I found out about the NABU PC from Adrian (Adrian’s Digital Basement) on November 15, 2022, and ordered my first NABU unit (he had also ordered one) with the idea it might be useful for parts down the road.
Adrian’s first NABU video on YouTube went public on November 26, 2022. It was up earlier, on November 20, 2022, for his Patreon supporters. Adrian found out about the NABUs for sale on eBay from another retro computer friend.
The sales of the new old stock NABU’s had passed around in a few forums and other social media places on a limited scale during this time prior to Adrian’s video being created. James (PellMill eBay seller) had also been selling them on his local Craigslist.
Leo Binkowski, an ex-NABU computer programmer (1982–1986) informed the NABU Community of the following earlier today (December 12, 2023):
“This is actually my third try to resurrect NABU. I tried by myself in 1995. Then when I found out York University was trying to recover the project in 2009, I recovered most of the titles you see today. I was told a book was being written about NABU at that time, and all of the software I recovered stayed locked up at York U.
Tim Ranger, the author of Laser Attack, NABU Galaxian, and NABU Q*Bert with me was actually the one who emailed me about Adrian Black’s video, around the time it came out. I had long given up searching the internet for mentions of NABU.”
DJ Sures first video about NABU on his YouTube channel was posted on November 22, 2022, when it arrived at his place, so it seems Adrian, myself, and DJ all ordered within a day or two of each other based on when we received them.
Leo Binkowski reached out to DJ Sures in the comment section of his first NABU video, introducing himself to DJ, and DJ replied in part, “Really great to meet you, Leo,” then asked Leo in a follow-up comment, “If you can share your software, my project would be very appreciated!”.
Basically, once Adrian’s original video hit his 100K+ subscribers on November 26, 2022, the NABU craze really took off, and once Leo started providing a few of us with his original NABU software cycles from 1984, which was first provided to the York Museum back in 2009, it was like pouring gas on a fire.
As shown on the Internet Archive Wayback Machine for December 3, 2022, Leo’s nabu.ca domain name was still pointed and redirecting to the York Musuem website:
It was around December 7, 2022 when Leo started pointing his nabu.ca domain name away from the York NABU Museum page and let DJ Sures put up his NABU-related site to showcase his “RetroNET cloud server” Network Adapter emulator software project:
On December 5, 2022 this NABU Network (NabuNetwork.com) website was launched to help expand and spread the NABU computer knowledge reach.
One year later, many of us have created all sorts of cool NABU stuff (Internet adapter software, floppy drive controllers, serial cards, etc.). Without Leo providing the cycle software, none of this would have happened, at least not as quickly, for sure.
-Sean