Slashdot Mirror
Fun and Profit With Obsolete Computers
An anonymous reader writes "C|Net has a story about the value of aging computer hardware, and the subculture of people who collect them. The story details some of the more enthusiastic collectors currently participating in the hobby, as well as their old-school beautiful hardware. '[Sellam Ismail] recently brought a quarter century-old Xerox Star computer back to life to be used as evidence in a patent lawsuit. The pride of his collection is an Apple Lisa, one of the first computers (introduced in 1983) with a now standard graphical interface. Such items sell for more than $10,000. In an old barn in Northern California that also houses pigs, Bruce Damer, 45, keeps a collection that includes a Cray-1 supercomputer, a Xerox Alto (an early microcomputer introduced in 1973) and early Apple prototypes. '
I think it would be a good idea to save my current computer in a warehouse for the next 30 years.
I've got a 23+ year old genuine Apple RF modulator. Take THAT, suckers. The "switcheur" troll would gladly suck my cock for this piece of Apple antiquity.
No article such as this is complete without a link straight to the Classic Computer Mailing List, with its high volume of discussions, finds, swaps and technical solutions.
A couple of years ago I was involved in the dissemination of a collection in the south-east of England. From the PDP-11/43 that had people offering to drive over from northern Europe, to the blue Intel MDS to Spain, the old Dragon to America, the stalwart CJE Micros grabbing up the BBC's Torch coprocessor, to the steady stream of people each collecting a VAX, it was amazing to see the interest and enthusiasm.
Three nice things about old machines:
(1) Simple enough that a single human can understand how they work;
(2) Scaled such that this same human can fix problems in his garage;
(3) Sufficiently well built that (2) can sometimes be unnecessary even after 20 years.
Plus, Lemmings looks surprisingly good on the big TV in the living room.
I still have a Commodore Plus 4. And before I got the disk drive, I had to retype all my programs in. That's how I learned to type faster. But anyway, think about how many XP users will hang on with a death grip! I'm a news director at a radio station and I love to talk about how Microsoft is screwing the consumer! It's so easy to do when Microsoft keeps providing such excellent examples such as Vista! After all, aren't they a part of the dumbing down of America. I then talk about Linux, which keeps getting better all the time.
Frankly, I don't get the collector (cough, mental illness hoarding, cough) mentality. I suppose I'll sit back and watch this thread for awhile and feed my 30 cats.
I have a large collection of Sinclair gear, from a bare ZX80 though a number of ZX81s (with and without Rampacks) to most models of the ZX Spectrum, from the original 16K to the +3 with built-in 3" disk drive. Microdrives, tapes, ZX and Alphacom printers, light guns, Currah u-speech and on and on.
It's purely nostalgia, not a money-making venture. My first computer was a ZX81, saved up for and bought new 24 years ago, and I still remember it like it was yesterday. (In fact, I still have it.)
Hal Spacejock: Science Fiction with Nuts
The problem with firing up the Cray 1 in my garage is the power it draws. It is fun to watch the power meter spin around and smoke though.
Bruce might want to snatch up those 6,400 Post-it notes, stuck to the windows of the E2 building @ UCSC by a bunch of frats in an attempt to recreate the first level of Donkey Kong...would look great stuck up on the inside of that tech-retro barn!
Just checked e-bay. Apple IIgs and a complete set of acessories, SIGNED BY WOZ!... $41.:( Well, back to number munchers, hyperstudio and oregon trail. I still want a Cray-1 for a couch in my basement whenver i buy a house.
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
On a modern computer, everything is wrapped into so many of abstraction that you can not discover how it works. It will take someone 3 years of experience to create a device driver or a graphics library that can be understood in 3 weeks on an old PC.
...used to sum up my job. We used to get spare PDP/11 parts from people like the those in the article. The DEC maintenance guys at the time told me about a factory they knew about which relied absolutely on a PDP/8. Service calls there were a challenge, to say the least.
