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Old Computers

I've had various computers of an IBM-PC variety, from an authentic IBM 8086 twin floppy drive with CGA colour, IBM PS/2 286 with weird expansion ports and 60gb hard drive, Dell 486 DX/100 (played Doom, Descent and Duke Nukem incredibly well), generic 233Mhz AMD 32mb PC - that had Voodoo 1,2 and 3 cards in it over its life time, a 1.4 GHz AMD with 1Gb of RAM, two laptops - but out of all that I only still have the laptops and my trusty ZX Spectrum +3 from 1988 - my first computer.

Some of the PCs died a natural death, others were sold and one was thrown away by accident (still annoyed about that because it was the 1.4GHz machine that still had plenty of life in it - and a new 200GB HD :() - all in all not a bad range considering I didn't exactly have much money to buy the stuff (most of them were old when I got them).
 
GregC said:
In my office I have a 486sx25 with 4mb ram 400mb hd running dos 6.22. It has windows 3.11 but I don't use it at all. I use this to run two old dos programs that I can't get running properly on any newer boxes. One of the programs was written for a 286. The 486 is too fast for it. When I need to create a project on it I need to create it on a floppy disk and then copy it over to the hd. If I try to create the file on the hd the program bombs. If I even try to run the program in dos mode on a newer box it crashes. The other program will run on a newer machine but will not print properly. I don't print that often so I would use my main computer for it but as long as I have to have the old box for the first program...
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Sounds like you need a programmer to get that puppy updated.

I used to have a TI 990 with a reel-to-reel tape drive on it. Sold it on eBay for like a hundred bucks. I went through a period of selling off all my stuff which I'm starting to regret. If it still turns on, I just hate to throw it away.
 
Gaspode said:
I have an Sony Vaio PCG-F305 laptop which I bought in Jan 2000. It has a Pentium 2 366MHz, 64MB RAM, 6GB disk and Win98SE. I've upped the RAM to 192MB and installed Windows Xp Home and up until late last year I was still using it for surfing and Word documents.

It does struggle with the latest versions of current software (Adobe 7 barely runs at all) so I installed Linux Redhat which should make it last a few more years. If only I can get Redhat to talk to the wireless card.

The only reason I can think that it's lasted so long is that I rarely took it out of the house so it didn't get bashed around like most laptops.
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Please disregard my earlier post. I've just got the thing out of a cupboard, switched it on and it just switches itself off a few seconds later. Oh well.
 
Gaspode said:
Please disregard my earlier post. I've just got the thing out of a cupboard, switched it on and it just switches itself off a few seconds later. Oh well.
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Aww.

Another one bites the dust.

A moments silence please.
 
a_unique_person said:
I gave away my hand soldered, made in Australia, Z80 S100 CPU board to Zep, for preservation in his computer museum. It even came with blue prints. Unfortunately, I tossed them out. I hope he manages to save it for posterity, even if it's just in some cupboard till a few geeks in 100 years or so wonder what went on in the dawn of personal computing history.
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I think I still have my hand-soldered, made in Australia Z80-based Microbee in the garage somewhere.

I've also got a Micro Professor. Anyone remember those?
 
It's not as impressive as some of you guys here but I still have an IBM PS/2 (286, 10 meg disk) running DOS 6.22 and some _very_ old games and a 486/66 running W95 and some _fairly_ old games. My networked boxes are reasonably venerable, too: a P2/350 running all the grunty stuff and a P3/800 storing files and stuff. Both running Fedora Core 3, massively patched: in common with my hardware, I only upgrade software when it really needs it.
 
The oldest computer I have is a Spectrum 48k, but it is in its original box, tucked inside a bigger box, stored in my garage. I doubt if it would work on my new digital tv.

The oldest working pc I have is an HP Pavilion running an AMD K6-350 with 384 megs of RAM that is temporarily on loan to my daughter and her fiance. I have to go round periodically and decontaminate it, because one of them insists on surfing porn sites and gets all sorts of nasty viruses. It struggles a bit with newer software. No, it struggles a lot.
 
The Whether Man said:
The oldest computer I have is a Spectrum 48k, but it is in its original box, tucked inside a bigger box, stored in my garage. I doubt if it would work on my new digital tv.
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You'd be surprised what you can do. Lots of people have knocked up all kinds of interfaces - SCART and such. The electronics of the Spectrum is pretty simple so there's a strong hardware modification community.
 
Zep said:
At work, I regularly support a few commercial machines that date back to the early 1980's, and there's a plethora of them from the early 1990's still out there running fine even now. One particular 10-year-old system I managed until recently regularly clocked over 700 days continuous 24x7 uptime supporting real users running real apps, not just the odd spot of network traffic. And it's still running today...
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The primary computer system at my work has code which has essentially been untouched since it was written in 1978 (in Basic!). It still uses flat-file "databases" to run everything!

Good news is that it's hack-virus-trojan-worm proof. Nobody writes anything today which can touch it.
 
The oldest I have is a 256 processor as in megabytes, those were the days... Computer games used to actually be good back then, and dos worked perfectly. I wish I could ditch windows and use dos again. Windows is just a bug riddled waste of processor power and RAM. Still some people here have some really old stuff, I can't match that. Mine only comes from the early 90s.
 
Starthinker said:
Sounds like you need a programmer to get that puppy updated.

I used to have a TI 990 with a reel-to-reel tape drive on it. Sold it on eBay for like a hundred bucks. I went through a period of selling off all my stuff which I'm starting to regret. If it still turns on, I just hate to throw it away.
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Ge that's funny. When I try to create the project on the hard disk the error message says to contact the programmer.
 
