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."

Comments

Not what was intended

[DasBub]

I guess my bedroom full of 486 cases and broken monitors isn't what they had in mind...

Re:Not what was intended

[wideBlueSkies]

I guess that my old Pong and Atari 2600 consoles don't count either eh?

I just threw away my 486 about 2 months ago... I guess that wouldn't have counted either.

Oh well.

Hey, is anyone selling an old IBM 370? My wife would love that in the basement. "But honey, it's a collectors item. Really."

Extremely classic computers

[handy_vandal]

I'd like to collect Stonehenge, but where would I keep it?

Uhm

[Tuffnut]

There's mention in the story of an even more interesting website www.classiccmp.org Unfortunately, most of the website is still under construction.

So...tell me again...why is this site even more interesting?

Scrap heap somewhere

[moankey]

I had a original IBM XT, Commodore 64, Mac Plus, and other peripherals that went with those machines, keyboards, mice, joysticks, modems, etc...
Figured one day I was going to make a lobby museum or something in my office building while on my road to global domination.

But sadly last month I found out my mom said that it had been sitting in her garage for the last 10 years so she figured it was safe to toss and she did so to make room for her Xmas decoration boxes which consist of Jingle Bell Rock dancing Santa, Fish on the wall with SAnta hat, X-Mas decorations, outside lights, and other festive crap...

TRS80 Model 100

[jridley]

I have 3 old Model 100 laptops, but not because they're collectible (I'm the anti-collector, I like nothing better than to throw out old useless crap (hope my kids don't think the same way in 50 years!), but because they're useful and tough as nails. I use them to gather data in the field, they have 32K RAM and a text editor, plus a serial port and a terminal program, and no moving parts. They also make great terminals for hooking to router serial ports, etc. Plus they run for 18 hours on 4 AA batteries and have a full size, real keyboard.

Re:TRS80 Model 100

[wideBlueSkies]

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.

More useful things to do than collecting

[sys$manager]

Perhaps you could use those old computers for something more useful than just collecting them.

Re:More useful things to do than collecting

[wideBlueSkies]

I think the guys over at Lucasfilm turned an SGI box into a beer tap during the production of Episode 1. It was big enough to keep a keg in, so they hollowed it out, and put a spout on it.

I can't find the link to the Wired article. I do remember reading this jsut before Ep1 came out.

In any event, drunken artists and such may explain something about how that movie turned out.

NeXT WorkStation

[Raiford]

... now that is a classic and you can find them on eBay on a fairly regular basis but probably not for long. Those were cool boxes in their day.

Re:NeXT WorkStation

[Bastian]

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.

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.

Some I wish I kept

[TheRealFixer]

Sold my Amiga 500 with monitor for a song a few years back. It was fun to play around with, kind of wish I still had it.

Also used to have a Commodore PET with a CBM 4040 years ago. But I got it from someone who stored it in a basement, and it smelled like mouse poop, which my family didn't appreciate.

On a side note, found this gem when searching eBay for "Amiga 500":

Commodore AMIGA 500 computer system in original box with Keyboard, Power Adapter, Video Cable, and Mouse. Very clean and box in great shape with some wear but has all inserts and packing material. Untested due to unfamiliarity, could not find ON button.

Why is old hardware a mans thing?

[t0qer]

Commodore 128D stored at your mother's house she's telling you to take home lest she chuck it

That's a very true comment...

Since I've been married, my wife CONSTANTLY tried to throw out my old atari stuff. I had an awesome 800xl setup with happy810 drives, toggle switch to switch between O/S's, the works.

I would try to explain to her, this is what I started out on when I was like 10. Didn't matter, week later I would find it all packed up. I tried explaining that it was a collectors item, didn't matter, if I had it out on display she would haphazzardly pack it all up, sans a few cable that went into the trash. I tried explaining to her you just cannot get that vintage POKEY sound with an emulator. She'd point at my SBLive wavetable card.

We must have gone through the whole my unpacking / her packing things about 10 times before I gave up. Finally I just said fuck it, i'm going to make sure it went to a good home. I packed it all up, and went to the nullsoft offices in San Francisco, since I had read that those cats were once atarians.

They were pretty stoked on what I gave them, I think Brennen said he was going to use the drives to dig up some old code he did back in the day just so he could see how much it had changed. Justin made a crack about how he missed the simple flow of line numbering in atari basic, and Christophe ran off with a trackball.

Geek guys like this sort of stuff and geek girls don't. So ladies, my question is, what gives?

--toq

Re:Hmm...

