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Obsolete Hardware Piling Up
loosenut writes: "The SF Chronicle has a lengthy article about the disposal or recycling of old computers, many with toxic components. If you are like me, you probably have a couple of 486s and Pentiums sitting in a closet somewhere. What is to become of these ancient beasts?" Read to the end of the article and it notes that Europe is planning to force manufacturers to recycle their products at the end of the product's lifespan.
Please, people, I implore you as someone who's job it is to support working computer systems.
If your computer is sufficiently old, say, slower than 333-500MHz, dont give it to someone else -- DESTROY IT!
Old technology (and the people who, unknowingly, cling to it) hold us back in so many ways.
We shouldnt have to have things like ISA, serial or parallel ports, floppies, POTS modems, etc on modern systems -- they're there because of the curse of backwards compatibility. Our systems would be so much faster better and more stable than ever, if we could remove every last vestige of that obsolete buggy-whip junk.
I'd urge manufacturers that still have drivers and technical information on these products to destroy every copy of it -- the quicker these products die off and become useless boat anchors, the better off we'll all be.
C'mon now...technology was MEANT to be disposable.
It's just a tool, dont get attached to it! When it's lived out the lifetime of it's product cycle, bury it, burn it, crush it, or otherwise redender it permanently inoperative -- the tech support workers of the world will thank you.
Are you tired of high lag times in games, low bandwith, and a long time logging in and having your web site keep being hacked into?
Then AOL internet is for you.
Infact, I was just playing quake3 arena on a 28.8 modem with very high ping times using AOL. I GOT DOWN TO 450 ms! Beat that mindspring!
With AOL internet webspace you get a cracker proof site that is very secure and high performance based. After all most crackers love AOL and would never touch a techy website thats on AOL because they know real geeks use AOL!
Those guys at AOL sure know how to make a great internet experience, their service is just so cheap compared to a regular ISP rates.
With AOL you know you are having quality. Just log into slashdot with an AOL account and mention how much you like AOL and watch your karma go straight up. Slashdoters and hard core internet users love AOL so much that even Alan Cox has an AOL address.
IIRC, doesn't Germany force car manufacturers there to produce their cars (for the local market only?) in such a way that they could be 100% recycled when they are, er, dumped?
If this is true, then why not force computer manufacturers to make their hardware to be ~100% recyclable (heck, even s/w makers could probably rethink their packaging!)? I am sure there can be a way of not using non-reusable plastics and similar materials in the making of computers/peripherals/etc.
The ultimate might be: since form factors are quite standardized, why not encourage re-use of parts from used computers, like the chassis? Instead of trashing it, why not recuperate a perfectly sound piece of (passive) hardware like that?
Computer companies age soon going to have to provide some sort of incentives for tradein of old machines before we're overrun with the obsolete beasts of yesteryear. In some cities such as where I live it's hard to dispose of monitors, the city simply won't take them and does no provide any suggestions. You can't imagine how many ancient 12", 14", and 17" monitors are in my basement. Luckilly they do take old worthless computers so I (and more importantly, my wife) were able to get rid of the old 386, 486, pentium, and early pentium II machines.
The computer world simply travels far too fast to keep up with the disposal of machines that have outlived their usefulness, we need a better program to handle these old clunkers.
Serial ports, null modems, and Telix.
I don't see why any hardware should be disposed of, a older 486 can still do work if it's given the right task. I think we are too quick to decalre computers useless. think before you send it the way of the buffalo!
Of course, the Linux server can add up as a firewall/internet gateway! What more would a small company want?
How about security?
Having your main fileserver double as a firewall is a Bad Idea. Throw a little 386DX33 and a pair of NICs up to handle your modem or DSL line. I'm not certain if a 386 can handle a full T1 (I know a P75 can fill the pipe without problem) but the message is the same: Firewalls work best when they also aren't full of doors, windows and conduit holes. Keep the network firewall seperate.
Many of the public schools don't need computers. They need textbooks! Funny how they often can afford new team uniforms every year, coach salaries, etc., but can't seem to find the money for basic things like books. Now it would certainly help if they could use the same books every year (we did...my algebra II textbook was from the 60s...math at this level doesn't change, so why buy new books -- teacher's & principal's opinion). That is, if the little shits did lose or tear them up.
the good ground has been paved over by suicidal maniacs
Man, I love the Goodwill Computer store here. It is so bad ass. Did you see the Apple Lisa they had running? or that NeXT cube? I called one of those computer museum things about them.
the only thing I can imagine bad about using such old computers is power consumption. but I haven't done any research on it so I'll just leave it at the level of potential concern.
-l
Help cure AIDS, cancer, and more. Donate your unused computer time to worldcommunitygrid.org. Join Team Slashdot!
At least my wife thinks that our home is where old computers come to die.
But seriously, a thought that might be a little offtopic but still on the subject is the vast ammount of computers that isn't getting "trashed" due to linux and enthusiasts that makes use of "obsolete" hardware.
There isn't any numbers on this but I know from observation that most people into linux keep old computers (sometimes collects them) for minor services like a home built firewall/router.
The point I'm trying to make is that if it was a windows world you would have _a lot more_ computers getting "recycled".
The effects could be that few would write drivers for older hardware and hence the hardware gets older faster raising cost.
// yendor
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It could be coffe.... or it could just be some warm brown liquid containing lots of caffeen.
If you are around Montreal, Canada, I would come pick up the Atari ST. A 512 ST was my first computer ever ... fond memory of hours lost to Dungeon Master !
Paying the shipping ain't worth it, but if you are around Montreal, mail me at egoyer at praeneste dot com. I'll be pleased to help you get rid of it ... :)
:wq
If you send away an old computer to a school they might initially do a small saving compared to buy new equipment, but in the long run I believe the school will suffer enormously from having a diverse range of out of date hardware. The service costs must get enormous since all computers are very different and old parts keeps breaking down and have to be replaced so things will have to be reinstalled. All computers will also have to be configured individually since some are too old and slow to run the same OS and programs as the latest ones. I can understand the benefit of a big company donating a large batch of almost identical computers to a school though, but I also believe that donations to schools just are second grade sollutions, government should push in enough money to keep the schools with a healthy machine park since the kids are our future and investing in their knowledge is a good investment. Graciously providing schools with old equipment that is "just enough" might in worst case actually counteract its purpose since it then might get harder for the school to demand money for new equipment.
The second idea of keeping them around as routers and firewalls is also something I see as doubtful in the long run. Compare for example the power consumption of an old 486-66 with a modern dedicated router without any moving parts. Add to that other factors as the likely breakdown frequency, space requirements, noise generation, air flow needs and risks like causing fires due to old dusty hardware that will run very hot if a fan breaks down and I doubt that it's a saving in the long run.
Giving them to schools and institutions in third world countries or just playing with them yourself or giving them to a relative who might need a second word processing computer to use when the kids play on the family's main machine might still be a good idea though, but I doubt many of the suggestions given here.
We love old 486/Pentium boxes here! Our firewall runs on freesco and thanks to the LTSP project, we have equipped everyone's desktop with a low-cost X terminal. There is a write-up of what we have done for anyone who cares. The beauty is that we have incredibly low cost-of-ownership, don't care if anyone breaks in and steals the stuff and it is totally silent in operation. The biggest complaint in the office now is the noise of the damn clock ticking. It has been a wonderful experience, they don't break down, you can boot one up from anybody's desk and get your own desktop ... send me as many as you have got!!
Yeah so far this year I have found a working Apple PowerBook and two working laser printers in trash heaps near my home. Sick! I clean them up and either keep them if I don't have one already (like the first laser printer) or give them to public schools.
What you fail to relize is that 60% of the technology being made right now is created by people who learned to do things with these very 286/386/6502 computers. (The other 40% is by people to whom the concept of a personal computer was far fetched) There's this creeping black box mentality that's taking over the tech world that tries to limit low level contact beyond what is neccesary for abstraction. There are some fundamental skills that can be learned when the entire cpu can be understood by an individual without computer aid. I will admit there are a few embeded systems that similarly fill this role, but you can't afford to outfit a class with them.
As example my old Apple ][+ has been a stereo controller, midi synth, assembly teacher, x10 controller, and lego mindstorms precursor. All this with me building the controlling hardware... at age 7 thru 16. (well, i wasn't allowed to solder till 10, but breadboards are better anyways). I learned some fundamental logic skills that will be usefull for all time. Where as I run across people (young-un) that never had to deal with less than a Pentium that have trouble with complex boolean logic.
Where was I rambling with this? My argument is that old hardware taught the current generation fundamental skills that are used today. Until you can prove that something else fills this requirement it is logically sound to attempt to teach the current learning generation (5-18 years) about this same hardware.
And as a total asside, the power issue is valid but schools represent a large enough capital force to invest in alternative energy. (There are a couple of schools in my state that have erected wind generators. I'm sure the SW could look into solar, several schools built on garbage landfill are using methane generators)
USA-Democracy is 270 million YESes and NOes a day, not one every four years.
Sounds like a covert way to send our trash to the third world -- and it doesn't solve the long term problems.
Not to mention there's the basic issue here that this idea really doesn't solve the basic problem that the equipment is basically hazardous waste -- all it does is hand it over to those who have no chance of disposing of it safely.
I don't agree that the advanced economy does cause them. Computers are clearly far less toxic than e.g. cars
In an advanced economy, you'd have cars as well (-; In any case, it's simply not true that giving a country computers will cause a shift to a high-tech based economy that would make pollution go away (there are a ton of very questionable assertions in that statement). The problem is that giving them computers would not have a major impact on other problems (I doubt it would destroy polluting industries, for example.)
Are computers "hazardous" waste?
Yes, they definitely are. (did you read the article?)
No, they earn substantially more than $25k. IT job market, tight ? There are still a lot of people with no talent, no qualifications, no skills, and no interest who can get jobs.
...and I'm a Linux bigot.
Being able to configure Linux helps me as a software developer, but wouldn't help _most_ people.
Operating Microsoft Office, or a clone like OpenOffice, is required in today's professional environment.
Joe
Joe Batt Solid Design
I've got a 6 year old 486/33 Thinkpad running RedHat 4.0 that's been my printer server for the last 4 years. It will be retired in a couple months (donated to Goodwill Computers in Austin TX) to be replaced by a state of the art Pentium/133, 32M RAM, 13.5 GIG IDE disk, running Debian. I expect that machine in that configuration to provide completely satisfactory service for the next 6-8 years as a printer server, file server, and eventually network firewall. Once it becomes a firewall, I'll probably put OpenBSD on it.
To be truthful, my two major apps are vi and g++, and that machine was NEVER inadequate for those tasks. The only reason that I have a superfast Celery 300A was to run Jane's USAF.
To make even better use of old hardware, that P/133 machine won't have a monitor. It's going to be configured with a serial line console, and my Compudyne 25Mhz 386SX laptop running MS-DOG and a term program will sit right on top of it. I bought it in 1992. With a bit of creative thinking, I finally found a new use for that thing.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
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I still haven't found a good way to dispose of the monitors and power supplies though...
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Drool, :) The best I've ever manged to get was a 25mhz 486sx /w MCA from a hospitol dumpster... there had been an AS/400 but it was already striped before i got there :(
really.. I think that people should start sending me their old hardware, I'm a complete hardware freak
Indys, yummy.
Well, actually, they are. Sort of. Virtually all current LCDs have some sort of backlight, and many older ones are actually flourescent tubes.
BTW, I've heard that the backlight in an LCD uses up to 25% of he power budget on a laptop. Can anyone add to this?
-- "They say that time changes things. The truth is, you have to change them yourself." (Andy Warhol, adapted)
I heard a while ago as well that places such as Africa actually OBJECTED to receiving 'old' computers as they 'didn't want to become the dumping ground for the rest of the world'.. They even said they would 'only accept a P166 or higher' ... sounds a bit of a snooty attitude to me. Free is free.
.. that'd be great.
So maybe you can't give them away.