Towards the end of my stint at Vic Roads the foam padding stuck to the top of the slide out boxes on the 11/84's had turned to dust and collected around the base of all the mux cards where they go into the backplane. Swap out a card and spend the next couple of hours vacuming out the backplane to get it working again. Installing a SCSI card was a challenge. You slide out the CPU box and get yourself organised by lying flat on your back underneath it. Like taking the transmission out of a car. The you identify the wire wrap cable for the slot which is going to take the card and repatch the appropriate interrupt line. On some of them you were lucky, there would be little shorting patches which you could pull off, like on the back of an IDE disk. Don't muck up the backplane in the process because people need traffic lights, you know.
I've got an ohio scientific superboard 2 in my spare parts cabinet. As long as I can still find a TV which listens to an RF modulator I am free to run up the micro assembler and hack away. My son is 5 now. In 7 years he will be the same age as me when my dad built that machine up.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
My Gateway 500S that cost $1250 in 2002 won't even bring $100 on ebay. I haven't tried to sell mine but I watched a lot of others try and fail. I think after 3 or 4 years the computer is only worth about what the software might cost new. Speaking of which, I was reading that XP won't be sold next year and maybe that will boost the price of some of the old machines since people might want XP again. I can't speak for all of Gateway's computers but the 500S was a stud (and Consumer Reports best buy) and mine still works great. I might pick up a couple more since they cost about what a copy of XP home would cost new anyway. I still don't even have to activate with Microsoft when I reinstall my XP from the 2002 Gateway so I was wondering if its easy to transfer OS to new machine. Old versions of XP might be nice to have.
I realize it's utterly pointless to respond to an automated bot, but aren't Xcode and IB NeXT inventions?
However impractical they may become there is just something cool about old machines. I remember when the cool old things of today were the dorky new things we complained about. But now that they're old they seem really classic and cool somehow...
Caveat Utilitor
I was running my webserver on an IBM thinkpad, P90 with 32Megs and 1gig harddrive but I just found an old rack mount server which is an old Pentium 133 with the F00F bug, it has 32Meg and a 4 gig drive. It's used to feed static web pages and as a picture and file server. It's a generic rack mount of some sort. Eventually it will get gutted and made into a more modern media server with a terabyte of storage. Unless someone offers me 10k.
The Thinkpad may be left unmolested though I'm considering making it a digital picture frame.
I'd go on a Vegan diet but the delivery time from Vega is too long. --brownkitty
Yeah, a co-worker of mine keeps a "museum" of old hardware, that is, he likes to collect crap and keep it around instead of throwing it away :)
If you are going to sell your old computers make sure you erase the hard drive first. Don't be like this clueless former Canadian Alliance party member who sold an old Powerbook that still contained party membership lists and other confidential info.
These oldies are regularly used in the demo scene. A colleague of mine regularly visits demo parties where up to 250 geeks gather to show each other their demos. He owns a souped-up atari with a custom board driven by a custom-made FPGA containing 2 Gb memory.
:-)
Although reportedly, even in the demo scene there is an on-going shift to PC hardware. The Amiga and Atari lovers are getting smaller.
On another note, he told me that when his group returned from a recent demo party by car, they noticed the little mileage markers (marking every 100 meter on European highways). They drove and counted 133.5, 133.6, and then saw that 133.7 was gone
8 of 13 people found this answer helpful. Did you?
Interface Builder is practically the same applikation in Tiger as in NeXTSTEP. Xcode however was not introduced until Apple released Panther. Project Builder on the other hand would be considered as a NeXT invention
I have:
four Sinclair Spectrums (rubber key 48K, two Spectrum+, and a toast rack Spectrum 128)
a MicroVAX
a Sun Ultra 5 (used as a server)
Out of all of them, the Sinclair machines are the most fun.
A little song that sums up why the Speccy was (and still is!) so much fun:
http://www2.b3ta.com/heyhey16k/heyhey16k.swf (warning, flash)
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
2 ea 8086's, 4 ea 8088's, 1 ea 386, 3 ea 486's ( one is even a DX!!!!), 1 ea cyrix 5x86 133, 2 ea p75's, 3 ea p133's, 2 ea p166's, 2 ea pII 266's, and the MASTER: 1 ea pIII slot 1 500....all rolled into one.
