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What's the Oldest Hardware You are Still Using?
ScottBob asks: "Seeing the recent post about the vintage computer festival got me thinking about old hardware I'm still using in my 'modern' computer. I have a 1 ghz Celeryonion machine, but when I bought the mobo I specifically looked for one with an ISA slot so I could still use my old Zoltrix modem I bought in '97 when V.90 was adopted (when it probably would have been cheaper to buy an ISA-less mobo and a PCI modem). I've also moved a '93 model floppy drive from machine to machine, and it still works. Usually, monitors and power supplies survive the ravage Moore's law has on hardware, but what other things does everybody else save when they cruft together a new machine? Anybody ever do things like disguise a 4 GHz P4 in an ancient 8086 machine box? While on the subject, is anybody still running old DOS programs in a DOS box on a Windows machine (e.g. a database) because your company is too poor/cheap to upgrade or doesn't want to bother with any free alternatives?"
Power Cord, leftover from 8086. Least valuable part then, most valuable part now. Still using it too.
For those vintage games, my personal favorite being Darklands by Microprose, and the occasional bout of A-Train my Maxis. Still can't beat a 486 with DOS 5.0 for some stuff :-) actually our voicemail system at work is DOS 6.2 as well.
...in bed
Hey - I use 1991 keyboard with my dual Opteron database server :)
My boyfriend!
I still use a Tyan Tomcat IV with a p120 as a firewall/dns/mail server.
The motherboard isn't 100% Y2K compliant but it runs like a champ.
Oderint dum metuant
Vintage 1984 with a solid steel backplate the thing weighs almost 5lbs. The buckling spring keys give excellent tactile and audible feedback. I need to get a new PC but the keyboard is staying
Free cell phone tracking
Just my Sound Blaster 16 ISA card.
We have a client that has remote site data collection units that are dialed into periodically to pick up reports. The modem on the units (which have been running flawlessly since '91) are old 1200 baud modems. Since its not broken, there was no need to replace the units...
--
Time is on my side
I'm taking COBOL which is on an IBM s390 running zOS and MVS. I know that the s390 is relatively new, but the damned thing is still relatively old and a pain to use :-)
I've also got a 486 DX2 running at 66mhz running as a router here, it's not really doing much, besides routing all the houses packets, but it's around 11 - 12 years old. And every now and then I fire up the apple IIe for just plain old fun, I think that thing is getting in the ballpark of 18 - 19 years old.
But as far as "running" or "using" you really can't get by running anything older than 5 years old for a workstation, I don't care how big of a mac fan you are :-)
Ignore the "p2p is theft" trolls, they're just uninformed
A fellow tech had a service call at a client that had been around so long that their info wasn't even in our "new" dispatching system (dating back to the early 90's). They had a remote office that was having some problems communicating back with the main office mainframe complex. Said tech goes out to client site and finds out that the way they communicate back to the mainframe is a custom app running on an origional IBM PC XT and the reason it's not working is that the HDD has wonked out. Well he does the old rap the drive on the countertop trick to get it spun up and tells them that he will look for a replacement drive but he states very ademantly that he makes no promises. Well after having a good laugh with the parts dispatcher he finds the FRU number in an old manual and does a search, low and behold one of our third party parts distributer has 15 of them IN STOCK! He orders one and then finds an ancient copy of ghost that can deal with the old system. He attaches the new drive and copies the partition over, viola, a system that will probably run for another 15+ years.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
I've got a Macintosh IIx (16 Mhz, 80 MB SCSI hd, 8 MB ram) setted up with OpenBSD running my printserver for my Laserjet 4 MV from HP and my very very old Apple StyleWriter II that still prints illustrations and such beautifully.
Other than that... I've also got a Mac SE/30 with NetBSD that isn't in use... I'm thinking of remaking on old PC-1 from IBM (7 mhz) I got in the basement to something fun though.
At one place which I assist with IT in, we still run the same UNIX-based billing/accounting system as we did in 1986.