PS: Not sure where I heard that story, if anyone knows it too and has a link
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Delphis
Delphis
Hmm, my small LAN is running a pre-MMX P166 as a firewall/proxy/webserver. Since a pre-MMX 166 doesn't requre a fan, and since the AT desktop case contains a fanless power supply, the only moving part in this computer is the hard disk. If not for the fact that we're stuck running NT4SP5 on the machine, it would be maintenance free...but as it is now, I just have to reboot it once every two or three months. There is NO single system solution currently on the market for a reasonable price that could take over the duties of this one computer, and still require as little maintenance.
There is nothing so pathetic as seeing a beautiful young theory roughed up by a tough gang of facts.
For those of you in the SF bay area (or Palm Springs), Computer Recycling Center is a good way to get rid of equipment you don't want. As the article mentions, they do their best to redistribute computers to organizations that need them. But even if a computer no longer works, they'll salvage parts from it for reuse, and recycle what they can of what remains.
As a Novell admin I must object :-)
Novell is simply less resource-intensive than the other common alternative from Redmond.
This reminds me, I should check out what my school is doing since I left it in 1997.
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Leonid S. Knyshov
Leonid S. Knyshov
Find me on Quora
Show me a collector who needs say 1500 Dell OptiPlex GXa's :-)
:-)
Corporate turnover is not measured in hundreds, it's measured in thousands.
There are not enough collectors
--
Leonid S. Knyshov
Leonid S. Knyshov
Find me on Quora
It's a 30 pin SIMM. :P
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Leonid S. Knyshov
Leonid S. Knyshov
Find me on Quora
More modern computers have lots of power saving features, so that whilst they may consume more energy whilst computing, they consume less for the 95% of the time they are doing nothing.
So it could be argued that dumping your old energy consuming computer is good for the environment.
P.S. Anyone want my 6502 BBC Micro and 68K Atari ST ??
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
I work at a recycling center where we do recycle computers.
The older units (386s and 486s) my mother is regularly suggesting we make a cluster.
I usually shot the idea down.
But then I can afford current systems so a 486 cluster isn't exactly useful for me.
She however is quite happy with a 486 laptop...
I don't actually exist.
After only a short time they'll be obsolete even by third world standards and be thrown out.
As these countries typically don't have the necessary recycling technology that means they end up as very dangerous land fill.
Computers contain large quantities of heavy metals and other disturbing materials.
Some think power is expensive in California but considering the typical income in a third world country it is MUCH more precious over there and thus little processing power at a high power consumption is not so great either...
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
Shit, we've gotten rid of ~10 indys just in my research group here at UCSD in the last few months. Indys are a dime a dozen from my perspective, and it's even got a frame grabber & stuff..
We give them to surplus sales, who sells them off in bulk I think. I have no idea what happens from there if they don't sell, though.
__ No registration required to read this message. They did it in the Matrix.
I'm all for the enviromental attempts to save the usefulness of the old PC's. But the material disposal of things we've already made is hard to get away from, eventually. It's a bridge we will have to cross, because that old 8088 is only going to run for so long.
If you have an old PC (or whatever) in your house, and you find a use for it (and can afford the power to keep it running.. not trivial here in CA) then kudos to you for the reuse part of the environmental equation. As to donating them to someone else.. they are going to suck a lot of power, and will eventually have a hardware failure. How long are old Pentiums designed to run? What will be the failure rate of the older hardware? I'm sure it's longer than the planned lifecycle today, but still it's not infinite.
As to the "give em to schools" option.. I would argue that schools need newer and better machines to teach people on, nothing sucks more than having to learn to tolerate Windows on an old POS computer which barely runs Windows itself and won't leave much room left to run anything useful. Additionally schools don't have much money for competent tech support/administrators and older machines generally require more of that.
Compatibility problems would be more frequent and troubleshooting is also bound to be more difficult.. since the hardware is old and not manufactured anymore.
For Example: Just the other day I was working on an old 486 PC w/modem (14.4) and forgot that you have to change a jumper to change the com port it runs on. Probably took me 2 hours to figure that out. How many people who didn't have a 486 in the first place are ever going to be able to fix shit like that?
let's spend some thought and find a useful and environmental way to junk em before, it's a bridge we're going to have to cross.
Just my $.02
__ No registration required to read this message. They did it in the Matrix.
c'mon ....I'm just throwing away my PII 300 Laptop with 3GB HD......
Really, this machine was a gift and I still use it for everything (Slackware Linux, KDE, Staoffice!, web, coding, etc) PROCESSOR SPEED IS OVERRATED, I just invested 80 USD into it by putting in a 128MB DIMM and I still hope ti use it for a couple of years...no MS Office to deal with
Actually, I have a couple of 486/66's with X on them that run apps from my Athlon machine. The Athlon doesn't feel a thing, and the kids can use NS6, Moz, irc clients, hell, they can even use Staroffice, and all at the same time!
For reference, I have 384MB RAM in the Athlon, but RAM is so cheap nowadays...
The 'old' computers some people here are calling useless get quite a bit of use here, all the way down to 486 machines. These work great for word processing and Internet access, among other things such as older (but still good) educational software. Ultimately the machines we have will need to be recycled somehow, but they're obviously of great use to us until then.
It's a shame that there aren't more *UGs and retirees out there contributing to this cause. Our two volunteers come to our site one or two days a week for a few hours and they keep us running very comfortably. One is a retired engineer and the other is his son. If it wasn't for them, we wouldn't have had any computers here the first two years we were open. Having visited a dozen or so other campuses, I can say that there are many other schools in the same position we were in a few years ago. Any teacher would attest to teh fact that an old working computer in a classroom is better than no computer in a classroom.
The volunteers have also put together computers from our parts bin for students that really want a computer at home to work but can't afford one. This has also proven to be a very good way to utilize old hardware. And the fact that the computers they get don't have decent fps just might be helping their grades anyway. :P
As for equipment failure, I would guestimate that about 80% of the equipment placed three to four years ago has been running without any problems whatsoever. Actually, the failure rate really isn't that far from the new machines that we have purchased. I guess that says something about how things are made these days...
So, bottom line... without volunteers, I would have to agree - old hardware isn't of much use to schools or other institutions without the means to pay someone to get the hardware working. But this would certainly change at any school if a retiree or a member or two of a *UG would donate a few hours of their time every month to a local school. :)
--SONET
Any fool can criticize, condemn and complain and most fools do. --Benjamin Franklin
I WANT COPIES OF MS DOS 1,2,3,4,5 WIN 1.0 (exists?),2,3; NT 1,2,3,4
There was no NT 1, 2, or 3. NT started with version 3.1 (there was also a 3.1AS). The versions of NT went 3.1, 3.5 (very short-lived), 3.51, 4.0, Win2K. Also, and trust me on this, you don't want a copy of MS-DOS 4.x <g>. It was the worst of them all. As for Windows 1.0, look here:http://cgi.ebay.com/aw-cgi/eBayISAPI.dll?View Item&item=1241862826.
Yeah, lets prove it's bad for you before we do anything. Doing anything before there are thousands of dead people to back up the "alleged health risks" would be bad for big business and we cant have any of that, now can we?
No siree..
-henrik
"there's a substantial risk the heavy metal will leach into the environment." Oh no, a natural substance may be returned to the earth where it will kill everything in it's path.
"PCs also contain lead, mainly in the solder that holds chips to circuit boards, and in that form it's even more likely to escape into the environment." Oh my dear god, this stuff could ESCAPE! Nothing like using a trigger word to get people to panic. Lead came from the very enviroment these people are worried about it escaping to. Lead is mined folks, right here on earth!
Please. Lead is natural. Yes, you are harmed if lead enters your body either from an AK-47 round or by eating paint. But computer parts in a landfil.....that's a big stretch of the imagination.
"The 'polluter pays' principle sends a strong signal to the companies to change," Again we see some brilliant thinking and innovation in free form logic. So, if I make you a cheeseburger and sell it to you, you then throw any part of the cheesburger or is wrapper into the street as litter, I'm a polluter and should be made to pay. I am evil. I am satan.
This is some pretty emotional stuff. It has to be because the logic doesn't work but these people need you on their side. This is big business, lots of opportunity to get rich for everyone in enviromental panic.
If this was such a serious and real issue, logical questions would be asked. How many of those monitors needed to be replaced? Was repair attempted? Come on, aren't you just getting a bigger monitor....fine, give this one to someone who needs one. That's recycling. Start by asking why this stuff is going to the landfill and I'm sure you'll learn that most of it doesn't NEED to go there in the first place.
How many of these computers needed to be purchased in the first place? Most personal computers are wasted (in terms of production). I have actually seen people upgrade PC from 486 class machines to the latest item because the 486 was "slow". When asked what they used the computer for: "just email". Those people are putting a lot of crap into landfills needlessly, and that's not just individuals, it's corporate too.
. Quit playing Monopoly with Bill. Switch to one of many non-Microsoft products today.
Sounds like the beginnings of a serial terminal to me...
But seriously, your ideas are great and to the point. I would much rather donate time than a few ducats.
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
Decoration!
I remember seeing pics of the old l0pht pad, and they had old circuit boards and hard drives decorating the walls. I'm sure there's enough geeks in the world to take on all the old hardware and turn it into wallpaper, coffee tables, end tables, etc.
:)
-brain
d00d! hook me up!
sup
I had a Sony 200ES monitor that would cost $200 to fix--not worth it. So, I put it out on the curb with my trash the night before and it was GONE within 20 minutes. I'm sure it was just a fuse or a bum capacitor, but I don't have the time to track it down. Hell, you can put anything on your curb and it will disappear. Someone took the old, broken screendoor I put out there.
--Mike
... set 'em up as netbooting X terminals around the house and shop. (minimize the moving parts in old Energy* stuff, they shouldn't be heavy power sinks) please, seriously, where are these "mountains" of unwanted PCs??
I WANT COPIES OF MS DOS 1,2,3,4,5 WIN 1.0 (exists?)
Yup, and you can see screenshots of it (and MANY more) at http://pla-netx.com/linebackn/guis/
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Wouldn't it be nice if more application developers used obsolete, slow, crapulent hardware?
Come on, most of them currently work on the "Okay, it's barely usable on an 800MHz Athlon, time to release" method... imagine how quick and lightweight applications could be if they were developed for a P-100 with 16MB of RAM?
-grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
IANA electrical engineer, but I'm pretty sure LCDs aren't made of little light bulbs.
Come on, people, where's the cluefulness? Am I the only person who noticed this?
-grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
I'm not sure if this is really relevant - but (once you've got Linux or BSD running on old hardware it seems to make sense to run them as X terminals.
I've been involved in a project where we are using a number of low end Pentiums without much ram as X terminals to a more powerful machine with plenty of ram running StarOffice and displaying on each of these old machines.
It seems to work well at the moment, we are still in the testing stage, but it looks like the management of the machines will be much easier than the current Windows systems elsewhere.
I've also tried this same project with these machines running a stripped down version of Windows 95 and using Microsoft's Terminal Services client as the shell=. In our office, (since most people have Server on their machines) this provides a quick and easy way for them to access their machines from just about anywhere.
There is a circuit board company in Bozeman MT that used to throw away their "ooops" boards -- until they discovered all the artsy types raiding the trash and carrying them off, to be made into wall hangings, translucent window blinds, bases for 3D art, etc. Then they started selling 'em for $5 each and couldn't meet demand. Of course you'd have to desolder all the junk off old motherboards etc, but metals recovery companies might consider selling stripped circuitboards at a nominal price just to get 'em used for something other than landfill. Or even offering 'em free for the hauling to artist groups.
:)
There's a guy who makes really old hard disks into very nifty clocks, he has a howto web site that should come up readily enough in a search.
And anyone with working P233-class hardware they want to chuck out, you can toss 'em my way
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
I'm in California. Until they raised our rates (and drastically lowered our baseline, ie. the amount of power you're allowed to use before you get charged premium rates) I could run 2 computers and a monitor 24/7, plus everything else I use, for $30-$40/month. With the new rates, it now costs another $30/mo. to run the 2nd computer. :(
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
The problem is that you need a couple of dozen 468 to theoretically get the performance of a recent chip on a certain, narrow class of tasks, and for the time and effort it takes to get the whole thing running, you could easily afford to simply buy a brand new system, not to talk of the amount of power all those old ones together would consume.