I have Caldera OpenLinux Base 1.1 installed on all, with Sun's Distributed Computing software, and I STILL can't get WoW or City of Heroes to run....guess I need to go RTFM AGAIN!!!
Down With Slashdot BETA!!! I've been around the corner and seen the oliphant; you can only abuse me from your perspecti
I used to collect this stuff. Well, not Crays, but retro computer hardware. Fun as it is to buy for $5 a Sun Sparc server that would have cost more than $10,000, there's a reason why this stuff is being chucked out. It's a waste of space. And if you plug it in and turn it on, it's also a waste of power.
Now, if people have enough space to start their own personal museum, I'm not going to tell them not to. But if you're an ordinary person with an ordinary house, you're better off putting them on the verge for the next council bulk rubbish collection.
As a collector of some of this old hardware (See my website, http://www.obsolyte.com/ ), I can tell you that for every "gem" you find, you also aquire about 2.5 tons of useless crap. It's very difficult to figure what machines will become the iconic collectables, and which ones will just be considered trash.
// at garage sales across the country, although, very likely missing key components.
The Apple Lisa is highly prized (although at one point, Apple was filling landfills with 'em and Sun Remarketing was selling what remained for $200 a pop), but the Mac 512k is pretty much ignored (although the original 128k Mac is valuable).
I have no idea what my old NeXT-Station is worth, but, it'll never be worth what the original Cube is. I have a pretty decent collection of SGI gear, but, does anyone care about SGI at this point? If you look on ebay, people can't even give that stuff away.
And while the Amiga may be the greatest computer ever made, you'd have trouble these days selling your A2000, no matter how tricked out it is (free Video toaster!). The Amiga collector market is saturated, anybody that wants an Amiga probably already has more than 2.
And you'll still find the venerable C=64 and Apple
Of course, should you have an original Altair in your basement, that's another story entirely.
TTYL
Brian Cirulnick
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
2. Fun ...
3.
4. Profit!!!
I wouldn't consider the mad hatter mad. Just reality impaired. He sure can make a mean cup of tea.
Just come back for it like John Titor did for his IBM 5100 computer.
waiting for ad.doubleclick.net
Comment analysis:
[x] Promotes Linux
[x] Bashes Microsoft and/or Vista
[ ] Bashes the MAFIAA
[ ] Mentions Apple
[ ] Defends individual rights and liberties
[x] Calls the American public dumb
[x] Pines for the good old days
Hmm... Good, but definitely could be better.
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
For a while it's great fun sorting through boxes of Spectrum tape software and Amiga disks and reliving some good gaming memories - but when you get to 25 "TAPE LOADING ERRORS" in a day, in can get a bit wearing.
Suffice it to say, about 2 years later I sold it all back on eBay for about the same money I paid for it. I still love the old games on those machines, as well as the C64, but these days it's far easier to play them in a PC emulator.
I admire the guys who collect as a hobby but I couldn't find enough hours in the day to do it.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
I've got stacks upon stacks of grey boxes, but somehow I cannot sell them for the world.
Among the computer antics I own (not many actually) there's a "custom" ZX Spectrum +. Why custom? Because my father was fed up of me and my brothers hogging the TV with that thing, so he bought a 10" monitor. Of course it couldn't be attached directly, so he got an I/O interface and by soldering cables directly on the mainboard(!) he got the video signal in a cable that he connected into the I/O interface. As well he did the same for the mic in and ear in inputs. The I/O interface had a DIN-like connector that was compatible with the monitor, but the signal was poor, so he added a power supply to the I/O to reduce the signal decay.
This thing worked perfectly until I stopped using the Spectrum in 1988.
A CC-licensed illustrated horror novel
A custom built PC or a Dell is simply out of the question
Wrong
Well, not about the custom PC, but very much so in the case of the Dell.
You know what makes something interesting/valuable to collectors? Rarity. If millions of people chuck their Dells, but you keep yours, especially if you keep a set that shows the incremental development of the desktop PC over a few years, then that's a collectable.