As I am comparitively new, compared to most of this hardware, I wasn't around to see it installed. About 8 years ago, the original Bell Labs Unix server was replaced with an x86 SCO box.
Many of the Terminals remaining are original. The printers both lasted until about a year ago when they simultaneously died.
Our software vendor stopped supplying updates about 3 years ago when they switched to windows. Last month, they completely pulled the plug, and in order to stay legal, we must now move to windows, which will be expensive initially and in the long-run.
I don't pay attention to the SCO system. It just works. It has worked for 17 years. Over those 17 years, we had to purchase one server, a few terminals, and a printer. With windows, we will need to maintain a 3 year upgrade cycle.
And the sad part about all of this is that there was absolutely nothing wrong with the unix hardware. Last week, I sadly removed the terminals, and installed terminal emulation software on the new windows PCs. Sure, I could have attempted telnet, but the server predates TCP/IP, and I feared corrupting the otherwise flawless system in place.
I know we have plenty of reasons to bash SCO, but I must testify that anything that can last 17 years with little or no maintence is worth keeping. I've already had calls about the windows hardware not working as expected. Ugh.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
Anyway the oldest machine I have working right now that I actually use is called an Adam and it was made by Coleco Vision. What is it used for you ask? An ashtray. An overgrown ashtray/beerstand nothing more. But I used it in elementary school so I won't part with it no matter how many burns it has... Besides one day it'll be a collectors item which I will sell for billions! NO! MILLIONS!
Brings tears to my eyes coming here... http://www.old-computers.com/
MoFscker
I still use slide rules.
I have two. The newest is from the late 60s. The oldest was given to me by my father. I think he got it when he was in college in the early 40s.
In the early 90s, I returned to college for another degree. I routinely used the slide rules for homework. The graders couldn't figure out why I only gave 3 digits of accuracy and the third was sometimes wrong.
On another occasion, I pulled it out to do a quick calculation during a test. The prof had never seen one and made a bee-line to my seat (on the aisle) and spent about 5 minutes looking it over.
I recently retired my 486DX2 (later OV83) system with 64MB of ram, that I built in 1992.
Fight Spammers!
Regardless of how old you think your hardware is, you haven't seen old hardware until you visit an active physics research lab.
;)
The one I was working in recently is still using an Apple ][ to scan the dye laser that forms the frequency reference in the world's first and only solid-state quantum computer.
It just goes to show you that the really clever guys simply won't upgrade until either something breaks or the old system won't do what's needed. Otherwise, keep the Apple.
BTW the Apple is sitting near a superconducting magnet, and still works. Its first failure that I know of was a few weeks ago when the power supply died. It's now got an AT power supply hanging off it
Yup. $600 new. Now worth about $25. I still have a huge selection of custom sounds that I use when I write music to give it all that nice 80's feel.
I also have a HP LaserJet IIIP from '91 that still works and is cheaper per page than all those crappy inkjet printers.
Hang on a sec...did you say you're taking COBOL? As in, taking a class on it? Learning it???
RUN AWAY! RUN AWAY!!!!
"A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
Ugh...Paradox database. Lousy in-house apps coded around it, original developers dead/missing/downsized/laughing from afar...but us IT schmucks still get to support it.
Well, OK, actually it runs just fine and rarely gives us trouble. Can't say the same for our MS-SQL servers...
Up until I recently killed (don't ask) my wife's computer, it still had Crystal Caves 1, 2, and 3 on it. Go Milo!
philcrissman.com.
Wow...I have one too, but it's the newest piece of hw I own...
What is this DOS you speak of? CP/M all the way. :-)
My firewall/dns/mail/local dev box is a p75, with 40 megs of ram and a whopping 1GB HD. It's one of the original IBM "Aptiva" models, and could barely run Win95 (it came with 3.11). Now it runs FreeBSD and couldn't be better suited to its purpose, though I have to admit I don't compile anything on it, everything - kernel included - gets compiled elsewhere and installed over NFS.
FreeBSD isn't dying, but it does run on geriatric hardware!
