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Collecting Classic Computers
chriton writes "There's an interesting article at Reuters about collecting classic computers. There's mention in the story of an even more interesting website www.classiccmp.org Unfortunately, most of the website is still under construction. The mailing list has been around since Jan 1997, and they clearly have plans for more accessible resources, but that just hasn't happened yet. If you are like me and have a an old Osbourne 1 in the closet and Commodore 128D stored at your mother's house she's telling you to take home lest she chuck it, you might find the list archives none the less."
it's hard to imagine anything made within the last 10 years or so really being collectible, with the possible exceptions of some Macs and maybe the neXt boxes.
While standard interchangeable parts are great for driving down costs, making repairs easier, making software, hardware and driver development easier, ect, it does reduce the collectibility of hardware. Then again, I guess old computers are considered collectible just because of the fact that they are rare.
I have blog like everyone else
Wasn't the Model 100 the last computer that Billy G. wrote software for?
Hmmm. Let me verify this.
< google... >
Confirmed. I knew it. The last useful thing MS did. Definitely one for the archives.
Here's the google search.
Huh?
My brother has a good database with first-hand accounts of many older machines at www.machine-room.org. He owns a good chunk of the machines represented therein himself.
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One of the thrills of colecting classic computers was demonstrated to me the other day when I tried to turn on a 23 year old multiprocessor machine in my garage; a power supply board exploded and caught fire.
The main things to fail in old machines are electrolytic capacitors.
Check out the Obsolete Computer Museum. It has tons of info and pictures of older machines.
When I want to search for an old or odd computer I always start searching in old-computers.com.
-- char*p="char*p=%c%s%c;main(){printf(p,34,p,34);}"
I have two - an original slab and an original Cube, plus one of the monitors. They are really interesting computers, although often in some seriously annoying ways.
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For one, it was not uncommon for the Cubes to have two motherboards - there was an upgrade to put a 68030 CPU in the NeXT Cube, but it came in the form of a whole motherboard. It was possible to plug two mobos into the backplane and use the old one for all sorts of fun tricks. Unfortunately, you couldn't use this trick for multiprocessing. .
Another neat (but stupid) trick is that the keyboard, mouse, speakers, and microphone all plugged into the monitor - and the monitor had no power cord! Instead, everything ran through a DB19 cable. Of course, the only place where a DB19 cable was ever used was on the original NeXT monitor, and nobody other than NeXT ever made them, so the monitor cables are rare enough to make them more expensive than the monitors themselves. Luckily, it is simple enough to take some DB25 connectors and fashion your own monitor cable.
I have a working Jupiter Ace with a big honking 16K RamPack expansion. The world's only ever released FORTH-based micro. This machine rules! It's the machine that the designers of the Spectrum (Timex-Sinclair 2000) went on to designfor an encore, and was hardware compatible. You can think of it in terms of Jay Miner's Atari->Amiga progression. Of course, if you really want to see what it's all about why bother with emulators? You can build your own Jupiter Ace.
Da Blog
NeXT Computer w17" Sony 8/105 NS3 COMPLETE Item # 2085722019
I would go for this if I had the space but now it would just sit in the garage.
"player 4 hit player 1 with 0 stroms"
ClassicCmp was a mailing list first, and I guess that's about what it is today, but much more is planned. I really mean that! CC was started in 1997 by people other than me. There was a very simple web site up for a while, but the guy in charge of it never updated it, and nobody else cared to do it. It stagnated. I joined the list about two years ago, and I became the list administrator just a few months ago when Jay West decided to take a break. I would have liked to start working on a new, improved CC site right then, but I was also working very hard to finish college. When you factor out the time I spend (usually) every day moderating posts for the cctech list (OT posts are filtered there), I had zero time for any other CC-related work. I needed to get something up there quick to fix the very incorrect 1997 pages, so what you see there now is my 3AM coffee-induced hack.
Some really nice things are planned for classiccmp.org:
- Better post archiving with spamproofing. My spamproofing method is somewhat unique.
- An archive of data files (software, docs, images, etc.).
- A link farm, which we hope will become a start-here-first resource for vintage-computing-related surfing.
- A FAQ. There is an old FAQ which you can probably still find with Google somewhere out there, but it has some very incorrect things in it. I'm working on a new FAQ.
- More moderators for cctech. Right now it's just me, so there is a serious lag time for cctech subscribers. We just implemented the second, moderated list a few months ago, and it seems to be working fine. It just needs more moderators.
I graduated from college a week or two ago and have settled into a new job. I now have ample time to spend making something nice for ClassicCmp. You can expect to see something actually worthwile there in the next few days.If you even the slightest bit interested in classic computers, please goto the list information page and subscribe to the list. At last count (a few days ago), we had 720 members. Average load is 50-100 messages per day. We'd love to add more people to the discussion.
Washington, DC: It's like Hollywood for ugly people.
came across this today, the old computer museum. http://www.old-computers.com/museum ah it brings back happy memories of a bygone age.
days when the Mattel Aquarius, Oric Atmos Spectrums and MSXs were the pinnacle of home computing.
Try the folks at si87.comg /Cables/cables .html
I bought some adapter cables from them for my NeXT and Sun monitors....
http://www.si87.com/Products/Cablin
....to post an incomplete, long forgotten URL to a site that hasn't gone ahead and added much in the way of content, when there are some truly excellent sites out there with really great and inspiring content, worked on by people who care.
Yeah, let me throw some URL where my mouth is.
http://www.obsoletecomputermuseum.org/
http://www.computer-museum.org/
http://www.homecomputer.de/
http://www.thelegacy.de/
http://www.mobygames.com/
And the list goes on, and on, and on.....
Well, since the Jornada 820 uses a StrongARM SA-1100 processor, it should be capable of running ARMLinux.
Quality or Quantity, don't tell me they're the same.
Someone on the internet located some old Sun4 kbds for me, apparently they made a couple of different types and the pads weren't the right type. I'm still looking. I could buy a kit of new-old-stock pads from one supplier for about $50, but that just isn't the proper way to restore an old vintage computer, it's got to be done right, and that means canniballizing old hardware on the cheap, not buying new parts off the shelf..
Yep, I've turned the thing on, the power supply only at first, it rates at precisely the same voltages as when I first built it, I wrote them in the margins of the manual. I ran it for an hour as a smoke test, seemed to work OK. Then I tested the motherboard and got a cursor, good video, seems to be 100% operational except for the kbd. The SOL power supply was a monster and the huge electrolytic caps all seem to be fine, but I don't know squat about power supplies, I don't know how I'd tell if it was bad or how I'd "reform" it. Any suggestions?
The only thing I haven't tested is my two 16KRA boards. Lots of little caps on that board, I'm afraid to power it up. I don't know how I'd test all those tiny caps, but they shouldn't be too hard to replace with modern equivalents (if I don't blow up anything else while testing).
There's a UK site called Binary Dinosaurs that does this properly...