Share Tweet reddit Email

Granit Falls, a city in the state of North Carolina was the center of a massive loss for the retro computing community. A warehouse that was being rented out for storage units and also held some small businesses, was also the home for the “Save the Machine Computer Preservation Group” which was consumed by the flames yesterday – luckily no one was hurt during the fire. The group organizers have reported that a small but very well-kept collection was lost during the fire. Derek N., co-founder of the group, sent a message with a partial list of the machines lost during the fire:

Hi folks, … You are correct that our collection isn’t huge, and we had a small selection of our machines in the facility that were lost. StM was part of Foothills Community Workshop in Granite Falls, NC. The workshop contained a full electronics lab, various server / IT equipment, full woodworking and metal working shops, ham radio station, laser cutters, and a science lab. All this with about 30 regular members. It was a really cool place to go spend a Saturday afternoon.

Off the top of my head, here are a few of the systems lost today:

Macintosh Plus

PET 4032-12

IBM PC (5150)

VIC20

Heathkit H8

Hewitt Packard HP-85A

Hewitt Packard HP-86b

AS/400 (eSeries)

Power Mac G4 Cube

IMSAI 8080

Sinclair 1000

A couple of DEC servers

Various G3/G4 machines

We don’t know the future of StM or FCW at this time. I can tell you, however, that we’ll maintain our Facebook presence and keep doing our best to save machines.