A lot of people let old hardware slip through their fingers without wondering whether it might be significant. We are alive at the birth of the information age. And just as people happily threw away comic books for decades (Hugo Gernsback's back catalogue ended up being used as ballast in trans atlantic shipping, can you beleive that!), we're chucking out 'useless' hardware now.
God I wish I still had my 3DFX Voodoo 1.
I can guarantee you that maintenance of such machines over 30 years has cost more than $10,000. If for no other reason than the real estate that they occupy. It is Silicon Valley after all. Rent out that room or shed you keep those heaps of junk in and you'll have $10,000 in 2 years rather than 30.
Think of it this way. If I told you that I wanted you to keep your current computer and all related peripherals for the next *30 years*, in working order, how much would I have to pay you to do that? I bet you'd ask for a lot more than $10k.
Same goes for any "collector's" item. People are amazed that a #1 issue of a golden age comic book will get $5,000 and up, and talk about it like it's an extraordinary profit for the seller. Ok, here's $5,000 -- now keep this piece of paper in pristine condition and obsess over it for the next 30 years. Sound like something you'd want to take up?
Yes, the prices are high but that doesn't imply profit by any human measure of economy.
I had the Timex Sinclair Z80 with the 16K Ram Pack, and I still remember spending hours typing in the code for "Dragon Fight" from Compute magazine. Of course, it was mainly the frustration of accidentally touching the Ram Pack, and having the computer reset, and the lengths I went to so that I wouldn't hit it!lol I used a toothpaste box, and tape to protect it from being bumped...which was a lot and darn it if it didn't work! I also had to raise the computer up on a "Hardy Boys" book as well to prevent it resetting. Man, when I finally finished the program....I was actually disappointed because it made it out to be like it was going to be the shit...nope, but it was fun finally getting it together!lol Thanks for bringing me back, man!
...being thrown out on a council rubbish collection. It was the original version, with cassette interface and heavy keyboard. I later acquired a CGA colour display at a fleamarket, and collected a bunch of old PC-bus cards. By the way this was in 1996 or 1997, so even back then I realised it would be worth something someday. I've never even attempted to plug it in. What I did was wrap it carefully in plastic and seal it up so it was airtight, then packed it away. It's still waiting for me to take a look at it, however that may be in many years from now as I have too many other projects.
Great, tell everyone and make it harder for the 'non profit' collector.
Bastards.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Bill Gates'?
Oh, sorry, that'd be you windoze fags.
I have a thing for Sun Sparc 20's -- they are VERY upgradeable and extremely reliable. Two of mine have quad 150mhz Ross processors making them snappy ehough to serve out some Apache/PHP/MySQL, host a little e-mail for a few domains, and do some secondary DNS. They're small, don't use a TON of power, and just plain cool.
Oh, and they'll run Linux or a few of the BSD's just fine..
Here is the uptime of one of my production Sparc 20's hosting a bit of email and DNS:
[matt@darkside]$ uptime
9:43AM up 953 days, 16:03, 1 user, load averages: 0.11, 0.11, 0.08
It would be well over 1,000 if a UPS hadn't needed replaced 953 days ago.
I have ipcop running on a pentium 133 laptop as my gateway/firewall. The battery holds enough charge to stay up for a few minutes when the power flickers. With the display built right in I don't need a monitor sitting there. I can turn off the display when I don't need it. I leave it on 24/7. It consumes about 13 watts of power at idle (via Killawatt*). It's a little pokey on the web pages, but uses very little CPU otherwise.
I was using a P266 laptop behind the 133 for a while and stripped down a knoppix install to run:
- httpd
- sshd
- samba
- openvpn
- fetchmail
- dovecot
- spamassassin
I adjusted most of the config files to lighten the load on the 256M of ram, but as I added more services it was just too much for it and stuff was getting sniped by OOM killer; nice experiment for a couple years though. Linux is adjustable for old crappy hardware which cant be said for windows (or apple for that matter).
[*] - http://www.smarthome.com/9034.html
boycott slashdot February 10th - 17th check out: altSlashdot.org
Don't know about you guys, but I keep a Silicon Graphics Indigo2 R10K 195MHz/MaxImpact workstation under my bed for my own nostalgic purposes. Back in my college days, the machines were so obscenely expensive (around $40,000 per unit), you had to have special security clearance just to get near one, let alone the room with all eight units.
