PC Galore

05/22/2026

The Most Important Computer Nobody Bought.

Meet the NeXT Cube, the machine Steve Jobs built after Apple showed him the door. All black and precisely 1 foot in every direction. Unapologetically obsessive. Just like its creator.
Three years after founding NeXT, Jobs finally unveiled The Cube at San Francisco’s Davies Symphony Hall in October 1988. It was an invitation only event, black turtleneck mandatory. He famously refused to invite a single Apple employee. One of the night’s showstopper moments? The Cube performing a live duet with a professional violinist. 
When Bill Gates saw it, his verdict was devastating:
“If you want black, I’ll get you a can of paint.”
Bill Gates was wrong. Again.
The Cube had built-in Ethernet networking when most PCs lived in complete isolation. A 256-megabyte magneto-optical drive that made floppy disks look prehistoric. Real-time audio processing through a dedicated DSP chip.  This was 1988.
At $6,500 — around $17,700 in today’s dollars, Byte magazine called it “worth every penny.”  The market disagreed. Only about 50,000 units ever sold.
But here’s the legacy that can never be taken away: Tim Berners-Lee used a NeXT Cube to build the World Wide Web in 1991. DOOM and Quake were developed on NeXT machines. And when Apple bought NeXT in 1997 for $429 million, the NeXTSTEP operating system became the direct ancestor of macOS, iOS, and every Apple device on earth today.
The Cube didn’t sell the world. It built it.
Come see this extraordinary piece of history at the PC Galore Museum of Technological Antiquities in Vancouver. One of the rarest and most consequential computers ever made — and it’s right here. 💙🇨🇦
🔗 https://pcgalore.com/museum

05/21/2026

Apple Invented The Smartphone and Killed It. Then Invented It Again.
1993. Steve Jobs is gone from Apple. CEO John Sculley needs his own “insanely great” moment. His answer? The Apple Newton MessagePad, a handheld computer you wrote on with a stylus. No keyboard. No mouse. Just your handwriting and a screen. In 1993.
The idea was genuinely revolutionary. A device offering handwriting recognition and AI technology in a mobile form factor at a time when even regular laptops were still relatively uncommon.
The ex*****on? Less impressive. The handwriting recognition was so notoriously unreliable it became a national joke and famously mocked in the Doonesbury comic strip for weeks. The press piled on. The damage was done.
But here’s what history forgets: once Apple actually got the technology right with later devices like the MessagePad 2100, which perfected the handwriting recognition system, Jobs had returned to Apple. And he had a verdict.
“God gave us ten styluses,” he reportedly quipped. Then he killed it.
February 27, 1998. Apple announced it would discontinue the Newton operating system and all Newton-based products. Developers lost years of work overnight. Loyal users were heartbroken.
But the Newton’s DNA never died. It was the direct precursor to what would ultimately become the iPad. The iPhone. Every touchscreen device you own today carries a little Newton in its soul. 🙏
Nine years after killing it, Jobs stood on that San Francisco stage and unveiled the iPhone. Touch screen. No stylus. Ten fingers.
He was right. And he was also standing on Newton’s shoulders.
Come see this beautiful, misunderstood pioneer at the PC Galore Museum of Technological Antiquities in Vancouver. Some failures change the world more than most successes. 💙🇨🇦
🔗 visit https://pcgalore.com/museum

05/20/2026

They Fired Steve Jobs. So He Built The Future Anyway.

1985. Apple’s board shows Steve Jobs the door. He’s 30 years old and furious.
His response?
“I feel like somebody just punched me in the stomach. I’m only 30 years old and I want to have a chance to continue creating things. I know I’ve got at least one more great computer in me.”
How prophetic..
He left Apple, started NeXT, and declared: “We’ll make a whole bunch of mistakes, but at least they’ll be new and creative ones.”
Then came three years of total secrecy. You couldn’t even see a NeXT prototype if you were offered a job there. In fact, you had to accept the position first. When Jobs finally unveiled it at an invitation-only gala in 1988, all black and perfectly designed, his own description was simply: “It’ll make your jaw drop.”
What you’re looking at is the NeXTstation Turbo Color. Only around 50,000 NeXT units were ever shipped. Rare doesn’t cover cover it.
And the twist? In 1991 a scientist named Tim Berners-Lee used a NeXT computer to build a little project called the World Wide Web. The internet was literally written on one of these.
Apple bought NeXT for $429 million in 1997. The software inside became the foundation of every Mac, iPhone, and iPad ever made. Jobs came home. And brought the future with him.
Come see this extraordinary machine — and the NeXT Bible beside it — at the PC Galore Museum of Technological Antiquities in Vancouver. 💙🇨🇦
🔗 https://pcgalore.com/museum

05/19/2026

The IPHONE 1
The Day Steve Jobs Changed Everything.