Bah! power? 95% (made up number) of the slashdot reader base doesn't care about the power usage of there clusters. Because they are loaded? no. Befause they are 12 and mommy and daddy pay those bills.
People collect this stuff. Aquariums, VAX bars, door stops, or even (gasp) running them for fun are all common activities for classic computer collectors.
Depending on how old the equipment is, there might be a small army of collectors eager to pick up or have shipped any surplus hardware you may have, at no cost to you. Got a bunch of old 486s? Don't hold your breath. Got an XT or an old 8-bit system? Probably. Got a PDP-11 or a VAX? Hell yeah! For an example, I just hauled a VAX 8600 system from Austin, Texas in a 24-foot Ryder truck to my home, where it now takes up nearly half of the garage.
Note: If you absolutely must turn your mac into a fishtank, VAX into a wet bar, etc., I beg you to *please* make sure that your machine has already been gutted for parts.
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SecretAsianMan (54.5% Slashdot pure)
Washington, DC: It's like Hollywood for ugly people.
My old 8086 used to be a fantastic Ultima machine - it will let you play from Ultima I to V perfectly. And trust me, Ultima V is a lot more fun than many FPS (actually I think it's way more interesting than Quake 3... :)
at one place I worked recently, hardware didn't get repaired, it got replaced without question. flaky video card? hell, that secretary needs a 800mhz pentium III anyway, order a new machine. laser printer doesn't work? go to office depot and get a new one. gamma is a little off on the monitor? yup, replace that puppy too, don't even consider adjusting it properly and putting a piece of duct tape over the adjustment buttons. windows2000? yup, everyone needs new machines (never mind asking if they really need to upgrade to win2000 in the first place). new computers? gotta get new monitors too, along with new keyboards, mice, all the plastic and foam packaging, manuals no one is gonna read, etc.
maybe I'm old fashioned... but seems to me like replacing a video card, or sending a printer to a local repair guy is a better idea than replacing an entire system .
Karma only matters to me now and zen.
I am working on a scheme to get such hardware to schools in southern Africa, especially Zimbabwe.
If you would like to get involved, drop me an email.
Live today. Tomorrow will cost a lot more!
Well, one thing I know about old chips is that you can't even hold a soldering iron to them or they'll melt. I hardly think a blow torch will help.
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Hell, almost everything is all about economics.
The first person who says they should make a beowulf cluster of them should be sterilized, then shot.
Feed the need: Digitaladdiction.net
I'm currently looking for "old" computers to play with at home, and I came accross the following link when searching for "surplus computer new zealand" (for some reason I currently live in NZ) using the Google (http://www.google.com/):
It's maybe not directly relevant to the article, but it's definitley relevant to many of the threads I've read here so far.
You can probably find something similar in your community.
It's 11pm, do you know what your deamons are up to?
whhhooooaaaahh Hope you've checked out the "new" ;-)
license for ipfilter
Now we know where Packard Bell gets its parts from
I gave them my 486/100 after many years of hard service, and they have it in use somewhere.
They're good people, and give free lessons on how to do network administration, firewalling, linux administration and the like.
Mike
-- Could you use my software consulting serv
I found Windows NT 3.0, complete box set with diskettes AND CD-ROM, for three bucks at the local Good Will store. It was marked "PROMOTIONAL SAMPLE -- NOT FOR RESALE", and unfortunately would not install on my retrocomputing 486/66. However I also found Turbo Pascal 6.0, complete box set, for two bucks, and after reinstalling DOS and Win 3.1 on my 486/66, Turbo Pascal installed just fine! =)
--- even the safest course is fraught with peril
History has shown that when there is stuff people get rid of in mass quantities, the few items that survive the great purge eventually become incredibly valuable antiques. I would not be the least bit surpised if 150 years from now that Dell 486 in your basement would fetch a small fortune. Maybe one day my great-grandchildren will be on the Geek Antique Road Show showing off great-grandpa's inspiron that ran linux as well as some other weird proprietary OS that everyone forget about.
no, really ...
phil.
http://www.spiny.org
Fry: heh, Yakov Smirnoff said it
Leela: No he didn't.
I remember seeing pics of the old l0pht pad, and they had old circuit boards and hard drives decorating the walls. I'm sure there's enough geeks in the world to take on all the old hardware and turn it into wallpaper, coffee tables, end tables, etc.
Oh, yeah. We've got motherboards from Vaxen and a Sun3 hanging on the walls.
I really want to get a Cray-1 and use it as furniture, but those are somewhat hard to come by...
MHz Pentium II
I work in a hospital. At the moment we are handing out nice new systems to all our administrators, consultants and other 'important' people. The people who actually make use computers like doctors, secretaries and so on often get a "recycled" computer from me. The spec is PII 266to350 96to128MB memory and whatever HDD is already in it as long as it is over 2GB.
These systems work fine and they run M$ Office2000 (ugh!) as well as the new machines. They connect to the network just as well and go on the WWW just as well. The only real difference is that they take longer to start.
I'll see your Constitution and raise you a Queen.
From ecompany:
Yes, IBM. Big Blue is on track to refurbish or recycle 500,000 used computers this year, or about 10,000 machines a week.
If it was said on slashdot, it MUST be true!
I use an old 8086 (IBM PS/2 Model 30) with 640kB RAM and 20MB HD as terminal. It has an 8bit ISA NIC (3c503) and runs MINIX. I use it to telnet and ftp to my other machines.
Hey, if you've got spare Pentiums sitting around, give them to me! I'm so strapped for cash that I can't afford $100 to buy an antiquated box to play with Linux on.
I found somebody at work that's going to give me an old Mac to scrounge for parts. I'm trying to resurrect an old Centris 650 so I can try to turn that into a Linux box. Yeah, a 25MHz Linux box on a non-standard chip. But I've heard I can overclock it to 40MHz.
I have zero tolerance for zero-tolerance policies.
Constitutionally Correct
HP will accept old computer components for recycling. If you have 10 or fewer items visit http://warp.external.hp.com/recycle. They will charge you $13 to $34 per item. They accept all brands, not just HP.
IT'S OLD!!!! Who the hell cares? When something outlives it's usefulness, you chuck it and get a better one.
Am I the only one who doesn't see anything wrong with that?
Laine Walker-Avina
"In
http://members.aol.com/spoons1000/break/
I was just thinking of a business idea earlier today and this was posted, and my idea would take advantage obsolete hardware. I'm thinking of setting up a business setting up masquerading firewalls for home broadband users. Put Debian or Slack on one of these guys, tighten it up, set it up as the gateway for Joe User's DSL or Cable setup. They're happy because their fears of "hackers" are calmed down and you get their DSL setup too, and you're happy because when they screw up the network settings you will have them as repeated clients.
.
Point is, that older machines could run significantly faster if they were just set up right. I've seen this sort of speed increase again and again on machines from various manufacturers (Dell, Compaq, HP, Time, to name a few) - why doesn't someone take some care when they produce the factory default? Then maybe we'd see those landfill sites filling up a little slower.
Yes, an old computer isn't as useful as a brand-spanking new 1 GHz+ box. Doesn't mean it can't be used. Use it as a web-browsing box, a file server, or even better, let your kid learn the advantages that a command line can offer as opposed to a GUI. I grew up on command-line machines, I still think that a CL offers advantages in certain circumstances. If the box works and can run an OS and browser, there's no reason to discard it yet.
The problem is that you need a couple of dozen 468 to theoretically get the performance of a recent chip on a certain, narrow class of tasks, and for the time and effort it takes to get the whole thing running, you could easily afford to simply buy a brand new system, not to talk of the amount of power all those old ones together would consume.
The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a little longer.
--Henry Kissinger
Good points, although much of it comes down to time==money. When you're looking at volunteers, hobbiests, and the like then time!=money and it might be worthwhile to keep them running.
But more to the point, what about the computers that are running perfectly but are old? I don't think anyone would object to running a P-100 or
the like until it failed. (except the brainless idiot who claims that a PII/450 is the bare mininmum to do anything functional) In fact, there are places I know of which collect old systems, configure them identically, and use the entire computer as a FRU. If something dies, the whole computer is swapped out in a minute with another one.
As for the settings via jumper, it's good for people to have obsolete knowledge in some ways. If nothing else, you can at least say, "I remember when..."
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
This is Slashdot. You'll be lucky if anyone bothers to read the start of the article.
One such company is here. I don't know if they will actually buy the stuff directly from you, but they can certainly tell you who will. And, of course, there's always Ebay...
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
andrew
Why did I lurk so long before registering for a Slashdot account? I could have had a Slashdot ID of less than 100000.
As a current high schooler (senior, graduating in two weeks thank god) I can very much second what he is saying.
:).
For example, at my high school guess what computers are in all the labs and for all the teachers? P75mhz 12mb ram Win95 running some prehistoric Novell to hook up to the network. 500 mb hard drive.
It gets worse: what do elementary and middle schools get? I'm not even kidding: Apple IIGS and Apple IIEs.
Now the validity of this statement varies from person to person, but if you are the sort of computer geek with the compulsion to buy the "latest and greatest", or at least update relatively often that today a P200 would seem really quite obsolete, go ahead and donate it to a local school you fell support for (maybe even *you* have children attending). Trust me, chances are they can use it. And hey if you manipulate the system you might even manage to write it off to reduce your taxes
BTW I tried installing OpenBSD and FreeBSD on it before Linux but I was less than enamoured with their support for ISDN. Linux works like a charm and I'm very happy.
PLease read again: "Switches often contain mercury, as do the fluorescent bulbs that light up liquid-crystal displays."
The LCD displays, don't contain light bulbs. But this is talking about the bulbs that light up the LCD displays. Slight differnce. Open and old (backlit) laptop up, and you'll find a bulb in there somewhere to light up the LCD. They usaly have that funny primatic plastic to, that looks cool when you look at a light though it.
Lots of other charities do similar work (albeit using Microsoft software), not necessarily bothering to worry about details of licensing, in all cases...
A program on Radio National told that Swedish law puts responsibility for properly recycling old computers onto the shoulders of their makers, importers and/or distributors (perhaps a Swedish reader can confirm & provide the details?).
There are lots of environmentally unfriendly substances in the plastics, chips, et al. that might - otherwise - go into landfills, water supplies, et al.
Anyone with am always on cable connection. It's frightening how much cracker activity my firewall sees.
And can you really do anything else with them?
Web browsing/mail reading seat. The imfamous central heating/home control project. Gerbil feeder.
In my experience, a 486 (or 68040) or below isn't worth the energy it takes to run them (especially considering today's energy situation),
We don't all live in California. As I've been getting more machines my electricity bill has been falling (i.e. energy is getting cheaper faster than my network is growing).
_O_
_O_
.|< The named which can be named is not the true named
I live in California. I have three computers at home, two of which are on 24/7. My average electric bill is about $60/month. Neither of those is running seti@home or anything that eats CPU that much unless I'm there using it. Neither has an array of disk drives that are constantly churning. Just because you have a 250W PSU doesn't mean you're using that much. However, I use all fluorescent lights and unplug appliances with clocks and stuff on them when they aren't being used. That probably contrubutes nicely to the electric bill's being reasonable.
Do we get the same amount of MIPs/Joules out of these old chips as the newer chips? Cluster a bunch of these together and watch your electricity bill go up... Get "a second athlon" for the price of 5 times more electricity.... are you actually doing anything good for the environment? We will need to recycle these machines sooner or later. So we might as well recycle them now, than having it sit there and use electricity inefficiently.
Please educate us on how we can use 8088s for dumb terminals. Did they have ISA buses to plug network cards into?
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin
And you don't want your //gs's? Send em here, buddy.
===
No, Obscelite is quite clearly the mineral that they make Intel chips out of. Its used a substrate to coat the semiconducting layer of fudenium onto.
;)
Besides, when did Slashdot ever make a mistake?
"I Know You Are But What Am I?"
