Relics: Tiny Computer Museum

Relics is a little museum of home computers that never existed: eight invented machines from 1978 to 2003, each one hand-drawn, each with its own boot sequence, its own operating system and its own secrets.

REAL BASIC YOU CAN PROGRAM
Magpie, Ember and Satchel start straight into BASIC, written from scratch for Relics. Type 10 PRINT "HELLO", then 20 GOTO 10, then RUN. FOR loops, GOSUB, arrays, strings, DATA, INPUT, INKEY$, colours, PLOT and DRAW, BEEP. Break stops anything, CONT carries on, SAVE and LOAD keep your programs on the machine's own disk. Each machine ships with example programs to list, run and pull apart.

EVERY KEY WORKS
Every key on every on-screen keyboard types, including the symbols BASIC needs. A hardware keyboard works too, and you can paste a whole listing in at once. Each key has its own click and a light tap of haptics.

THE BRITISH MICROS
Three invented machines from the years when Britain learned to program at the kitchen table. The Ember: a little black rubber-key slab whose colours bleed when they cross, and a tape that takes its time. The Satchel: the school micro with a > prompt, teletext-style pages and a queue to use it. The Magpie: the whole computer in one sloping keyboard, plugged into the telly.

AND THE REST OF THE COLLECTION
- Lattice-8 (1978): a mail-order kit with a hex monitor and notes left by its builders.
- Quill (1987): a one-bit desktop with a menu bar and a waste basket.
- Bastion 5 (1995): a grey tower that boots to a working prompt. DIR, CD, COPY, EDIT, batch files and AUTOEXEC, then a taskbar desktop.
- Yolk (1999): a translucent egg with a dial-up modem and an offline 1999 web to browse.
- Folio (2003): a slate notebook with a glossy desktop and balloons nobody asked for.

GAMES, FILES AND SECRETS
Every machine has its own original game, a text editor, a paint program, a file browser with hidden files and a terminal with secret commands. Find them all and earn medals.

PERIOD SOFTWARE ON EVERY MACHINE
- Bastion 5: Keep Patience and Four Gates card games, the Tally calculator with its paper roll, and the Night Watch screensaver.
- Quill: Abacus, Jumble, Bell, Pastebook and Turnabout, a one-bit board game.
- Satchel: Bellhallow Keep, a 25-room castle game; Detention, a school-after-hours text adventure; and Moon Hauler, a wireframe freight run round the moons of a gas giant.
- Ember: Wick's Round, a lamplighter platformer that loads from tape.
- Lattice-8: STEWARD, ten years running a hill co-operative.
- Magpie, Ember and Satchel: a type-in listings magazine each, which can type its programs in for you.
- Yolk and Folio: chess against the machine, a jukebox of original chiptunes, and a buddy list of five scripted characters who live inside the computer.

HAND-DRAWN, NO AI ART
Every case, icon, font and screen in Relics was designed by hand. Every name, company, logo and operating system is invented.

MADE FOR IPHONE DUO
Half-fold your iPhone Duo into a laptop and the screen stands up on the top half while the keyboard and pointer lie flat under your hands. Open it like a book for the screen on one page and the keyboard on the other. Relics works fully on every iPhone and iPad too, with the screen above the keyboard.

No ads. No in-app purchases. No account. Nothing leaves your phone.