[spacefrog]

I've got a nicely decked out A3000 system... Four gig baracuda, 24mb ram, 040, picasso video card...

Although I would need something more valuable than your mother for it. Do you have any sisters?

My 23 year old Atari, still going strong!

[FyRE666]

Ok, so it's not that flexible, and the non-volatile storage can only manage to keep 3 high-scores, but my Centipede arcade machine is still working with the original boards and monitor! Well, I have recapped it and replaced some of the 2116 4bit RAM, but still - not bad for a machine that was running over 12 hours a day for 13 years without a crash, before I bought it...

One of the best sites

[teslatug]

Check out the Obsolete Computer Museum. It has tons of info and pictures of older machines.

BeBox

[Adnans]

I decided to mothball my BeBox until it's worth at least as much as what I paid for it originally, taking into account inflation, etc.. :)

-adnans

Re:How true...

[ShadowDrake]

Novelty is worth big points, so I'd expect interest in:

1. Prototypes (reference Commodore 65)
2. Unusual design or implementation decisions (Pen Computing devices)
3. Firsts (Why not drop $10 on an original Palm Pilot in case it's worth something someday)
4. Lasts, conversely (the last entries in the Amiga and ST lines, for example)
5. Things with an undesirable reputation-- bet you wish you still had that P60 with the bad FPU!
6. Items that were rarities due to supply or marketing decisions (I bet that 1.2GHz Hammers they sent around for demonstration will be worth something, and did anyone ever get a 160MHz Am5x86?)

Jupiter Ace - World's Only FORTH-Based Micro

[meehawl]

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.

Preserving Docmentation and Software is more Imp..

[The Optimizer]

...is more important sometimes than preserving the actual machine itself.

Manuals get lost. Tapes and Floppy Disks wear out. And then capacitors and other components go bad and without technical info, you're often left with an interesting doorstop.

With that imformation, emulators can get developed, software can be archived into modern formats, and new floppy disks containing software for these systems can be custom created so we don't have to worry (too much) about the originals wearing out.

I like to collect early 8-bit/Pre-PC computers. At the moment I have the following machines (among many others):

* Exidy Sorcerer (1979-1983-ish)
* APF Imagination Machine (1980-ish)
* Compucolor II (1978-1979 ish)

Of those three, I have the technical service manuals and schematics for the first two. I can fire them up and amuse myself by making them do things. I also have some software for them. I've made it a point to freely provide copies of all my technical documentation to other people interested in these old machines, in order to spread the knowledge and lower the chances of it getting lost.

For the Compucolor II though, I acquired a unit that had been converted to 240 volts (Australia). I have it because it was one of the very first computers I ever used, and a cool machine (8080, 48K RAM, 8 Color Display: 80x25 text, 160x100 graphics). I had no idea how rare it was even back then (1978), so decided I wanted to acquire one to add to my collection.

So far, I have no schematics or technical information, and no software (it had a single floppy drive built into the monitor), and have been unable to use it given my limited hardware reverse-engineering skills. The company that made it disappeared over 20 years ago. Thus, with out information and software, it's likely that in time no one will even remember it existed.

-Mp

Apologies from the (new) ClassicCmp webmaster

[SecretAsianMan]

I am Jeffrey Sharp, the (new) webmaster of the ClassicCmp site. I'd like to apologize for and explain the current state of the web site.

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.

PDP-11

[wideBlueSkies]

Here's a link to a site where a guy describes his plans to restore one of these classic machines.

It's a short read, but it's nice to see someone trying to restore one of thse boxes.

Ken Thompson used to have a link on his page to someone who was restoring one of these. But since he's retired, it's not there now.

Re:PDP-11

[nutznboltz]

PDP-10 with a PDP-11 in it just for booting the system:

http://starfish.osfn.org/rcs/DECsystem/2065/2065-o pen.jpg

The PDP-11 is over on the left on the top shelf. It has a row of blue and greenish-black toggle switches.

An even larger PDP-10 that uses four PDP-11's

http://starfish.osfn.org/rcs/DECsystem/1090/1090-o pen.jpg

but the PDP-11's aren't pictured.