"BSD: Free as in speech. Linux: Free as in beer. Windows 10: Free as in herpes." --Man On Pink Corner in #52607549.
I still have one client with a company wide Q&A (Symantec) database that was started in 1983. Fortunately it was written well and has survived even on current XP boxes. I have offered to upgrade them to a Windows based application, but they don't like the costs that will be incurred. They are not the only ones. I guess I should be happy they liked my system, but 20 years seems a bit long of tooth.
And yes, I still do modifications on it from time to time.
Sig under construction since 1998.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I have, and still occasionally use, a Radio Shack Model 100. That's the laptop with the 40x8 screen.
Sure, it's only got 64KB of memory, but it will run forever on 4xAA batteries. And the keyboard is great.
Why the assumption that a company is too poor/cheap to upgrade or doesn't want to bother with free alternatives? Believe it or not, there is still some software for which free alternatives do not exist. And probably will never exist, because it is so specialized.
At one bio lab where I worked, I had to support a bunch of DOS machines connected to lab equipment, because the controller programs only worked in DOS, due to the age of the equipment. Replacing the device would cost more than your average waterfront condo, so it's not exactly as if the company was being "cheap". Besides, the old device worked fine - if it ain't broke... etc.
Another place I worked at used a proprietary database for storing patient records. The server was a 386SX/25 and was accessed from dumb terminals connected to a multiport serial board. Replacing/upgrading this woudl require spending a huge amount of money to obtain a new system, or a huge number of man-hours developing a new open-source system and getting it certified. (Such systems need to be certified what with privacy laws and the like.)
So, there are plenty of reasons why a company might keep old hardware arround - almost anything which has custom boards or software written for it is likely to be running on older hardware, simply because there's no reason to upgrade.
There is no sig, there is only Zuul.
When I first submitted this story, I was tearing up my house looking for the driver CD for my old Sound Blaster Live card. For whatever reason, Creative didn't have Windows 98 drivers/software for the original version (the one I have, not the 5.1 version) available for download.
Anyway, on the subject of companies still using legacy hardware, nuke plants have to be the king of dinosaur computer users. No new nuke plants have been ordered since the Three Mile Island accident in the late 70's, and all the hardware they use (everything from pump motors to computers) have to go through so much regulatory red tape that it is cost prohibitive to upgrade, hence, the computers running the control systems are all geriatric 70's era mainframes that constantly have to be maintained. Most nukes were never meant to go over 50-75% of their rated generating capacity, but in today's energy hungry world, utilities try to squeeze out every bit of energy they can from them, pushing them to 105% rated capacity and beyond. And the NRC is okay with this given the age of their control systems??
By contrast, I recently visited a coal burning power plant that uses various Windows 2000 machines and Sun hardware running Solaris, all networked together with fiber and using modern off-the-shelf control system software. So much for the "modern" miracle of nuclear power.
"Vintage"? Next thing you know, we're going to go to keyboard-testing events, wash our hands in salt water and blow-dry them between testings, and start using weird adjectives.
"Ah, yes. This eMachines knockoff displays a firmer character, with elements of plozz and fwimple, leading to an oaky finish."
Eep.
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
A company called Unicomp bought the rights to the original design. They are still available, steel backplate, buckling springs, sensible layout, and all. get 'em here, $50 a pop.
I bought four, one for each machine I use at work (including a Mac - used a USB-PS2 converter) and one for my PC at home. They absolutely kick ass. I saw many of the original IBM keyboards at the Vintage Conputer Festival last weekend - tested the feel and weight of them and the original ones are identical to the current ones from Unicomp as far as I can tell.
Until I picked up a Chicony KBP9805. (see also the KU9865)
:-(
It's good an old school solid feel, but it only has a single aluminum plate inside, which makes it easy to carry around.
Best part?
Not only is it spill resistant, you can disassemble the plastic components (base, key tray) and put it in the dishwasher. The contact sheet is a clever enclosed rubber design, which is itself washable, and the controller a very simple PCB that snaps in and out of place.
