgotten Vintage Computers Are Being Liberated From a Barn in Massachusetts

The NABU Network was an obscure, forgotten part of Canadian tech history—until the day the internet noticed that thousands of NABU machines were being sold on eBay at rock-bottom prices.

Show thread

Erik Ableson Jun 28, 2023

@ernie @Motherboard @lisamelton I came so close to working for Nabu back in the day. This is a wild story 30 years later

Show thread

AGMS

@erik I worked at #Artech Digital Entertainments, which turns out had originally done #Nabu games (some sort of programmer sharing or split or subcontracting resulted in Artech - a mystery).

They continued on with Commodore #C64 games (B.C.’s Quest for Tires was famous). Though I joined in the 80386 MS-DOS era, with Super VGA and 640x400 graphics.