Of course, the system itself has lost much of the luster over the years, when you consider that current desktop computers (and even game consoles) are able to do in realtime what would have taken several days/weeks to achieve on the older hardware.
Yet, it's still satisfying to know I finally have one of the very machines I once envied others for having access to.
8==8 Bones 8==8
She works (or did, last time we tested her) & we may have some accessories & software for her, maybe even a few manuals...
TIA
Pretty much if you go to an electronics recycling event and see what others are tossing it'll probably make you see that you've collected alot of junk. But the important thing is to recycle the junk properly.
That can be hard to do even if you find a free recycling event as they may be limited to once a year and only for a part day (not 8 hours).
If you are a serious collector then you've done your research as to what is worth keeping and know the cost of maintainance as moving hardware components can deteriorate over time and non moving components are subject to deterioration too, just takes longer.
But what is really needed is a fast and small OS that can easily be ported to the otherwise "junk" to bring a bit more life and use to it before its final destination of landfill of recycling by better methods.
There are some small and fast OS... More than the ones I know about, Minix 3, AROS, Damnsmall Linux, etc.. and there is new hardware that allows FPGA programming of emulations of some of the old system, hardware such as the C=ONE.
Though its not ancient by any means, i still have my old 486DX2-66 from 1995 running. It runs an old BBS. :)
Maybe it 10 or 20 more years, i'll get some money out of it. Ha!
I recently (well 12 months ago) moved house interstate. Having lived in the same house for a loong time, and only short moves before, I had hoarded a large collection of old computer crap. If I saw something for sale, and it was old, I would buy it assuming the price was right. I quite enjoy making old, dead, or forgotten hardware work as it was intended. Some machines were older than me. I had 3 very old washing machine style DEC computers I scored at a hospital auction (12$aud for the pallet).
:(
Anywho, in preparation for the move I put as much of it on ebay as I could. The 8-bit home computer era stuff sold really well, one dude paid for shiping over 30 kilos of the stuff across the country. The very old stuff was too heavy to really ebay, I did manage to shift a little to some local nerds. Anything PC, later than 286, earlier than p3 didn't sell. Amiga crap of the same era sold without trouble. I couldn't give away the pile of 3dfx cards. There was a cubic meter of 32pin sims that didn't get any interest. I guess this isn't a big suprise, I had to take 6 trailer loads of PC crap to the recycling center (I bet a bunch of it is still there).
Suprises:
Newton OMP didn't sell, but cassiopeaia E-10 did
A classroom worth of perfectly good and well setup Apple PPCs ended up being donated, later somebody discovered the CPU fans were uber quiet and junked them all for the fans
One dude paid top dollar for all the C64s (regardless of condition) and had me remove all the SID chips and send him just those.
I keep a Sun 3/470 around that I resurrected after being saved from a big dumpster. Not overly quick, but it does keep the room warm when running.
I did actually use it several years ago while in school to have something that was slow enough that I could see differences in algorithms for a couple of my CS classes.
One original programmer from Elliot Automation.
/. and sees me trying to pimp him out.
Only one previous owner.
Has wear and tear.
I am so dead if my Dad finds
is not finding the hardware - there's more of that around than you might expect. ... "real programmers" tended to ... tho' discovering where to download the emulator and software
There are even a lot of manuals floating around
keep a manual or two when the machine was replaced.
However, the software - which is perhaps the heart of the machine - and the cables
tended to get thrown away separately as soon as the CPU was closed down.
For example for the most popular mainframe in the UK in the 1970s - the ICL1900 series -
most of the small machine software (the operators Executive; the operating systems
George I & II; and the compilers that were used on the small machines like the 4K
versions of Algol and Fortran) seems to have been lost. It is lucky that one project
has managed to preserve the large system operating system (George 3) and some
related software
is tricky, to say the least.
