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Vintage Computer Festival in San Jose
K2 noted the Vintage Computer Festival taking place in California ... apparently MIT does this too (not that this matters to us midwesterners). At least there's a lot of interesting looking reading material on the site that those of us who aren't there can read (the true Apple story, archives on vintage computers, petitions to sign wrt releasing specs of vintage hardware into the public domain etc).
Those who are interested in the MIT event should probably check out the flyer.
It's a relatively well-attended event, although the hardware (and software) available ranges from antique (vacuum tubes and all) to the relatively new (PII-range tech). Decent prices, however, and you can generally get whatever you're looking for.
What qualifies for this distinction?
:) For cars this is easy; anything over 30 years or so. But in the computing industry, where machines advance fast enough that something two-three years old is out of date, where is the line drawn?
I mean, I can reasonably deduct that anything from the 70's and earlier is going to be a good qualifier, but what other lines of machines can we expect to see?
Their website doesn't seem to go into much detail on it; would this include the first Macs that hit shelves? How about my old Amiga 500? An itty bitty Sun IPX?
What is classified as a "vintage" computer?
Is a place to get rid of all the "vintage" computer stuff I have now. I'm starting to run out of storage space!!!
jred
www.cautioninc.com
jred
www.cautioninc.com
caution, inc.
jred
I'm not a mechanic but I play one in my garage...
Nothing like the Slashdot effect on a vintage computer.
/. load. I got the first graphic loaded before the site slowed under the pressure. Either that, or the web server is a TRS-80...
I guess everything is vintage under the
Linux - Because Mommy taught me to Share.
Vintage Computer Festival?
Is that anything like a Renaissance Faire?
"Hail and well met! Prepare to eat fiery death from my Vic-20, knave!"
love,
br4dh4x0r
/. is a commercial entity. goto slashdot.com
If you can do without the couple of pennies you'd earn by selling it, several charities would most likely be happy to pick up your used computer equipment. I know from experience that Good Will will gladly take whole systems dating back to the IBM PS and PS/2.
If what you've got is just loose components there are still options. There is a charity, "Computer Bank Charity" if I remember correctly, here in Seattle that takes older computers and computer parts, rebuilds and refurbishes them and supplies them to lower income families - an effort to breach the "digital divide". I'm certain there would be something along those lines in your area.
A previous slashdot article about computer charity in general : http://slashdot.org/askslashd ot/00/07/01/226259.shtml.
Ad in classifieds: Pandora's Box (no box) $5
Slashdotted methinks (stuck loading front page).
Cheap trick gets round slashdot effectso you can actually read something and be able to post with intelligence ;) is :
use Google's Advanced Search and search vintage.org for a word like "computer" or "old" like this :-) and load up the cached pages of the site
should work for any slashdotted site, just pick a word not too generic to be eliminated by Google's engine bu tlikely to appear on every page, and enjoy the cached files!Don't you just love Google?
Karma whoring for my /. soul please look away if this is obvious to you
The Festival site links to a petition on an important topic (well, important to vintage computer users anyway): legalizing `abandonware'.
These old computers would be even more useless without software, and a few thousand signatures might help convince some of these companies to release their old, all-but-forgotten software into the public domain.
So, go sign the petition, before it gets slashdotted too.
Like that ancient PIII-933 I got a month ago? Yes, those were the days. I remember when I was the first person on my block to get a near-gHz PC... I was the envy of everyone in my country. For a mere $4000, I was on the cusp of gigahertz processing... opening up 87 instances of Microsoft Word was never easier.
Ah, but those simple days of pre-gHz processing are all but gone out here in the real world. Being the leading edge guy I am and obviously needing to keep up with the times and after hours of putting it off, I finally made the upgrade to the 1133 mHz P3.
Oh, sweet nostalgia! The 1133 performs as well as my pre-pre-gHz 850! Why, it seems like only months ago when the most I could get out of my desktop was a paltry 180 fps in Q3A. Happy days are here again!
How did our ancient pre-gHz brethren survive with such quaint technology?!
J
Old computers. Old video games. These are a few of my favorite things...
San Jose, here I come!
And the brethren went away edified.
I suspect there are several things that would help classify a computer as vintage.
I'm guessing the most importaint factor is that it has been abaondoned by its maker. Things like a Sun 3 are vintage while a sparcstation 1 isn't (yet). A PDP-11 and most vaxen are but the Microvax isn't yet at least till the end of the month.
I also expect that a minium of 5 years (or should it be 10) is needed. My web server is running on a Sparcstation 1 that is now over 11 years old and its not vintage yet so maybe 10 years should be the cut-off.
I do know the the first computer to do music that they are installing accross the street from my house counts as vintage since its now 50 years old.