January 9, 2007. San Francisco. Steve Jobs walks on stage in his trademark black turtleneck and jeans and says:
“This is a day I’ve been looking forward to for two and a half years. Every once in a while, a revolutionary product comes along that changes everything.”
Then he paused. Looked out at the crowd. And said he was introducing three revolutionary products.
“A widescreen iPod with touch controls. A revolutionary mobile phone. A breakthrough internet communications device.”
The crowd went wild. Then he smiled.
“These are not three separate devices. This is one device. And we are calling it the IPhone.”
The demo had been rehearsed on a razor’s edge. The prototype could only make calls and browse the internet in a very specific sequence or it would crash.

Eighteen years later, the iPhone is in the pocket of over a billion people.
From the IMSAI 8080’s toggle switches to the iPhone’s glass touchscreen — every machine in our collection tells a piece of this extraordinary story.
Come see the original iPhone and dozens of other world-changing machines at the PC Galore Museum of Technological Antiquities in Vancouver.
History you can actually touch. 💙🇨🇦
🔗 Link - www.pcgalore.com/museum

05/14/2026

It Was Called The SuperBrain QD by Intertec Data Systems. SuperBrain QD was possibly the coolest name ever given to a personal computer, and one of the most overlooked machines of the early computing era.
Launched in 1979, this all-in-one beauty had screen, keyboard, and disk drives built into one sleek unit. Before “all-in-one” was even a marketing term.
Here’s the exciting part for the geeks among us. It had TWO Zilog Z80 processors. In 1979. The second one dedicated entirely to disk management. Dual CPUs before dual CPUs were cool. This computer dialed up to 11!
The QD — Quad Density — model doubled the storage of the original. Because regular density just wasn’t SuperBrain enough.
It even made computing history as the machine used in the world’s very first Kermit file transfer connection in 1981. The protocol that would go on to link computers across the globe.
Sales hit $17 million in 1981. Then IBM arrived and By 1986 the SuperBrain was gone… yet another brilliant machine that deserved a longer story. 💔
We’re glad to be telling it.
At PC Galore, 32 years in Vancouver has taught us to never underestimate the underdog. From legends like this to your iPhone, tablet, or laptop — we’ve got you covered. 💙🇨🇦
📍 Vancouver’s friendliest tech team. Come say hi.

05/13/2026

They Called It The Trash-80.
Meet the Radio Shack TRS-80 Model I circa 1977. The nickname “Trash-80” wasn’t exactly kind. But the sales numbers? They shut everyone up real fast.
Radio Shack spent less than $150,000 developing it. Executives thought they’d sell maybe 3,000 units a year. The guy who designed it, Steve Leininger, boldly predicted 50,000.
They sold over 10,000 in the first month and a half. 55,000 in the first year. The switchboard at Radio Shack was paralyzed with orders. Nobody saw it coming.
The monitor was essentially a recycled black-and-white TV set with its tuner removed. Storage? A cassette tape player. Glamorous it was not. Revolutionary it absolutely was.
At $599, it came with 4KB of RAM, a Z80 processor, a monitor, cassette recorder, and a tape with Blackjack and Backgammon. Date night was set!
While Apple II launched the same year at $1,298 and Commodore PET at $795, the TRS-80 at $599 was available at over 3,000 Radio Shack stores worldwide and helped transform personal computers from a hobbyist curiosity into a mass-market product. The people’s computer.
One ended up in the Smithsonian. Not bad for a Trash-80.
At PC Galore, we’ve loved computers like this one for 32 years in Vancouver. From cassette tapes to cloud storage, from 4KB to 4 terabytes — we’ve seen every chapter. And we’re still here, making tech simple and friendly for everyone. Want a tour of our museum? Check out our website and book today!💙🇨🇦
📍 Vancouver’s most experienced and friendliest tech team. Come visit us!