I think you have to be careful pointing out exactly who should be responsible for taking care of the old computers. If I buy a computer from Dell, IBM or similar, then I can easily point who should take care of it. What if I buy the parts separately? A processor from AMD, memory from Viking, and so on - who is responsible then? I think that it's stupid to put the responsibility on the companies, because sometimes you can't point out one single company, and sometimes they are gone when you want to recycle your computer... I think that the government should put a small tax on computer purchases, and then the government pays a recycling company once it is time to retire your old computer.
Yes, that's the way we're moving in Europe. Within the next ten years, barring a major change of direction, Mazda will, indeed, be legally obliged to take back its old trucks.
which gives them a fabulous incentive to make sure that the trucks it builds today are as recyclable as possible. This is why, for example, there are now, IIRC, 5 distinct plastics in a BMW car where there were upwards of 20 on their designs of a decade ago.
TomV
Heh.
I work at an ISP, and you would be *amazed* at how many people are still using windows 3.11. These people could spend $100 on a computer at a flea market and end up with a system that is 10x faster, yet they still keep on. Most of them are students or working poor who either can't afford a "new" computer, or don't know enough about them to bother.
As an added bonus, most point of sale terminals are still running on old 386's that haven't been upgraded since they were bought. And why should they upgrade? The system works exactly the same as it did when they first bought it, and moving to a new system would be a royal pain in the butt, likely without any real benefits. Old hardware isn't a problem to use so long as you're using old software on it too.
---
"No problem. I have the capacity to do infinite work so long as you don't mind that my quality approaches zero."-Dilbert
I don't know what your running, but we where using a 166 for a firewall. It was fine until we went over 2mb on the connection, and upgraded to a 300. For a server, any Pentium Pro or higher class system should work fine, unless you've got more than 10-15 users on it.
Maybe we DID take the blue pill. You wouldn't remember anyway.
I know the feeling. I had saved every penny I could to buy such a beast. Ok, I didn't run Windoze on it, DOS was just fine. It was a marvellous machine compared to my dad's XT. The magic bond between me and my electronic friend never died *grin*. That was the reason I kept using it, even though I had several more advanced machines after a while and didn't need the 486 anymore. It was simply my first machine! To bad it died about 2 years ago. Crashed harddisk, strange reboots and suddenly a big bang from the power supply put an end to its life. I'm sure it rests in peace somewhere in the big server-farm in the sky...
Woefdram, l'apprenti sorcier
We actually abandoned those methods in 1945, remember?
Woefdram, l'apprenti sorcier
I don't particularly like the idea of requiring someone to do something, but it could be stimulated, yes. As a matter of fact, most car manufacturers I know try to put their cars together in such a way that enables them to recycle them after a few years. And why not? I mean, there's a lot of material in a car that you can simply reuse.
Woefdram, l'apprenti sorcier
Correct. In the Netherlands it's not only for fridges, but for all kinds of household appliances. You pay the normal price in the shop plus a removal fee (verwijderingsbijdrage in Dutch, I wonder if the Fish knows that word *grin*). These funds are then used to recycle the stuff after it's obsoleted. You don't just throw stuff in your wastebin here (at least, there's quite some legislation about what you can and can't throw in there), I always take my special stuff to the right box on the dump. Once in a while, they empty that box and recycle all the stuff. Takes a little money, but that's what you pay your removal fee for.
But honestly, I like the idea of sending this stuff to developing countries. Question is, what kind of hardware would you send them? I mean, when I ditched my old 486, it was not because I had no use for it anymore (as a matter of fact, it served as my home web and FTP-server and was also dial-in/gateway machine). The reason was that after a long life of hard work, it just died. I wonder if anyone in a developing country has any use for a dead machine. If you send this stuff, you'll have to revive it first. Which costs money.
Maybe the idea of our removal fee could be applied to this scenario: you pay it when you buy your hardware and will be used to make sure that every wasted machine sent to some developing country actually works. I think it wouldn't cost much more than the way we do it now, but I think our environment surely would benefit from it. I'm not an environmentalist, but with George W. Bush on the wheel, the rest of the world has to pace things up in order to compensate for this genius.
Woefdram, l'apprenti sorcier
Interesting point. But you have to counterbalance that against the educational benefit. And it may even have positive environmental effects: more hackers = a more advanced economy = less "old-style" heavy industry (coal, steel etc.) = less pollution.
David
Freedom of speech won't feed my children
I would and I have. Cool.
David
Freedom of speech won't feed my children
I don't agree that the advanced economy does cause them. Computers are clearly far less toxic than e.g. cars. But that is too big a debate for here.
Are computers "hazardous" waste?
David
Freedom of speech won't feed my children
Rather than "recycling" them, why not set up a scheme to distribute them to places like India which are crying out for the technical resources to train their huge potential developer base?
You could grade every old PC for power, then load it with free software - e.g. a 386 becomes a simple file server, a decent Pentium gets XFCE and can be used as a developer desktop. Then distribute them to the voluntary sector in the developing world.
David
Freedom of speech won't feed my children
It makes we want to write the assholes who put on "Robot Wars" to change their name everytime I see a meatbeast controlling a bot...truth is, creating a good API for process controls would be a good step in the right direction. Hell, everyone I know would get a kick out of watching bots based on different OS'sgo up against each other.
Taking the meatbeasts out of the actual competition would give the concept of "Robot Wars" more credibility...yeah, I know programming an autonomous bot isn't for the faint of heart, but if some dedicated individuals out there cobble up a decent API to use some simple stuff (frequency transponders for enemy location would be enough, motion detectors and IR sensors would sweeten the deal when whitenoise generators are brought into play) to direct the bot, most of the existing platforms under meat control now could be liberated pretty quick, and it wouldn't take much more than a 486.
Most of these old systems are hobbled by their BIOS limitations for HD size/speeds, and 3rd party driver support. But these issues don't interfere with regards to serial port operations, or the use of custom code to read data from an I/O port . The hardware itself is still very useful for many tasks which don't require a GUI.
And anyone interested in creating a BOTAPI, or anyone who knows if such a thing is already underway, please chime in.
Every new form of media has it's own Requirimento
Sure that old 386 or 486 doesn't compile with gcc too fast or churn through your MySQL database with lightning speed, but if you cluster a few of them together you can get some impressive performance out of the old buggers. Beowulf is the Viagra of the computing world. One 486 is far too slow to run GIMP filters very quickly, but 4 clustered together will zip through it about 3x as fast (overhead differs depending on your interconnect and task at hand). Do what some of my friends have done -- collect "worthless" 386 and 486 machines untill you have a "second Athlon for free"! :-)
I WANT COPIES OF MS DOS 1,2,3,4,5 WIN 1.0 (exists?),2,3; NT 1,2,3,4
My former college roommate had an old DataGeneral portable computer with Windows 1.0. It looked more like a glorified version of DOSSHELL and windows couldn't even overlap. I think it may have been marketed under the name "MS DOS Executive" but I don't recall, it's been awhile. Back in the days of the "MICR*SOFT" logo with the stylized "O". And on a similar thread, I think Windows NT started at version 3.0, but I'm not sure.
Unless it's a recent Athlon or Pentium III, it's just not worthwhile for a school (or anyone, really) to setup and maintain. I've been there, I've seen it. Too many tradeoffs for weak performance and being older hardware, it'll become outdated that much faster. If it's a 486 or older, throw it out. If it's a Pentium or Pentium II, throw it out or give it to the geek kid down the block.
With modern OSes (WinME, Win2K, recent linux distros, etc), modern software, and the overall capabilities of a modern computer system, I've found the bare minimum for usefulness to be a PII-450, 128 MB RAM, 10 GB HD, TNT2 or Rage128. An ideal bottom feeder system would be PII-500, 192 MB, 15 GB. Better still would be 600 - 900 MHz Celeron or Duron. There simply is no sense in using anything older. Machines are too cheap and time is too valuable to cobble together old trash. It's old systems that are holing back our potential and usefulness. The only thing I can think of that would make a PII-266 - PII-400 useful would be a beowulf cluster to allow the machines to work together in parallel on a few modern (and thus demanding) tasks. Move on, folks.
Old PCs are what's holding us back. Unless it's an Athlon or Pentium III you're planning on donating, just throw the darned thing out. Giving a school a Petnium or Pentium II is just giving them troubles and grief. The schools are far better off getting grants and (money) donations for new machines. A 1 - 1.5 GHz machine will be usable for at least 2 or 3 years, anything older will become obsolete much faster. Don't get me wrong, old hardware is fun to tinker with, at home, if you have the time *and* enjoy that sort of thing. It's not something to donate to a school or other local organization unless you are willing to fully support the machine. Do your local school a favor and put aside $1 a day until you can buy them a shiny new machine and/or maybe a few good reference books or accessories.
I don't know about you, but I could always use a few spare machines as terminals, webstations, etc. With 32 MB RAM, even a 486/100 is quite usable under X with a slim kernel (read: don't compile in everything under the sun) and a light window manager such as blackbox. Mozilla 0.9 is too slow to use, but Konq works fine. Setup NFS and NIS properly and administration is a breeze.
"Systems are engineered to break down after 3 years." er, nope... not Apple boxes... all of mine still work, most have the original equipment in them... oh, sure there are some parts that were upgraded in them back when they were almost new, say, three years old LOL
I volunteered to revive freeboxen - which I had only just joined when it closed down. The maintainer was looking for volunteers, but then ignored my message. Freeboxen.com was awesome.
Eventually things won't be useful anymore, so recycling will be essential. But reusing them until then is wonderful, esp if it saves someone making something ELSE that would have to be recycled.
Until then, I want freeboxen back, even if I have to run it.
Looking for freelance Actionscript (Flash/Flex) or ColdFusion work and/or freelance developers. Email me, put Slashdot
freeboxen.com - awesome site - people will pay you to get rid of your old stuff. Free parts,
nm, scratch that, it seems to be down, kind of permanantly.
2.)
local hs/college computer club / whatever
- set up a beowulf of 486's or pentium 100's.
- hundreds of things to do - linux
- computers for the poor with win 95 (because you got the licenses for free) / linux (fsck licencing)
- keep the 8086, sell on ebay in a few years, or practice soldering/desoldering.
3.) (shameless begging)
For really cool, working stuff (200mhz up computers), I'll take it off your hands - really! I'll even pay for shipping! Well, the boards anyway. I'll take any working dimms for free too! Any HDD's greater than 1 gig are great too!
I WANT COPIES OF MS DOS 1,2,3,4,5 WIN 1.0 (exists?),2,3; NT 1,2,3,4
Ideas:
486 as a firewall / internet router and / or windows 3.1 demo machine, play gorrilas.bas with ms qubasic on dos 6.2
- learn about motherboard repair, get a logic testor, a mboard repair book.
286 - put Commander Keen 1 + 2 on it. Run demo in endless loop or untill you rip out the pc speaker cause the sound effects are bleedin' annoying.
8086 - put really, really old abandonware on it.
- calculate pi to x million digits,
Of course, you need a screen for this - so you keep 4-8 lbs of lead out of the landfill and get a nice space heater in one wonderful deal!
Hmm, old software.. some un named person in my college formats the hdd's of the new dell 700 mhz machines and places Dos 3.1 on them. Managed to install Desqview on a box as well (with dos 5). Funny as hell to see the software and the sysadmins pissed. Runs really fast too (except for desqvies, which sorta ran)
The slashdot 2 minute between postings limit: /.'ers since Spring 2001.
Pissing off hyper caffeineated
1q2w3e4r5t6y7u8i9o0pqawsedrftgthyjukilo;p'azsxdcf
A friend of mine is buying up used
Pentiums and is going to see what kind of
Beowulf cluster he can make out of them...
Like everyone here didn't know that PCs were filling landfills and leading to ecocide.
~~ What's stopping you?
Is that so? My school has a whole library of brand new PIII's. Every day there are at least two "out of order," and the ones that do work are used for what? Games and shockwave.com. Gee, such wonderful use of brand new technology!
My old school had older machines in the library and people used them only for useful things, such as typing and basic web browsing because they didn't have the new toys of the fast machines.
To tell you the truth, the old machines were faster.
THROW OUT A PII? What is wrong with you? My main machine up until a few months ago was a P166, and it did everything I needed. I only got a new machine because my mom needed one (she now uses the 166 every day.. works fine for her!) and I got a k6 550. Oh, but I guess I should throw that away, right? It couldn't possibly be of any use!
