Geek Haven #11

The airlock that leads into this circular room serves two purposes. Firstly, it minimises the amount of dust entering from the outside, with a powerful ceiling fan providing an air barrier as well as blasting loose debris from those who are entering. Secondly it offsets the interior-most door from the exterior wall so that your arrival into the room, through the second iris opening, delivers you into a large open central area.

The first thing you notice about this room is the sterility. It is very white and very clean. And beautifully lit from arrays of colourful LED lights set in the walls, the ceiling and from numerous themed lamps representing brands and characters of gaming yesteryear. More like the deck of a starship than the cozy bedroom den that was likely the original setting for the rest of the room's contents.

Around the entire exterior wall, stretching back from the edge of the central area is a continuous desk surface. Continuous in terms of filling the space, but actually broken up into segments which are individually height adjustable so that the supported equipment can be delivered to a comfortable position for bean-bag, desk-chair and standing use.

The desk segments are home to computers and consoles from all eras, connected to display equipment of various types and sizes. No effort has been made to house these, or even to manage the cables which snake all over the place with power coming from rings of sockets circling the room at multiple heights. Whoever specified this room clearly feels that "cable management" causes as many problems as it solves, or even that the wiring is part of the charm - don't be ashamed of what you are. It's certainly simpler if you will be regularly reconfiguring your setup. This is directly addressed by a wall banner of tractor feed printout with large ASCII Art lettering ensuring you that "clutter is cool - bless the mess". Beside that are two more similar art installations of a Ferrari and a reclining lady - ASCII never looked better!

This is clearly a personal collection rather than a comprehensive archive, but everything is set up and usable. And it seems to have been arranged in chronological order - upon entry the past is to your left and the near-present to your right.

The central area has a scattering of chairs and stools in various bright colours. Gaming seats, bean bags, a music stool, and sensible upright chairs with good lumbar support offer something for every session. All of the seats are currently clustered in the centre of the room. Maybe it was recently cleaned and left this way. Or perhaps the owner thinks that chairs are for wimps!

All around the room, above monitor height, are three tiers of shelves, mostly containing media and peripherals. Books, monthly magazines, game boxes, disk boxes, joysticks, and various other add-ons for each of the systems on display. 3d-printed game character book-ends separate the eras of media ensuring the Sinclair Users don't clash with the Amiga Formats.

Walking clockwise takes you past the following well-loved exhibits:
- Prinztronic Tournament Pong with light gun
- Sinclair ZX81
- Acorn Electron
- Commodore 64
- Commodore 16
- Commodore Plus4
- Amiga 500
- a pair of Amiga 1200s
- Sony Playstation
- Pentium II PC
- Nintendo Wii
- Playstation 3
- BBC Micro Model B
- Intel MacBook Pro
- Nintendo Switch
- Apple silicon MacBook Air

A ten-high stack of other laptops is evidence of Wirth's Law - the cynical corollary of Moore's Law - that "Software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware becomes faster". Whilst the computers with which this room's owner grew up will always have a place in the heart, this pile is just evidence of how we are happy to squander a valuable resource (CPU/RAM) for the sake of some shallow OS/UI fad.