Re:My Inventory

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

Apple IIe (soon to be networked via localtalk, but the rom is ruined on the workstation card.. no wonder the ebayer sold it for $1)
Apple IIgs (networked to my linux server via localtalk)
Mac Plus (networked to my linux server via localtalk)
Mac SE (networked via ethernet)
A slew of 9" black&white macs
Mac LC (networked to my linux server via token ring)
Apple Pippin (set top box)
NeXT Colorstation
Amiga 500
Amiga 2000 (networked to my linux server via arcnet)
Amiga 3000
Amiga 4000
Commodore Vic20
Commodore 64
Commodore 128
DECstation 5000/133
PDP11/04 (with dual board unibus etherneton the way, and in my 42U rack)
Vaxstation 3000
Vaxstation 4000
DEC Multia (alpha chip, though a horribly crippled one)
Atari ST 520 (networked with homebrew ACSI-ethernet)
Atari ST 1024STFM
Atari 600XL
Sparcstation 2 (with a dual slot HIPPI card, still need hippi for my linux server!)
TRS-80 Coco 1, 2 & 3
TRS-80 Model 4 (soon to be networked via Omninet, assuming I can find a ISA omninet card)
TRS-80 Model II (soon to be networked via Omninet, assuming I can find a ISA omninet card)
TRS-80 Model 6000 (68k cpu, I need an arcnet board for this baby... ran xenix, and billed as a multi-user system by Tandy. Also in *MINT* condition)
Altos Bidmaster (ran xenix on a 186...blech)
Timex Sinclair
TI994a
HP Netserver (running Banyan Vines 6)
Several 386/486/pentiums (running Netware 2-6)
Several PS/2's(running OS/2 v1.3 - Warp 4)

My home lan consists of:

Localtalk, Token Ring (4/16/100mps)
Ethernet (10baseT/2/5/100/802.11)
VG Anylan, Arcnet (2.5/100mps)
FDDI, ATM (155mps, need to find the 622mps optional module for my Cabletron ZX-250)
DOCSIS (are there any direct DOCSIS PCI cards? My ifconfig output is only 3 pages or so...)

To be implemented:
HIPPI (pending, need PCI card and switch)
Omninet (have the multiplexer and vintage cards, need card for linux server)
Econet (have cards for Archimedes, would need the incredibly rare Ecolink ISA card for the linux server, and some Acorn machines)
Starlan (have a 6300, need the boards, switches.. will be done eventually)

By my count, that means I have these CPU families...
65xx, 68xx, Z80, x86, alpha, 68k, PPC, TMS9900, Sparc, MIPS, Super Hitachi
(ok, so its a sega saturn, still counts)
?? (whatever the PDP has, know the board number, but what do you call the cpu family?)
??? (same, for the Vax)

I've lost count of OS's, but it's something like 40+.

I'm obviously missing the Bebox, and Apple Lisa. The Bebox though, I'm holding out for the Lucent Hobbit CPU prototype... no lame PPC here ;)

I suppose I also need an HP-UX machine, for another OS and the PA-Risc chip. Wouldn't hurt to pick up a cheap SGI Indy either, or for that matter an earlier RS6000. But I really want a Xerox Alto or Star... anyone selling? Oh, and definitely must have a Falcon (Atari ST, last of the line).

You see, it is a lifetime goal of mine, to have the most evil, bastardized localtalk network ever. That means having

Apple II (already done)
x86 PC (The most NICed linux box in history)
Macs (easy, of course)
NeXT (harder, pretty sure I will have to write the drivers myself)
SGI (their RS-422 ports seem to be agreeable with netatalk)
Atari (Falcon or TT030, has the rs-422, even in miniDIN8, but never any drivers)
Amiga (had a chance at the Zorro2 localtalk board, but was broke... guy wouldn't hold it for me:( )

And if that isn't bad enough, my newly bought 19" rack (for $1 no less!) is already half full. Bay Networks and a a Cisco router (2514), and my lovely PDP11 (oldest computer I own)

But the worst part is, by far, I'm just getting started.

I just threw away my first computer...

[trentfoley]

Last month I finally pitched my HP86A computer with green-screen and all. It got me through high school and college. It was my first CP/M machine. It was my first computer with UPPER and lower case. It was my first computer with graphics. It was my first computer! And, it had a floppy instead of cassettte. It was even my first cool hack, defeating the two character passwords on the file system.

As a bachelor, I kept it as it served as a really cool analog display alarm-clock. I had the voice synth module and programmed it to say "You should wake up now, Trent" for the first alarm, and then for each time I hit snooze (anykey) it would say ruder things. It also served as a dart score keeping gadget.

But alas, after 11 years of marriage, my wife got fed up and asked me to clear out its space so she coule use it for her computer. So I set about saying goodbye. I got really high first so that when my wife asked if I was crying, I could say, "Don't be silly -- I'm just really high". It was a sad moment. I will miss the green glow and the absolute silence of my old HP86A.

It's kind of silly.....

[Jason Scott]

....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.....