I had a server running on a p120 until a few weeks ago when I got a k6 300 for it. I guess I should throw not only the old board away but the new one as well! Never mind the fact that it is in use and is working perfectly for the server (apache,web,irc and some other things, all on a T1).
Maybe I should throw away the 486's at my house that allow me to use the web, telnet/ssh, email, and everything else. They couldn't be of any use, of course.
And most of all, I should trash the 486/25 that routes my DSL connection! It couldn't POSSIBLY be of any use! Neither could that 386/16 I use to learn to program assembly. Nope, no use whatsoever.
Not all of us can afford brand new machines every month.
--- Free Dynamic DNS http://www.staticky.com/
I know, this is an odd thing to say. However, it seems to me that many people are just too ardent to throw away an old computer when they get a new one.
It really surprises me how much can be done with very limited hardware. A PDP-11 was enough for the development of UNIX and of C, in spite of the fact that it has performance not exceeding that of an 286 (PDP was 32 bit, though). My parents began using computers at the time they had to punch bytecodes (which were not called that way then :-) on perforated paper. And yet they (and thousands of other people) have managed to achieve much using these very simple means.
I am not saying that a computer never gets old. An XT should have become total junk by now. However, even now an old 486 has a plenty of uses: MP3 (well, a Pentium is better for that), print serving, firewalling, limited-scale web-serving, just studying Linux and more. It seems to me that the problem would diminish if people started thinking what their "garbage" could do before throwing it away.
With the minimal hardware requirements needed by Linux, why cant we load up these old boxes and GIVE them to inner city kids who CAN'T AFFORD anything else. Not only would we be giving something to the advancement of these children but breeding new Linux lovers and penguin biased users (as opposed to WinKids). Take a lesson from the tobacco industry, aim for the young-they are our future. Now if we could only convince a financially stable ISP to donate dial-up accounts with the boxes under say a charity premis... can u say 'writeoff'!?
I'd tell all my friends, but they'd never believe me. ~rh
To find out more visit the Donations page.
Perhaps if you live in California or somewhere else where energy prices are outrageous. I run 10 machines 24/7 at my house and my total bill is usually around $60. That includes all the other power hungry appliances (TVs, Dryer, Fridge, AC, etc.). If I was paying $60/machine my bill would be well over $600. I don't know where you are getting your figures but you need to check them again.
Enigma
Enigma
I should also point out the NewDeal software, which provides a nice, memory-light operating system for even the puniest old machines.
How so?
--
Hehehee, actually, that's a major motivation behind porting it over, etc. Because I start soooo many fights pro-BSD anti-GPL, I want to get a chance to explain proper ways of doing certain things, such as the author keeping control of a product, etc. And any modifications that need made to IPF to work before adding to xMach, I will clear with the author first, and any modifications to xMach that need made to add IPF, I'll contribute back so he can automate adding it, as he has done for EVERY other os.
--
Maybe I'm the only developer who could use more hardware, but 486 and pentium class systems are welcome donations to xMach, and I especially need more systems to test code on, such as my work-in-progress of integrating ipfilter.
--
I agree with that, but in my opinion recycling can be a cost effective process if production process is tuned to it. The industry should pay their garbage they deliver to the customer, and that was also the point of the the last paragraph in the article I think.
When manufacturers have to cover the costs of recycling, he said, "it creates a powerful incentive . .to reduce such costs by designing products that... .. of course it is again the good old customer that pays the costs of recycling, the Belgian government invented a new tax so that we have to pay about an extra 5% for every household and electronic material.
As of the 1st of june Belgium(Europe) already has this system of manufacturars forced to take back let's say your old refrigarator. But it will not make them design products that go longer:
RC5 cluster
Now that must be big news to a lot of slashdotters!
sulli
RTFJ.
The above might sound like a silly idea, but I'm sure that at least some of the old ICs are probably useful to the embedded market in ome way or another. Could you melt the motherboard to separate the copper from the plastic/silicon? Not sure what to do with the old solder, either...
I suppose the easiest thing to recycle are cases: pure sheet steel/aluminium, screws, etc. Some of the power supply components and small fans rarely break and are common in other systems.
The main problem is labour. No matter what recycling/reuse solution you suggest, computers are complex devices, and I think that for the near future, a lot of human processing will be needed to separate the wheat from the chaff. Moreover, the expectation is for cheap computers (at least in North America), and covering the costs of recycling could raise prices considerably. We don't just need good technical ideas about how to recycle, we also need a good way to sell the idea to the consumer. And let's stay away from government controls...
Excluding the fans, 3 years according to various hardware manufactors and industry insiders. It seems that all the oem's don't care about quality like they use to because everyone upgrades so often that the extra quality will be unoticed. Why make something better and more expensive if no one will use it after 2 1/2 to 3 years? I replaced my cpu fan 3 times in 4 years on my old p166. However, after close to 4 years the whole thing just began to die. Nic card went down, cd-rom drive no longer works, power supply fan stoped, etc.
Today's machines in my opinion, are junk. I see things that alot of OEM's are doing like, puting cheap fans that make alot of noise and break after 6 to 9 months (cough gateway) for a %5 increase in performance to show off benchmarks. The sad thing is that most servers have video cards with fans. That is bad because they fail alot and will take a server down. Do video cards need a fan? So what its slower. With or without a fan it will still become obsolete at the same time.
Fast and cheap is the name of the game. HP or IBM need to have the same things that the E-machines POS model has for the same price. Cheaper and lower quality hardware or overclocked hardware with fans will suffice. Also if the machine breaks down 3 years down the road, it will be likely that you will go back to your OEM to purchase a new one. They have an economic incentive to lower the machines lifespan.
However, since the new XP licensing scheme is going to piss off alot of users, I am expecting the trend to reverse. Most bussinesses still use Office967/Office2000 and have no plans on changing. They will also keep their old hardware because it still works fine with old software. I myself, will keep Windows2000 and Linux on my system for at least 4 years with no plans on upgrading. If Linux still works fine in 2004 I will not upgrade at all. I will just replace an ocasional fan or piece of hardware. If my whole machine falls apart then its a different story.
ITs amazing that old mac's, IBM AT's, commodore 64's, atari, TRS-80's still run fine but my p166 from 1996 no longer does. Hmmm
http://saveie6.com/
You have got to be kidding me. Read the article. This guy has to be a troll. You can tell by his sarcasism.
AOL is high isp rates and this troll was sarcastic and most slashdoters know about this. Also 450 ms sucks on quake3arena(even for a 28.8) and AOL has been known to have ping problems due to its dated and bloated propretiary inner network that tcp/ip has to pass through to get to the web.
If I was a slashdoter with an AOL account, I wouldn't tell anyone here for obvious reasons. ALan Cox would not touch it with a 10 foot pole assuming their was even a linux version. This last sentance just gives it all away as a troll.
http://saveie6.com/
Why did it run well after all those years? Simple, one thing I was very picky at was memory consumption: this means, if I don't need the service, I just don't run it. The Run, and Services key in the registry were closely watched by me. Cleaning up the registry regularly helped too. Don't install every shareware proggy you come accross, etc.... Probably this memory paranoia came from my old DOS days...and the registry paranoia quickly came after my first W95 reinstall. Besides, I never came across a program that didn't want to run on 95 so "upgrading" to 98 was never an option. (NT4 neither, because I realise the hardware couldn't have supported it beyond SP3)
The problem with factory defaults is that they are a common denominator of what Marketing (?) thinks will be usefull. ) I have seen newly bought preinstalled PC's with 64Meg RAM (this was some years ago) that had a memory usage of 80Meg in idle! (That is: directly after bootup) :-)
Ever noticed how many icons most people have in their icontray? (and that is mostly the top of the iceberg) Realplayer, why do I want that running all the time? Same for that ICQ webdetect agent: come on, I know when I'm online. Oh, and one big spoiler...needed for nothing at all: in Start-> Startup folder you'll find Office Startup (OSA.EXE), now honestly, I don't care that Word starts up in 1 minute or 3 minutes....I have to wait anyway, let's use it to make some tea.
Besides, if you wondered what happened to the P120? It is happily running it's old days as a Linux experimental machine.
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
The problem is for $150 you can buy a router that does masqing, DHCP, portforwarding etc AND is a 4 port 10/100 switch, is smaller, quieter and uses less power. Don't get me wrong, I have a 486 running e-smith (which I can't praise highly enough, BTW) for my home network access, but for Joe User one of these little devices is the way to go.
The reason why recycling has not been more widely adopted is because it costs more to recycle a computer than can be gained from the products gained from that recycling. Apparently here in Australia, a trial recycling program was run for a while - but the computer manufacturer had to PAY $5 to get the computer recycled. Maybe when a critical mass of recycling takes place - economy-of-scale is achieved - then recycling will be economical. This problem is that people will have to pay until this is achieved - thus creating a paradox.
"Australia... The land up over, depending on your frame of reference."
The long-term solution, which most folks won't like, might be to charge a deposit on the hardware or complete systems at sale. Just like the deposit on glass bottles in some states [Michigan comes to mind], you get an economic incentive to give them back afterwards.
If the money would be managed in the interim, given a five-year shelf life of most components, the interest could be used to bear the burden of the costs of extraction, and the principal could be returned back to the individual.
Running simple cost thoughts here, using compounding interest at 3.3% [what my credit union gives on a savings rate], a five-year investment on $100 deposit for a full system would garner $17.63--probably not enough to cover the extraction and recovery costs, but enough to ameliorate them.
I do understand the desire of many here to re-use old machines [working on getting my 850MHz T-bird finished so I can turn my P166MMX into my home LAN firewall myself], but at some point, the hardware does stop working. Those schools do have to junk the boxes at some point, often because the adults don't have the technical knowhow to fix them, the district doesn't have the money to pay them, and no one will let the kids play with it to get it back running.
-- Geof F. Morris
My former employer, Global Monitor, deals in ancient hardware. Often they will pick it up for free, and sometimes they will even pay for it, if you have a lot of old working (sometimes even non-working) 14" and 15" monitors, for instance. Some of the easier fixes are done in-house, others are sent overseas where it is cheaper to fix them. Their warehouse is a virtual museum of old computer junk. I've spent many an hour perusing all the stuff up there...
Most of the posts here have been about old intel stuff but at a lot of places (especially colleges) you can find old SPARC and MIPS based systems in the junk closets. These systems can be a gold mine for anyone without a lot of money but who is interested in real Unix workstations. A really lucky friend of mine even found an old Ultra 1 in a junk pile, and other stuff like SGI Indys and Sun IPX should be fairly easy to find abandoned somewhere.
Okay, there is some hardware that is unworkable in the Internet age. A 4.77 MHz PC/XT with dual floppies and a green-screen counts as "unworkable" and should be junked.
But a LOT of what is being junked these days are things like VLB 486 machines, low-end Pentiums. They should go to schools, community centers, and churches. I know, there are lots of arguments against this:
The answer to all of these questions is YOUR VOLUNTEER TIME as a computer expert. I give my time locally to a number of small computer centers and networks which are not for profit. Here are my answers to the concerns above:
Regarding #1 (Repair and maintenance): Yes, a power supply fails every now and then in "my" networks, or a video card goes bad, or a monitor. But part of what we're talking about is the glut of older hardware. It's not a big deal for a Slashdot user to swap out a power supply, a video card, a monitor -- and older hardware of this type is in ample supply. Yes, a school will have trouble justifying $400 in repairs to get an old 486 PC fixed, but the average Slashdot user can cannibalize three old 486 PCs into one working one that will help 10-20 kids in a matter of 30 minutes or so without needing spare parts or incurring expense. It's a matter of having the correct knowledge to get this older stuff working.
Regarding #2 (Slow): A 486/25 may be too slow to run Internet Explorer 5.5 under Windows 98 for streaming media -- it's true. But put Windows 3.1 and Netscape 3 (you can still download it at Netscape.com) on a 486/25 with 8-16 megabytes of memory and it's about fast enough for WebMail. Stick it in a corner of the community center and write "For E-Mail Only" on the front of it. Donate or get somebody to donate a little of their time to help people learn to use WebMail. Then try telling a little Russian grandmother that's just made contact with her children in Russia for the first time in 15 years that the machine is too slow to be worth anything. She'll tell you that it was worth something to her to have this public e-mail machine there.