GregC said:
In my office I have a 486sx25 with 4mb ram 400mb hd running dos 6.22. It has windows 3.11 but I don't use it at all. I use this to run two old dos programs that I can't get running properly on any newer boxes. One of the programs was written for a 286. The 486 is too fast for it.
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You probably could try running the program in an emulator like Bochs. Bochs isn't very fast to begin with and you can also slow it down by specifying how many instructions per second you want it to run.
 
malbui said:
It's not as impressive as some of you guys here but I still have an IBM PS/2 (286, 10 meg disk) running DOS 6.22 and some _very_ old games and a 486/66 running W95 and some _fairly_ old games. My networked boxes are reasonably venerable, too: a P2/350 running all the grunty stuff and a P3/800 storing files and stuff. Both running Fedora Core 3, massively patched: in common with my hardware, I only upgrade software when it really needs it.
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I used to refurbish/resell old computers and got a truckload of PS/2's including a pile of servers (9595, I think, something like that). They must of had a cult following because my phone started ringing off the hook. People were actually tracking these things from where they were found to my shop. In about a week they were gone (about 200, and about 10 servers) except for 2 and a server because I wanted to set some up in my house to see what all the fuss was about. Since you can't get microchannel stuff anywhere and they were already old and outdated at the time I really couldn't see why anyone would want them. I kept asking the buyers and they would just tell me "they're better." Okay, more power to them.

They still had OS/2 on them. Did that die out with the PS/2? I managed to get Win98 to run, but it was nothing to write home about.
 
Starthinker said:
I used to refurbish/resell old computers and got a truckload of PS/2's including a pile of servers (9595, I think, something like that). They must of had a cult following because my phone started ringing off the hook. People were actually tracking these things from where they were found to my shop. In about a week they were gone (about 200, and about 10 servers) except for 2 and a server because I wanted to set some up in my house to see what all the fuss was about. Since you can't get microchannel stuff anywhere and they were already old and outdated at the time I really couldn't see why anyone would want them. I kept asking the buyers and they would just tell me "they're better." Okay, more power to them.

They still had OS/2 on them. Did that die out with the PS/2? I managed to get Win98 to run, but it was nothing to write home about.
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I imagine they're buying them for the spare parts.... reminds me of the NUTJOBS who insist on using the old 3Dfx Voodoo graphics cards. You'll find them on a gaming bulletin board asking how to get their copy of Morrowind to run on a Voodoo 3... and they insist that the video quality is better than anything out today. :rolleyes:
 
My current desktop is a Dell PIII-500 running Windows 98SE which still works just fine for what I'm doing right now. I didn't upgrade from my old 486/66 running Win 3.1 and Dos until 2000, when Turbo Tax stopped supporting Windows 3.1. I have a barn full of old stuff, including my original Tandy Color Computer (with a full 64K ram!), my first PC (an Epson 286 that I used until 1995 and still works), and a host of other scrounged junk I can't bear to throw away, including a couple of original Compaq luggables, an IBM 3270, assorted XT's, etc., and a few odd bits like 10 megabyte Bernoulli boxes and buckets of cards, parts, mice, and the like. One of these days I'll have to clean it all out, but they charge to throw it away.

My newest computer is a 2002 Dell laptop. I also have a couple of older laptops, including a nice Toshiba running windows 95 which I have more or less dedicated to running a labelmaker.

Every once in a blue moon I find myself able to do something with all this stuff that nobody has any more. A couple of years ago, while searching for something on the web, I found a plea from a fellow in California whose Bernoulli box had died and couldn't find anybody who could salvage his library of stored programs. He ended up sending me a huge box of disks (they're about 10 inches square), and I was able to bodge up one of my drives, read the contents to an old 386, laplink that to my old laptop, copy the contents of all those disks to a zip disk and then use the zip disk to burn a CD on my laptop. He was very pleased. A little later, I answered another plea from a person whose old Epson with MFM drive had died. His wife's doctoral thesis material was on the hard drive, and it wouldn't boot. He sent it to a hard drive recovery service and they had no clue what to do with it. They didn't have any machine that could read a 20 meg. MFM drive! So I put it in my Epson, set the bios, got it to boot one last time (glitchy HD), laplinked it to the laptop, etc. and he also ended up with a CD of the whole shebang.

But one of these days I really will have to clear some of it out.
 
I still have two Alex terminals. That won't mean anything to anyone other than Canadian geeks. Yes, I know it's not a computer. It's still relevant.
 
jimlintott said:
Cool. What is it?

Most desktop PC users are unfamiliar with the reliability, stability and security that is available on big iron. Most desktop users think the occasional crash is normal and expected.
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VAX 4000-105A plus VAX 4000-705A VAXclustered, OpenVMS 6.2. It was regularly doing 6-nines uptime or better (only the very occasional extended power outage took the cluster down).

Alas I'm no longer managing it, and it has since been relegated to providing historical data. However the replacement system (Windows + SQL) has cost over a million dollars and hundreds of thousands of manhours to implement, and still it doesn't come close to the same functionality and reliability. The people managing it have got a definite CTL-ALT-DEL mentality when it comes to "fixing problems". And to be brutally frank, I feel that Windows has still to fully step to the plate in the server robustness stakes...
 
Girlfriend has a 600MHz PC with 10MB HD and 256MB RAM running MS-Office 97 and yes XP. A little sluggish at times but works fine overall and still her primary PC (uses it mostly for telecommuting, paying bills, and light 'net research). Has had it I think 6-7 years now, which has to be some kind of record.

I wish I had some older PCs, including my first PC, a 386, just for nostalgia.
 
Mmmm.

Only two mentions of Macs and one of them is a guy with a computer museum.

Didn't someone in the Mac vs PC thread say that Macs have a longer life span. Wonder where they are?

:D
 
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