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Unless you have something singularly unique, like a Cray or something, I very much doubt your old computer gear is of value to anybody.

You could donate your Cray to the museum and replace it with a scale model, like this enterprising chap did.

Check out what it takes to read a Cray disk pack from the 1980s. That is the challenge with digital formats. http://www.chrisfenton.com/cray-1-digital-archeology/

That's not a format problem; it's a media problem.

The big problem with analog recordings is that the media and the format are inseparable. With a digital copy, you can migrate it losslessly from medium to medium forever, so long as you're diligent about it. With analog media, you have generational loss every time you migrate it.

Check out what it takes to read a Cray disk pack from the 1980s. That is the challenge with digital formats. http://www.chrisfenton.com/cray-1-digital-archeology/

Welcome to the real world.

In the starting days of the automobile, the horse farmers and buggy whip manufacturers managed to come up with all sorts of insane fucking laws. For instance, these. In a few states, you had to have a flagman walk in front of your car (yes WALK) waving a flag and beeping a horn to "warn" drivers of horse-drawn carriages that one of these crazy horseless contraptions was coming through.

Eventually, good sense prevailed, and the buggy whip manufacturers fell to their proper place in history... but some of these crazy stupid laws remain on the books, just unenforced.

Likewise, we'll probably see the same thing happen here. "Piracy", as the MafiAA goons tell it, is killing their ability to rip off artists of money. Sooner or later, the artists will find a way to make money that doesn't involve the goons and the illegal MafiAA price-fixing monopolies. It's already starting to happen. "Piracy" is also, thanks to fucked up copyright laws, becoming the only way to preserve our digital history; in the meantime, plenty has been lost, such as software for the Cray-1 that wasn't preserved and that can't be run on other platforms. The Apple II/e library is preserved only because "pirates" have preserved most of it and crafted emulation for it. Similar for most of the early Commodore computers, the Atari lines... DosBox almost REQUIRES that you have "pirate" software that ran on 5 1/4" disk in order to run it (e.g. "copy the disk") for some of the oldest stuff it runs, but modern computers don't even have the connections required to attach an actual 5 1/4" disk even if you could find media that hasn't succumbed to bit-rot.

It's impossible to say that copyright is meaningful when so much of "copyrighted" products today is covered by a law that lasts 100x longer than the expected platform lifespan. That's just ridiculous on the face of it and deliberately breaks the contract between copyright holders and society, which is that the copyrighted work WILL enter the public domain as repayment to the public for the grant of LIMITED duration monopoly.

He hooked his own analog-to-digital converter up to the read-head and post-processed the heck out of it to recover the data.

http://chrisfenton.com/cray-1-digital-archeology/

The real problem is, the longer copyright terms get, the more works are lost for good.

Don't believe me? Think about how many books "under copyright" may be lost simply because nobody preserves a copy. Think about how many films are lost merely because the original source, moldering under "copyright protection", went bad in the can down in the vaults of some MafiAA member and either is unreadable, or perished in a vault fire (early nitrate stock is NOTORIOUS for being susceptible to both).

We almost lost an amazing amount of black gospel music before a few concerned citizens stepped in; we STILL risk losing a large amount of it due to MafiAA meddling.

And that doesn't even discuss the loss of computer programs for formats and computers that won't expire copyright for decades, but are functionally already dead - the guy who built this is having a devil of a time finding software to test it with, merely because disk packs weren't maintained and SGI apparently wiped most of their archives. Or the various game consoles, or early home computers where most software was stored on highly volatile and quickly-degrading floppy disks...

The 1970's called, it said you are low tech. Here's an example of a single TTL board from a VAX. There must be about 300 individual TTL chips from the 7400 series on it (where one chip has 4 nand on it, etc). The left 29 boards in this VAXare the cpu.

It is very noble to build your own CPU architecture with your own instruction set, however building CPUs out of gates in individual chips is just an exercise in wasting money when you can do the same thing on FPGAs, like the guy that built an entire Cray-1 on an FPGA development board. A more impressive project, the visual 6502 in javascript, made by scanning the actual chip and rebuilding the circuit out of individual transistors on the die, proves you don't even need hardware.

From TFS:

All software is available if you want to build one for your own living room. The largest obstacle in the project is to find original software."

Um... why not just click on the little link provided there?

Depends alot on your definition of laptop.

Chris Fenton, living in NYC, made his own laptop, based on a picaxe microcontroller.

http://chrisfenton.com/diy-laptop-v2/

Picaxe controllers are sold by a firm in Bath, UK

http://www.rev-ed.co.uk/

I'm guessing a picaxe is a pic controller with some proprietary firmware on top.

pic controllers are made by Microchip out of Arizona. Their environmental health and safety page implies they might be involved in Thailand, maybe.

Now, I have no idea where the copper wire was made, where the LCD screen was made, batteries, etc. Theres alot more than just the microcontroller.

Ask and ye shall receive

The idea of running Linux on a PicAxe microcontroller must excite a lot of people... Every link to a project or explanation of "linaxe" results in 404 errors and more 404 errors.