05/12/2026

The Most Badass Looking Computer You’ve Never Heard Of.
Meet the Ithaca InterSystems DPS-1. Black chassis. Blazing orange toggle switches. The kind of machine that looks like it should be running a James Bond villain’s lair.
It started as Ithaca Audio — a Cornell University grad named Steven Edelman reselling hi-fi stereo gear to his classmates. Then he pivoted to computers, scraped together a bit of money and set up shop in a tiny rented space in a college neighbourhood.
The DPS-1 was a Z80-powered S-100 bus microcomputer. It launched in 1979 and immediately punched way above its weight, landing contracts with Bank of America, CBS, General Electric, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and NASA!
Let that sink in.
It was arguably the last enthusiast computer ever built with a full classic front panel of data and address switches and lights. The end of an era in one gorgeous, orange-toggled machine.
Then came IBM. IBM PCs dominated the market and sadly InterSystems ceased operations by 1986. Gone. But never forgotten — at least not by us.
Some computers changed the world. Some just looked incredible doing it. The DPS-1 did both.
At PC Galore, we’ve spent 32 years in Vancouver surrounded by machines like this one…the ones that dared to be different, that built the foundation for every device you use today. From toggle switches to touchscreens, we’ve seen it all. And we’re still here to help you with every bit of it. 🇨🇦💙
📍 Vancouver’s most experienced and friendliest tech team. Come say hi!

05/11/2026

05/11/2026

The Woman Tech History Forgot.
Two bored housewives. $6,000. And an idea that would change everything. 
In 1976, Lore Harp and her neighbour Carole Ely decided they were done with suburbia and started a microelectronics company out of their homes. No tech background. No Silicon Valley connections. Just nerve. 
They called it Vector Graphic. In its first year they did $1 million in sales. 

By 1981, revenue had hit $36.2 million.  Lore took Vector Graphic public on the NASDAQ and became the first female founder ever to do so.  In a room full of men who didn’t believe she belonged there.
At the very same 1977 West Coast Computer Faire where Apple launched the Apple II, Vector Graphic was just a few booths away, launching their own machine.  Nobody talks about that.
Then came IBM. The company was slow to pivot to the IBM PC standard, and faced poor managerial decisions and mistimed advertising. Lore stepped away, the company declined rapidly, and despite returning in 1983, she couldn’t save it. Vector Graphic was sold. Gone.  💔
But Lore? She kept going. She and her husband later donated approximately $350 million to co-found the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT — one of the largest gifts to a university in history. 
Not bad for a housewife from Westlake Village.
She didn’t just break the glass ceiling, she built a computer company underneath it. 🙌
At PC Galore, 32 years in Vancouver has taught us one thing: the best tech stories are almost always the ones nobody tells. We’re telling this one. 💙🇨🇦

05/08/2026

“Get your feet off my desk, get out of here, you stink, and we’re not going to buy your product.” — Joe Keenan, President of Atari, 1976, rejecting Steve Jobs’ offer to sell him the rights to what would become the Apple I.

Steve Wozniak sold his Volkswagen. Steve Jobs sold his programmable calculator. Together they scraped together enough to start Apple Computer Company in a garage in Los Altos, California. The Apple I , about 200 hand-built circuit boards in wooden boxes was their proof of concept. The Apple II was their masterstroke.

In 1977, the Apple II arrived as one of the world’s first fully assembled, mass-produced personal computers: a real keyboard, a colour display, sound, graphics, and a floppy disk drive, all in one machine. It wasn’t a kit. It wasn’t a circuit board. It was a computer anyone could use. That was a radical idea.

And radical ideas? We respect those deeply. 💙

At PC Galore, we’ve spent 32 years in Vancouver doing our own radical thing, making technology simple, accessible, and friendly for everyone. From the Apple II to your iPhone, iPad, laptop, or smart TV, we’re here when tech feels complicated. Because everyone deserves to feel confident with their devices, no matter their age or experience.

Joe Keenan passed on the future. We never will. 😄🇨🇦

📍 Visit us in Vancouver — Vancouver’s most experienced and friendliest tech team.

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