There are good keyboards out there that aren't 20 years old if you do a little searching. Sometimes you have to go straight to the OEM manufacturers out in Asia to get what you want.
Anyway, back on topic... The oldest part I'm still using is the stereo attached to my PC so I can hear my music. I ditched the elderly floppy drive about a year ago.
Fuck Beta. Fuck Dice
I just retired an Indigo colored Indigo with a R3000 MIPS CPU. The sucker would not die. That also goes for a couple of R4000 Indigo colored Indigos.
Then again, we still have a Personal Iris (R2000) that is being used as a print server (parallel port). We have provisions to replace this print server, but for some odd reason nobody wants to pull the plug on this old (circa 1988) computer. I can't. It is odd, but I somehow find that pulling the plug would be cruel.
Then again, this use to be my desktop system over ten years ago. I wrote a lot of code on that ancient computer (X11? Motif?, nah, GL and NeWS).
sc2.sourceforge.net is where you will find Star Control 2, restored to its original glory for Linux PCs. It even has voices, which the original PC version did not. I play it altogether too much.
Hardware, software, and blinking lights!
I use an E6B, not for reliability but because it's cheap. But I've seen many catalogues and flight shops sell "electronic E6B's", presumably just calculators optimized again for those sorts of problems. I've seen them in use, but never tried it myself.
Anyway, if the avionics electronics all failed, you'd face more difficulties navigating than having your calculator or not, most likely (though you'd have no issues staying aloft on a plane thats not fly-by-wire--the avionics electrical system is independent of the magnetos that provide the spark for combustion in the engine).
Not sure just how old this baby is, but I have an OmniKey/101 keyboard made by Northgate Computer Systems (do they even still exist? I can't find them). I think I may have had this way back on my 386 (it's now on a Athlon 1.2GHz running FreeBSD). Reasons I like it:
1) It's hefty, like the original IBM keyboard. Metal base, stays firmly in-place on the desk wherever you set it. Nice solid feel.
2) The letters will NEVER wear off, due to the way they're molded. The letters aren't painted on the keys... they are part of the plastic itself, molded all the way through. Awesome! I'm a fast and vigorous typer and not only wear letters off, but wear plastic down.
3) The keys remove for easy cleaning. In fact, I took the entire thing apart for a cleaning not too long ago. I still have the special light-blue Northgate key-removal tool.
4) Mechanical key-switches for that tactile feel.
5) Programmable... although I not longer remember how. There's a flip-up panel in the upper-left with an orange button and some DIP switches. Using the switches you could set it to come up always as Dvorak or do some other things. Using the orange button then pressing an F? key you could switch between QWERTY and Dvorak on the fly, as well as other stuff. You could also buy a set of Dvorak keycaps.
I'm getting to the point though where the noisiness of the keyboard is a problem. People get annoyed when they hear me typing while I'm on the phone. Oh well.
A big green wang from 1979
The world is an ugly place.
May we never see th
I wouldn't give up my model M for anything. However there is this one interesting issue...when you got one girlfriend on the phone, and the other online, the one on the phone gets pissed off saying that you're not paying attention to her because she can hear you typing in the background.
I still have an A2000/040 running at the TV station where I work. At one time, we had five Amigas running doing various tasks, including a 1200 doing a constant "glass" logo in the bottom right corner of the screen.
The aforementioned A2000's only job these days is to reach into the Associated Press (AP NewsDesk, running WinNT4_SP6) server via Samba, parse the individual scripts for the latest news program, order them, comma delimit them, and send them to a Linux PostgreSQL server where it is automatically imported, and available via our web page (wdtv.com). All done using AREXX (Amiga REXX) and EZCron (a gui cron written by myself, with a little help from our past Chief Engineer.
Ah, the beauty of it all! It runs 24/7, has not been rebooted since I can remember, and even processes ScreamerNet frames with Lightwave 3D in its spare time (OK, it's slow at that task, but helps about 5%).