Regarding #3 (faster machines for cheap): Cheap is not the same as free. You can tell a school that they shouldn't bother with a stack of 486/66 machines because they can get Pentium II 233 systems for only $100-$200 each. Or you can donate a day and help them get 10 of those 486/66 machines running enough for kids to type a report or two and visit a few simple Web sites -- even if slowly -- costing the school nothing. If they don't have the cash, they don't have the cash. Telling them just how little cash they really need isn't all that helpful.
Here are some examples from my own experience:
A local church wanted to get three computers in a small network for their members to do Web, e-mail, family history and a few other things. They had someone in for an estimate and nearly died. So, they decided to try for just "a computer" (that's right, one) but decided they still couldn't afford it. Over the course of a weekend, I was able to get for them six PCs (mostly 486/66 machines) at $5.00 each from a local university who was basically tossing them. A bunch of 640x480 VGA greyscale monitors were free from the same place. "Useless" was written on top of each of them in black marker. At work, a pile of 10b2 ethernet cards and a bunch of coax had been laying around in a closet for a long time. I asked, and I got them. We booted up the machines, cleared out the cruft and just left Windows 95 behind. Installed the network cards, wired them all up, stuck a 56k modem and Linux and masquerading on the last one and 'ta-da' -- a six user network with basic Web, e-mail and applications. Slow? To me, dog slow. To them, a godsend. They didn't have anything else. One weekend.
Another anecdote: I got wind of the fact that a local government office was paying to have a moving company haul a bunch of 486 and low-end pentium machines out into the desert and smash them to bits because they had depreciated into oblivion. I contacted the agency and was able to get the machines and a bunch of color 640x480 and 800x600 monitors donated. Some of them needed work. Out of about 20 machines, about 11 good ones were assembled, mostly by swapping power supplies, drives, monitors, etc. Took the better part of an afternoon. A local surplus software company donated a bunch of Windows 3.1 and vintage 1995 "multimedia encyclopedias" and other early multimedia titles, including a few storybooks-on-a-CD. The systems went into a local school in a poor neighborhood who only had to foot the bill for a few sets of headphones for the kids. Those kids don't care that the machines won't run Office 2000, Netscape, or Quake II. They're happily using Compton's 1995 and Grolier's 1994 encyclopedias to write reports with Windows Write and print them to an old beat-up HP LaserJet II. All it took was knowledge and time to turn "old junk" magically into "classroom computers." My investment: a Saturday, a few blank floppies, a little sweat and nagging a couple of my friends to come and help out.
Yes, I've returned to both of these places once or twice to make repairs, but it's no problem. I have access to plenty of spare parts and each repair usually only takes an hour or two at the most -- if that long. True, there is no money in these budgets to repair older systems if they break down, but as long as someone with knowledge and old spare parts from our present glut is around, no money is needed when something goes wrong.
The point:
Part of what decides whether old hardware is useful or not is whether those with the knowledge to make it useful are willing to do so. Giving two Saturdays a month or just say the morning hours of every Saturday, you as a knowledgable Slashdot reader can make a lot of people happy by connecting them to the information age. This especially applies to those of you living in metropolitan areas where those on the "more ghetto" side of town often aren't fortunate to have access to computers or to have been the beneficiary of a made-for-TV Microsoft commercial about giving computers to poor folks.
Saturday LAN parties are great, but smiles are great too.
Just start asking around -- make it known that you're a computer professional and you're willing to give some of your time to your community to make technology happen for those who can't afford it. You'll be swamped with needs in no time -- needs that you can help to fill if you're willing to give a little time and to work on old hardware.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
Whether it is using a 486 to play Tetris on the Science Library or set up a doom cluster or if we are really bored, dropping it at drop night. No matter what speed it is, we have a use for it. I mean, for a place where our server was only just upgraded from a p133 to a p233 3 days ago, and just cause we could, we do quite well with what we get.
Donate. It will go to good use. I promise. One of our next projects is a nice little developement linux cluster so that 4 or 5 people can sit down together and work on a project. We could use any donations you can give up.
(In all seriousness, if you are in the RI area, email me at j_hasbani @ (no spam) yahoo.com, and we would be glad to take what you got. One of our members is the head of BRUMUG, Brown Univ Mac Users Group, and she would happily take as many macs as you've got too.)
And btw, I am VERY willing to bet you will /. our server. That will suck.
I recently setup a LAN for an office which was full of old 486s and low end pentiums. What we did was build one Linux server that was a powerful pentium with a gig of RAM. The workstations act as dumb terminals that have basicaly nothing on them except that they act as VNC clients. The server then does all the work.
Since the workstations were so cheap to pick up. (Most of them given to us for free) And the server's RAM was relatively cheap due to good prices on RAM at the moment. The whole solution was incredibly cheap. Imagine setting out an office for 10 people for $3000 or so. Not bad? Of course, the Linux server can add up as a firewall/internet gateway! What more would a small company want?
perl -e 'print $i=pack(c5, (41*2), sqrt(7056), (unpack(c,H)-2), oct(115), 10);'
You know it seems to me that this is an opportunity to address a big problem: the digital divide. These old computers could be fixed up with Linux and installed into schools. The old PC's would get some more useful life, the kids would get to learn to use computers (and learn that there is other software besides Microsoft) and we'd be making a start on closing the "Digital Divide". I wonder if anyone is already doing something like this.
Of course, that wouldn't address the problem of a machine that's ceased to work because one or more of its components have simply worn out.
Onorio Catenacci
--
"And that's the world in a nutshell -- an appropriate receptacle."
--
"And that's the world in a nutshell -- an appropriate receptacle."
-- Stan Dunn
The BBC micro makes a nice machine controller having the digital I/O ports. We replaced a PDP-11 with one once (many years ago). I still use old kit for tasks like printing shipping labels. I just installed a 286 to replace an 8088 which died, driving a salvaged tractor-feed dotmatrix printer. A 10k program in Modula-2 does the work of a 200k program in Delphi with 10x faster development time. Is there anyone who recycles old software?
i do what any other enthusiast would do - keep them, when there's enough bits for another computer, build it. make a LAN, get some mates round, play counterstrike til the small hours. or just set up a small network and practice or just mess about with stuff trying to make some cool things work.
---
---
Never send a man where you can send a bullet.
> There is no sense in donating, say, a 266 MHz Pentium II...
I'd gladly accept that sort of donation... it's better than my machine.
old computers don't die, they just become file/web/ftp servers
----
One world. One internet. One root. (ICANN policy)
"I would say that 99 per cent of what my father has written about his own life is false." - L. Ron Hubbard Jr.
As other people have already said, send them out to development projects in other parts of the world. Here in Guatemala, shops sell old 486's for $200 or more. Schools and non-profits are starving for machines.
You say you have a room full of old pentiums weighing on your mind? Find a place to send them to, call in a shipping company, they'll take it from there. They'll pack them up, and take them away. But don't send crappy monitors, people here can't afford to get laser surgery to fix their eyes, and english keyboards are a waste of time, even here keyboards are relatively cheap.
Here in Xela, I know of several organizations that are desperate for computers, so if you get in touch with me, I'll make sure those machines go to a good home.
alan at celasmaya dot edu dot gt
Exactly right. If for example the Mozilla developers would use p-100's maybe their program might be usable on all those old machines you guys are going to donate to the developing world.
Of course, when you send out those old machines, people here can get to work fixing the huge, bloated stuff that comes out of all those 1 G workstations.
I learned to compute on an old 8088 with dos 2, 256k of ram and no hdd when everyelse had 486's with windows 3.1 and were saving up for a new pentium. It loaded WordPerfect, or some spreadsheet program from the old big floppy's. So thoses old machines will do fine for anyone with a interest.
Right now I'm in Guatemala, and I can tell you that we would be happy to get a shitload of 486's or pentiums. Just off the top of my head, I know of several organizations that can make good use of those dinosaurs you have clutering up your storage space. So why not call up your local friendly shippers, they'll come down, back them up, and take them away.
Drop me a note at alan at celasmaya dot edu dot gt if you want some details on how to send those machines down here.
My former college roommate had an old DataGeneral portable computer with Windows 1.0.
when i was in college, i did a lot of my work on an old zenith supersport 286 laptop with windows 1.04 and ms-works for dos (2? 3?). it's amazing how far windows has come since then... sort of like when i figured out how to use kde instead of twm.
--saint----
I'm still working at a p200, and it's for crying out loud the fastest machine overhere.
Everything starting from p100 is welcome...
Other uses include:
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
If you have old computers like 486s sell them on ebay. Me or someone else will pick them up. They're pretty handy. If you get 20 or more of them into some extremelinux or beowulf action it makes a dandy Tribes ][ server.
If you have other old computers, specifically apple][gs's, they are still good. If you didn't know the apple ][ gs can do everything that your pc you are using right now can do, except 3d stuff. It has tcpip, cd burners, games, AIM, ICQ, netscape, everything. It's slow, but it works. Did I forget to mention Wolfenstein 3d for the apple ][ gs? How about my C=64 with the 14.4 modem? Old computers are still good.
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
You can use 8088 machines with an ISA ethernet card and the use a dos version of NCSA telnet to access servers on a network. The whole thing can fit on a floppy if you're good. I recently did this with a 386 laptop I found in the trash. Used an obsolete Xircom pocket adapter too, going through the parallel port and giving me ethernet.
Works great!
More obsolete hardware at ObsolYte! Where the antique is ElYte!
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
If you've got one you don't want, send it to me - if your machine is antique and/or unique, I'll make it a part of my museum, and give it a page on my "Obsolyte" web site.
Otherwise, I can always use the spare parts! I have found good homes for many of the machines I've recovered from dumpsters!
ObsolYte! - where the antique is ElYte!
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
I'm not just saying this because /. is pro-Linux... I use a 486/66 for my firewall and mail server, and a P200 for my web server, and they still sit there twiddling their thumbs 99.999% of the time. The P200 also makes a very good desktop system, even while serving pages itself.
I'd buy something better, but why?
MadCow.
I used to have a sig, but I set it free and it never came back.
As for recycling of parts, I already see that going on at computer shows, but I don't think it can be done profitably at the scale required to reclaim all the old computer junk out there. Most parts are already manufactured on razor thin margins. Reclaimed parts have to be removed and tested. They still can't be sold as new, so would need to be heavely discounted. I doubt there's any profit in it. The most valuable parts would be surface mount and you pretty much can't remove them without making them unusable.
I don't have old Pentiums to give away. I don't even have decent 486s to give away. By the time I'm done with something, it is seriously outdated. I had a real hard time getting rid of some 486sx25 machines and 386s w/ virtually no RAM last fall.
I'm a loser baby, so why don't you kill me.
Okay, lemme think about it.
Using the Linux Router Project, its possible to use a 486 as a router with no hard disk, only one floppy disk. A 486 doesn't need a fan on the CPU, if it has a properly sized heatsink. However, you still have the P/S fan, unless you want to see about grabbing an old Macintosh machine and adapting the P/S over (I assume its possible, any info?). Therefore, with no hardware hacking, you are reduced to 1 fan (in the P/S), and a floppy disk drive as the things that are most likely to fail (because of the moving parts), and the fan should be the only cause of noise once the thing boots. With hardware hacking of the P/S, there is no extra noise.
As for dust, any machine can be dusty, I don't see why a properly cleaned old machine will gather dust faster then a new machine. Any machine does need proper air flow if it generates heat, fan or no fan. The only remaining factors are electricity and size. The electricity cost should be offset by the low/free cost of the hardware, and for those who are interested in conserving energy, reuse of an older machine with a higher energy draw is probably less energy then manufacturing a new machine. As for size, well, I can't win them all. :)
Here it is:
Take all those old 486's and beowolf those bad boy's togeather in to one distributed processing dinosaur, and set them to figuring out something REALLY important, like how come the two biggest political parties in the US can never seem to pick a competant candidate for president from their combined membership.