I have to disagree with you there. OEM-supplied components *are* quite flimsy, since they compete on essentially nothing but price (well, perhaps extra volume buttons on the keyboard might be a selling point).
There are a number of manufacturers that produce more highly-price, nicer input devices. Among them, Logitech,
which sells a whole line of wireless keyboards, PCKeyboard, which has among its offerings modern versions of old-IBM-Model-M style buckling-spring mechanism keyboards (CLICK CLICK CLICK...), Fingerworks' unusual offerings, the expensive-but-ultimate-RSI-avoidance Kinesis keyboards, and Goldtouch's ergo products.
May we never see th
How about a Color Computer 3, running a multi-tasking operating system with overlapping windows and mouse and hard drive and everything in 512k of ram and a 6809 processer running a Mhz clock in the low single digits...
Hah! I actually have a copy of Windows 1.03 (came on 5 360K floppies, counting Windows Write).
The only reason we have the rights we have is that people just like us died to gain those rights. -- Cheerio Boy
In my office, across from my new 2GHz dual G5, I have a 1991 NeXT Workstation. Admittedly, I don't have it on all the time anymore, but I do turn it on once in a while to convert old WriteNow files and such. (Until July 2001 it was my main machine and in use daily -- I had to wait until OS X before there were machines up to the task of replacing it.)
:-)
These days, one of my favorite uses of the machine is doing a side-by-side comparison with OS X. I compare the supplied Terminal, TextEdit and Mail applications on OS X and NeXTSTEP, showing that they're essentially the same programs, including details like the Font Panel and Color Picker. I then run OmniGraffle (2.0) on the Mac and Diagram.app on the NeXT -- again the two are essentially the same (OmniGraffle began as a Diagram clone and will read Diagram files). Finally, I run Abscissa (a graph-drawing program) on both and open the same file and show that it's exactly the same third-party app, just recompiled. Along the way I show things like live window dragging. It's pretty easy to see how OS X is in large part a continuation of NeXTSTEP.
The NeXT is, of course, a little slower, but people tend to be surprised when I reveal that the NeXT has a 25MHz CPU, whereas the G5 has two 2000MHz CPUs (factor of 160 difference), the NeXT is maxed out at 32MB of RAM, whereas my G5 is only at 3/16ths capacity at 1536MB (48x more), and the NeXT has a 1GB internal drive whereas the G5 has a 160GB drive (another factor of 160). The NeXT is more than twelve years old and nevertheless holds its own pretty well -- it certainly doesn't seem like 1/160th of the machine my G5 is.
Sadly, these days it takes a couple of tries before the internal 1GB hard drive spins up, and so I think one day it's going to go to that place in the sky that disk drives go to. That'll be a sad day, but not one I can't recover from -- at only 1GB, it's not like it takes much space to store a backup.
I am still using a Macintosh LCII running at a blistering 16MHz. It is still in the original configuration with the original 40MB harddrive. I use it at my small business to print up signs and tags for merchendise.
Been in the family the whole time. Still runs like new.
Oh, and I drag out a 1990 dot matrix printer once a year to print some 3-part forms for my daughters' school auction. They better graduate before the ribbon wears out.
Not exactly vintage, but my A1200 still sees a fair bit of use, primarily to run Bars and Pipes, but SWOS gets the odd outing too. I have an A4000 too, but it makes too much noise for the environment I want to use it in. Every time I use the Amiga I'm surprised by the speed and friendliness of the OS. Wonderful computers.
I've also got a Sun ELC (external disk, board in the back of the monitor) which I dig out when I need to check something on SunOS 2.5. Which, admittedly, doesn't happen an awful lot these days.
I took a look at the recent vintage festival site and came across some images of the Amiga 3000UX, the one that came with a bona fide S5V4 Unix. I remember drooling about owning one of those back in 1991. Those things could have changed the market by themselves if Commodore and Sun and all the other proprietry UNix buggers hadn't been so immesurably greedy.
That would be X2 technology... not 2X.
-- This space for lease, low setup fee, inquire within!