RA7
-
"Consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds" - RWE
I have my old 486 and pentium on the same network, sharing the same monitor. I use the 486 more than the pentuim, because I don't need the speed when I type. When I do need the speed, I fire up the pentuim.
Things like SETI, while they may use spare cycles and spare equipment, also chew power. What we really need is to consider options that chew less power.
I mean, you would probably complain if every car got to rev to the max the moment you turned the ignition.
OS/2 - because choice is a terrible thing to waste.
Scary. I know. But fortunately, here in the present, the evil expressed in this one man play don't exist. Why the all in one motherboards from motherboard manufactures all but obliterated need for anything propritary. Why now the only magic left is that of a splash screen in the bios. Progress kids. Think about it, because, one day, you'll be working in cities on the moon. And once more, you'll never have to hear anything by bananarama again (they were like britney spears, but ugly in triplicate, and we didn't have the Studio Magic 5000).
--Jimmy has fancy plans; and pants to match.
I agree that schools, daycares, community groups, etc. could benefit from old hardware. It's so inaccurate to say that giving them old 486 and Pentium boxes would saddle folks with out-of-date software. Exactly what does Office2000 give that Office97 doesn't when all somone need is word processing to print the church newsletter, for Pete's sake?
Anyways, one of the biggest sources of old hardware is, of course, corporations. I work for a very large corporation that freed up over 5000 old desktops in a few short months (part of a concentrated replacement effort). I had the idea to give these PCs away - good for the community and good PR for the company. We had staff ready to reimage the machines on their own time!.
Well guess what? The legal department got involved and felt that, legally, the only way to ensure that the hard drives had no confidential data on them was to pay an outside firm to remove each drive and drill a whole in it! I am NOT making this up. In the end, the cost to do this was prohibitive ($200/PC), so the machines were mothballed in a warehouse and, mysteriously, have been slowly disappearing out the door.
So, we all lost on this escapade and no one really knows what data was left on them anyways. Anyone else encounter similar problems recycling old hardware out to the community?
CrazyLegs
"Pork!!" said the Fish, and we all laughed.
Schools are very happy to receive your "old" Pentiums. :-)
Call your local primary school and ask when they will come pick it up
This take-back-your-old-products sheme is allready in place for refridgerators in many European countries.
I'm no environmental fundamentalist, but I like this kind of nature care better than (say) Ozone speed limits .
120 chars is not enough!
I had a Sony 200ES monitor that would cost $200 to fix--not worth it. So, I put it out on the curb with my trash the night before and it was GONE within 20 minutes.
Well, that's the rub I guess. I've had a lot of old HP Laserjet II and III monstrosities die on me in the past few months. It would have cost us at least $100 apiece to get them all looked at and repaired, and then they'd still be shitty old slow printers. So I took the money that we would have spent on repairs and bought a couple LJ 4100N workgroup printers and chucked the old ones. It just wasn't worth the time or effort to fix them.
I have an old beat up Mazda truck. When it finally stops running, should Mazda be REQUIRED to take it back?
You bought a Mazda truck? HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!
OK, seriously though, that's an interesting point. I think that it's important that manufacturers be thinking of ways to make their cars/trucks/computers/whatever more easily recycled. But I don't think that they should be responsible for recycling it. I'm thinking of all the times when I've been able to go to the local junkyard/salvage yard and buy a used part from a junked car and put it on my car. It can be a real cost-saver. And auto recycling is fairly common nowdays anyway, so for non-usable parts they can be broken down.
why do some of you think that when it gets half the speed of the fastest machine it becomes obsolete. Heck, are family doesn't have the money for a new computer and i am making dew with and old p1 133. Even the slower computers are still undoubtably useful. when i doubt, run away
what is this for? oh well
I completely agree. In fact, I think this policy should apply to ALL products, not just computers, here in America. Perhaps the best single method to make our lifestyle less wasteful is to include the full environmental cost of cleaning up after it in the price of every item. And SHOW that price on the item, so they know just how much it is. It would encourage both producers and consumers to be more mindful in order to save money, and on top of that could actually reduce taxes by creating less cleanup jobs for the government.
Environmental cost may be difficult to determine (and you can bet the companies will try to get away with all they can), and preventing exploitation of the system by the garbage companies (which are in at least one large city run by the mafia) might be tricky, but it beats spotty here-and-there legislation.
These direct recycling programs for electronic appliances are a great start, and are easy to implement since you don't even have to determine cost. Expanding the system to include all electronic appliances would be simple, and could really jump-start the 3rd-party recycling industry.
cryptochrome
---If you can't trust a nerd, who can you trust?
Sure you can make a server or firewall out of pre-pentium computer. But how many people need those? (Ans: Only a few geeks would bother) And can you really do anything else with them? (Ans: No)
In my experience, a 486 (or 68040) or below isn't worth the energy it takes to run them (especially considering today's energy situation), or the space to keep them around.
cryptochrome
---If you can't trust a nerd, who can you trust?
Here in Portland, there are a couple of organizations which address this issue:
freegeek.org takes in old computers and recycles them into usable Linux machines, providing education for folks who want to learn to be a a PC technician and in return for volunteer hours, the volunteer gets a useful PC in return with Mandrake and other stuff on it.
They will also responsibly recycle components they do not use for a nominal charge.
The StRUT program similarly provides education and recycling services for Portland, and, I understand, for other communities as well.
So the resources are out there - perhaps in your community. And the volunteer opportunities are there as well, if that's your interest.
Dave
Oops, a typo in a headline. Or just an allusion I'm not getting?
A World in a Grain of Sand / Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Infinity in the Palm of your Hand / And Eternity in an Hour.
Look the "give 'em to schools" thing sounds like a good deal, but let's keep it in perspective: It takes LONGER to configure and maintain one of those old boxes, if only because you need to have to spend so much time massaging 'em and 2 donated boxes are rarely the same. Plus they suck.
My wife is a tech director for a school district -that includes hardware / software support, 200+ PC, 3 servers, LAN, WAN the whole deal, plus academic curriculum support, and teacher training, plus long-term tech strategy etc. Her staff consists of herself and 1 hardware support person. This is a small school district but that's about the level of support *most* districts get, apart from the relative handful of wealthy suburbs.
She doesn't have time to massage all those obsolete boxen into something resembling a desktop PC. She can write grants to get funding to buy new ones, but obviously has to configure them and get 'em hooked up.
You really wanna help, don't unload your obsolete junk on her and her colleagues, give 'em something useful like use of your brain and your skills. Most schools have Tech committees of local folk interested in technology issues to help get things done and shape policy. It's open to anyone interested, including that antitechnology nutcase down the street from you. Show up and help. Volunteer to help setup those 60 PCs she just got and needs to find time somewhere to configure. Volunteer to help train teachers (No joke, she had to start her training with "You turn the computer on with the Big Red Switch in the back"). Start a Linux / StarOffice In Schools program; her school requires technology education for everybody, but teaches Windows/Office because she doesn't have the tools to teach anything else at the jr. high / high school level.
If nothing else check out the NetDay program for a cool way to get your local school wired up for networking if that hasn't happened yet.
Okay, rant off.
Do Not Taunt Happy Fun Ball
Do not taunt Happy Fun Ball
We have a company here which recycles old systems for companies. They charge something in the reaches of 50 bucks a pop. I'd like to see recycling required by law, because a lot more companies would invest in selling their used computers cheap, or giving them away. I love it when big corporations give computers away. Especially when they give them to me.
-- Nerds on toast in the new millenium
That is a good Idea but it will be a hard sell. The big problem with recycling computers is not so much the electronics as the huge amounts of Plastic. Take a look at you PC's monitor for example:
- Glass tube, recyclable.
- Whole lot of metal and electronics, recyclable.
- Chemicals in the glass tube, problem
- The plastic casing, huge problem.
What can be done about the plastic? Plastic is not completely recyclabe like metals for example and it is not Biodegradable like wood. It is hard to melt down and use again for new monitor/PC casings. It can not just be burned. It does not break down/decay if you dump it in a landfill and even if you recycle it to make, say, garden furniture of it you are still stuck with getting rid of a huge amount of plastic some time.The problem here is that unless engineers start trying to calculate the disposability/recyclebility of ALL of the materials that an object is made of into their design we will drown in a flood of our own unbiodegradable, unrecyclable waste. This will involve not allways going the easyest cheapest most comfortable way and that will not be popular with the public because it will mean higher prices.
Here in Germany there has been much debate over an ecological tax on fossile fuels. The car owners lobby and the conservatives want it abolished. Their reasoning is that the money earned on this tax will not be spent on enviromental issues. But if that is the case why are they not arguing that the money should be better spent? The answer is simple they are prepared to own a car, they are prepared to cause wear and tear on the motor-ways that causes clowds of tar particles the rest of us has to inhale and they are prepared to spew pollutants into the atmosphere but they are not prepared to pay the price of repairing the motorways and cleaning up the pollution they cause.
It is only natural that the price of a product includes design costs, material costs, manufacturing costs, packaging costs, transport costs, marketing costs, so why should it not include disposal/recycling costs? True, we are allready paying taxes to dispose of waste but this disposal, at least in the case of plastic is just carting it off into a landfill where we can not see it. If producing a completely recyclable and/or bio-degradable product is not one of the holy grails of design work then it should be.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
$13 disposal fee for that old CBM Pet? I'll give ya $5 for it, and pick it up from your door!
A bit selfish perhaps :)
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
are they gonna have to recycle all old broken cars?
I think this might be the job of the consumer, gasp, heaven forbid we pay to get rid of OUR crap. Just cause they provided us with a machine doesn't mean they should have to eat the costs of destroying it. Were I used to live we had to pay for all our trash bags, no company was paying there part of that $.75 a bag, I had to pay for it, perhaps this should be the same way.
I know no one wants to pay to throw out an old box, but it really doesn't make much sense to try to figure out what company pays to rid me of my box that was built from parts from 5 different companies...
http://monkeyserver.com --- weeeeee
The reason why they can all only speak of re-use by others that have no other choice is because it is an extremely difficult task for all these machines that we eagerly produce to be recycled without further pollution to the environment. So much of what we produce is not bio-degradeable. So much of what we do and produce without even a second thought has consequences to our world that will last for millenia. Eventually, there will be a lot of trash; Eventually, the only environment that we have will be irreversibly polluted.
We need to realize that the only people that will pay for our lack of restraint are us and our future generations. It is high time we reconsidered our habits and took serious measures to protect the environment.
As a Native American proverb I once heard went, "It is only after the last tree has been cut, only after the last river has been polluted, that you will realize that you cannot eat money."
Me, I find that my 1986 Tandy 102 makes a fine laptop--it has a decent text editor, it's very light, and it gets two or three months of fairly steady use to the pack of four AAs.
Is the company which assembled the box responsible? The manufacturers of individual cards? Individual chips? No matter what granularity you choose, I can give an example of deceased companies' hardware which is still in use without even having to leave my room.
Why there hasn't been some kind of movement to place 486es and Pentiums, with a free OS like Linux, in our under-funded public schools, I'll never know... All children need are internet and word-processing capability, anyway. Instead, we have Bill Gates donating a piddly few computers (in comparison to his income) to select schools around the nation, so as to promote his Microsoft software.
Nothing makes me angrier than walking past a dumpster, seeing an old PC in there, hauling it out (yes, if I see hardware in the garbage, I do go in after it), and finding that it still works. All functional hardware has a use. We even use old 8088s as terminals around here. If you can't use it, give it to someone who can. Don't throw it out. The more old computers we keep in service, the fewer new ones that have to be built to serve the same purpose. Reuse, reduce, and recycle, people.
- Turq - "That's TRON, he fights for the users."
There are lots of companies out there that recycle old computers.. They tear them down and recover all the rare metals and such (No sense trying to recycle silicon since it's not exactly hard to make and its hard to rebuild. However, the gold bonding wires (the wires that connect the metal pins on the package to the silicon wafer inside. The company that I work for recycles all chips that are damaged or not working properly (and sells as many of them as they can to people that don't need fast or reliable parts) This same process is used on PCB's, and other common components. The relative cost of removing a part and trying to reuse it (a Rpack for example) is too high for real world situations. Instead they simply recover the precious metals and call it a day. In time, just like cans/paper recycling, the process will get refined and improved and they may be able to catalog parts for reuse (a 5V regulator hasn't had many major changes in the last few years.. to reuse a regulator from a 486 in a power supply for a TV or something will not cause problems. (Recent ATX supplies require faster/better regulation, which means that an older regulator won't fit the required properties and such.)
Never buy brands. Buy a computer in a standard (ATX?) case. If you do so you will be able to replace the parts that become obsolete and computer will still work. After some replacement you will have enough parts for a second computer that presumably will be a server, router or, say, base computer for interface cards design where your slightest error fries the m/b.
This trick will not help with brandnames. You will throw away everything at once - case, m/b, video, processor - all, and spend a fortune to buy a new computer at once.
Delete all SPAM from my address to answer.
Now, I'm not flooded with computer parts, but I do happen to have a couple of old systems kicking around (one of those being an Atari ST in working condition). Now when stuff breaks down, I just strip it to parts and decorate my house, car, etc. Nothing like old 32-pin SIMMs hanging off the rearview mirror to say "I'm a geek and proud of it".
It's also a great way to meet like-minded girls. They sit down and notice not only the "computer stuff" on the mirror, but that it's a 32-pin SIMM? Hold on like grim death, brother.
- Relativistic? That's barely Newtonian!
If you work at a recycling center, just have contacts with a local super computing center. I'm sure they'd love to have all the old boards running, chained together in parallel processing. Its a revolutionary thing, to have FREE COMPUTERS. Of course, old ones should be scrapped, but anything above like a 386 could be chained up for more power :)
God spoke to me
There's no need to require anyone to recycle a truck, because it's economical to do so. Steel has a decent scrap value, and it's not hard to recover from a truck body. The point is that it's difficult and expensive to recycle a PCB.
Toronto-area transit rider? Rate your ride.
So, any bright ideas as to how these things can be efficiently recycled or used?
GreyPoopon
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GreyPoopon
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Why is it I can write insightful comments but can't come up with a clever signature?
Landfills must be getting all kinds of junk!
Felinoid brings up an interesting point: his mom is quite happy with a 486 laptop. I think many of us are forgetting that we've become accustomed to bigger, better, faster ... while there are always folks in our lives who do not use a computer because they are afraid of them.
/.er was using it as their daily rig -- but she only uses it for e-mail. And besides -- I was given the Mac by a friend at Lockheed Martin, so it's pretty cool knowing that my mom (who hadn't used a PC since my dad's CP/M machine finally died in 1990) is using a computer formerly owned by a rocket science. No joke.
....
My point? If it runs and can get on the Internet, set it up for someone like your mom, aunt, sister, brother, etc. My mom's first computer was a Mac IIsi with 8 MB of RAM -- LAST CHRISTMAS! Flame on -- all I had to do was teach her to use the mouse and explain a Web browser to her. Say whatever you want about Macs, I could care less -- all she has to do is hit the power button like an appliance to turn it on and off because it's set up to start Netscape, which makes the modem dial out, and then takes her straight into her Hotmail account as her homepage. Sure, it's slower than Hades and would be the butt of too many jokes if a
By her next birthday or Christmas, she'll be ready for something new and the old Mac II goes back in the museum, er, spare bedroom
Even superheroes once were losers
***ITs amazing that old mac's, IBM AT's, commodore 64's, atari, TRS-80's still run fine but my p166 from 1996 no longer does. Hmmm*** I know exactly what you are talking about. I remember fighting with my brother over the Nintendo, my brother crying to my father, my father tossing the Nintendo across the room and then plugging it back in and playing happily with my brother again. Now THAT was quality.
on what you're using the machine for. I've got a working 486DX2/66mhz with 12 megs of RAM that runs Win95/Office97 pretty well. I've never had to do any major repairs on it (I did replace the HD about 7 yrs ago) and if all you need it for is word processing/spreadsheet apps, then there's really no need for a faster computer. I mean c'mon, exactly how much has the latest M$ office product line actually improved your productivity compared to the original release ver? In my case not at all... M$ has only turned it into RAM/HD gobbling Über bloatware with little/no added practical functionality. As for hardware failures, it's just a tad bit over 9 years old and I've never had anything actually *break* on me yet (maybe I'm just damn lucky, or maybe Gateway builds really solid boxen, I dunno). I guess what you gotta remember is that people are just (for the most part) continuing to use computers for the same things they did 10 years ago. The only reason you need faster computers is that now we have complex GUI's and animated "helper" characters and other resource-clogging cruft. If you're willing to live with apps that get the job done just as well but lack a pretty interface, a 486/P1 is fine.
:). Just have a real sturdy specialized isa card that handles the i/o and a GPL'd software package that uses some scripting language to conrol behaviour based on inputs (remote control would be simplest. reaction to environmental "stimuli" would be most badass).
Oh yeah, it also (aside from the HDD, which sounds like a small jackhammer) runs much more quietly than the 900mhx Athlon I'm using to post this.
Hrmm.. it just ocurred to me, wouldn't you be able (if you're good) use one of those old bad boys as a controller for a battlebot? That would be cool, and it doesn't matter if it gets broken
...
string* plamenessFilter =
*plamenessFilter = "Flaming Death!!";
I work for an organization that receives donated obsolete computers, refurbishes them, and donates them to the disabled. We are not unique; there are many others like us. Before you scrap your obsolete equipment, please look around for organizations like this.
It's really sort of sad. I remember being so impressed when I saw my first 486 run windows 3.1. I wondered how anyone could possibly afford to have one in their house. Those were the days one could accurately judge the speed of a machine by how fast it could run the 'starfield simulation' screensaver. Now, most 486's can only aspire to holding doors open, or keeping the car from rolling during an oil change. Someday not to far in the future, we'll be able to brag about living the pre-gigahertz days. The "new" generations will wonder how we managed.
Yup, sad but true...m l
http://slashdot.org/articles/00/09/18/0339248.sht
-freija
. echo -e \\04 >
I posted this comment with a 486SX/33mhz with 24 megs of 60ns EDO (parity) RAM. I have overclocked it to 100mhz and thown on a heatsink that I "borrowed" from a school computer. I am also running Apache 1.3.19 while using Nescape in X.
These old things are still very useful. I use my 486 for developing C, C++, and PERL programs. I can connect to the internet over my home LAN (where another 486 is a router/firewall). I also use it to develop a game, Spatial Disruption where we actually used this 486 as a web server with over 100 people playing.
486's and low end Pentiums have thier usefulness in many aspects of computing. They may not be fast, but they get the job done, especially if you overclock them! The efficency of Linux or a BSD distro also helps out. Windows is just too big and slow for these computers if you want to do what I'm doing with them. Oh yeah, another advantage, they are usually cheap or FREE!
D/\ Gooberguy
Karma: Meh (Mostly from meh.)
I love 486's i can put linux on the thing and be more than happy to take it off your hands. If anyone ever wants to get rid of a 486 email me at squall8_99@yahoo.com ill gladly pay shipping or something but dont throw em away for the love of god!
NaTe
I have an old beat up Mazda truck. When it finally stops running, should Mazda be REQUIRED to take it back?
"I'd hate to make you beat the crap out of me!" - me
I never throw out an old machine. Even an old 386 with 4 megs of RAM and no hard drive can boot a floppy-disk Linux proxy server or router. If it's a 486, it can run the QNX demo, and you have a nice little internet kiosk. If the computer doesn't have a network card or modem, you ca always boot a single-disk linux and use it to run Seti@home or D.net.
Incidentally, my high school's voice-mail system runs on a 486SX 25 mhz machine, and runs perfectly.
I'm the stranger...posting to
you probably pay somewhere between $20 and $60 per month per machine in electricity no matter how fast or slow; a bunch of those pay for a new low-end machine quickly
somewhat tangentially, see also the efforts of the Redundant Technology Initiative at:
http://www.lowtech.org/
they have all kinds of uses for old hardware...
I think it would be nice to force companies to publish all possible technical documentation for their obsolete products. This would make secondary use and recycling much simpler. It will also add some more educational value to hardware sent to third world countries. And this law should cover not only computers, but every technical device (car, vcr etc)
Non functional hardware
Inert Motherbard:
Disassemble, retain plates and hardware. Retain power supply, IDE or SCSI HD's, drives, RAM, socketed components and cards. Remove battery from board and dispose of responsibly. Toss Mobo. Reuse or recycle case.
Bad HD (not IDE or SCSI):
If the board does not have an IDE or SCSI HD controller, it's not worth the trouble, see above. If it does, replace the drive and keep going. The platters from the drives make cool windchimes.
Disabled Mobo service:
Can the service be replaced with a card (eg. built in SVGA)? If it can, install a card and disable the service in the BIOS. If not, can it run without the service for a dedicated system? If it can't, toss it as an inert Mobo.
How to use Obsolete equipment
8088 or 8086 (PCs and XTs)are excellent training aids and tech demonstrators to show people how to work on a computer. It's harder than most modern systems, but logical, and if they can grok this, they'll figure out a new one in seconds. These also work well as dumb terminals and the IBM's had BASIC in ROM. They need a PC NOT AT keyboard.
286, V20, and V30 (ATs) can do everything a the XT's above can do, take ISA boards, and they have some of the capabilities of newer units. These have the speed to do basic embedded work running C++. Laptops of this era (eg. Epson Equity LT) are great for robotic projects, running stuff off the parallel and serial ports.
386 or 386sx (no mathco) we can run Linux now, albeit a bit slowly. Their best use is as an embedded router / firewall with a 2.2.x kernel. Other uses include embedded project command and control. This is the machine you want to run a web enabled project. Intel still manufactures this unit for embedded applications. Laptops of this vintage make great telnet consoles and if they have the ports, can handle 10baseT and 56K PCMCIA cards. Let's not talk about packet sniffers and the like, shall we?
486 or 486sx (no mathco) make great development boxes for console apps. The faster ones are good enough to run a basic clean X console (I wouldn't run KDE or Gnome) The DX-5 133 and AMD's 586-133 run as fast or faster than a P90 for most apps. On a network they have the horsepower to run as a backup server, router-switch (up to 100baseT), DNS Server, or basic snooper / logger (what, you thought Carnivore was a new thing?). 486 Laptops can do a lot and these are the first to have really good color LCD screens. Using one will frustrate you if you forget it's limitations, and you will, because for some things it runs and looks like a modern PC. The ones with CD and sound make great portable MP3 players for the car.
Any Pentium system has a use. Now we are talking about any small office network slot as a server or high throughput firewall or webserver. Linux at the desktop (you heard me right) or anything else you can conceive of. Anyone who tosses a working Pentium laptop is stupid and deserves to lose a hard working piece of hardware to folks like me. Broken screen? No big deal, use it with a monitor as a workstation or server with a built in UPS.
Any business tossing PII's or better needs to go dot com themselves, but, I'll gladly take donations!
Hope this gives you some ideas of what to do with an old PC or who to give it to.
Quit wasting money folks, what are we doing today that is significantly different from 10 years ago? The Net? Yes, but email and Web don't take that much, and we still type letters and do spreadsheets. Glutted software (I didn't even mention M$) drives the hardware market and the rich get richer. Not on my pocketbook! I have spent less than $1000.- in the last 10 years on PC's and while I've never been on the bleeding edge, those that are have been jealous of my uptimes.
You only think it's impossible because it's never been done.
here in MI it's the law. you must recycle your used toys. I work at a local community college where we just began to comply. we check out the out of date systems for working units, assemble them into complete sytems and sell them to the public. the stuff we cant sell we palletize and pay a recyler, by the pound, to process. no more dumpster diving for the staff or the in the know locals:) school policy is that the goodies can not be given away or sold if they are not in working order. working order meaning working monitors, bootable systems and bla bla bla. i just shrink wrapped a pallet of boxes with those nice but old ASUS P/1 P55T2P4 mother boards in them, along with cd drives, floppy drives, sound and network cards and p133 - p166 processors. all because i did not have any hard drives to install in the box!