I have also seen no evidence that anyone has preserved the GeCOS operating system
from the large Honeywell systems (6000, and its successor the Level 66). OK, it is
not so "special" as Multics, which ran on similar hardware, but still does contain
many interesting features - most notably in file handing. For that matter has the
B programming language (predecessor of C, designed for large-word oriented machines)
been saved anywhere?
The profit doesn't come from some company who shrewdly warehoused all this vintage stuff 30 years ago in pristine condition. No one does that, no one claims that as a good profit making gesture. Your comic example is exactly right, but you entirely miss the point:
The profit comes when you discover this stuff 30 years later, in good condition, by chance - and everyone else threw theirs out. Not that you stored it personally, yourself, all this time.
Incidentally, you can rent climate controlled storage space large enough for a computer system for maybe $5/month. $60/yr * 30 yrs - $1800. Much less than $10,000. You'd be stupid to, because no one knows what will be rare and valuable in 30 years time.
In short, your rant was more of a "well, no shit sherlock" kind of post.
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
No, because the modern hardware IS a Bresenham algo - it's called a graphic card.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
So I followed the link to the hard drives. And IBM 3340 cost $7.81 per meg.
The 2GB of RAM in my computer only cost 6 cents per meg. And the hard drives, well lets look at that.
You can score a 500GB SATA drive for about $100 now. If my math is right, that's less than a penny per meg.
And we're seeing the price of static RAM drop like a rock too. You've already got 320GB SSD's out there.
"Historically, there is a lot of stuff that is significant in here," Ismail said. "People are going to understand why I did this."
Famous words from a
- genius
- mad genius
- evil mad genius
- visionary
Carbon based humanoid in training.
For a number of years the Retro Computing Society of Rhode Island was building a nice collection of old iron.
It was very DEC centric in some respects, but had other oddities like a Packard-Bell 250 that used acoustic delay lines for registers. The KL-10 was a beautiful beast too, it's ancestry included belonging to Sikorsky for some time.
But gentrification had its way with the society. The web site is gone and the collection had to be moved at least once because of rehabilitation of the building that I'd predicted a number of years earlier. Now I have no idea where it is.
But I did get to play on a PDP-12, and my find was a Honeywell-6 micro.
Those SID chips are still in big demand, especially in the garage music scene (as thewre are a bunch of custom 64s and SID powered music boxes. If you are going to part out a 64, best to get all the 'big chips' which includes the processorr, video, sound, and interface chips (as us old timers need those for repair parts).
"Enjoy what you're doing! If it becomes drudgery, you're doing it wrong!" - Jim Butterfield
I'm not a "linux fag", but I am a unix girl. Is it OK if I suck dick?
My CoCo is long gone, and even my beloved 286 has been recycled, but I have sitting here at my feet a (re)Pentium 200, circa '94-'97, with the new used $3 hard drive (shipping companies who *don't* bubble wrap, even when they're asked to, and hard drives do *not* get along...), and a used $10 CD drive, that I use for a Linux-based firewall router. No X, no compilers... and once I get it back up, it'll do the work it's been doing for seven or eight years.
Tell me why I need a new, fast machine for this purpose....
mark
I have hundreds of old PC's stacked to the ceiling in every room.
I have a warehouse full of PC's. I have a fully operational ROLM phone system configured to handle 10,000 (ten thousand) lines. I have a Data General Mini Computer. On and on and on.. So many CRT's I can't count them all. Dot matrix printers the size of golf carts.
What ya need that's obsolete? I got ya covered.
I limit my vintage computing hobby to laptops. The main reason is that each laptop is the pinnacle of engineering in its day. Some aspects of vintage laptops, like battery life, boot time (if any) stand their ground against modern laptops and in important ways surpass them (Model 100 series, Cambridge Z88, NC100, NEC-8500...)
Laptops are easy to store, so you don't have a big physical space issue like you do with some of the minicomputers and even some micros. Earlier vintage laptops don't require special power supplies, and some run off off-the-shelf alkalines or rechargeable batteries.
Anyway, the place for Model 100 users to find the community is http://club100.org/
-- John.
I laugh my ass off every time someone wastes big $$ to buy a new computer that has enough power to be called a supercomputer a few years ago and now is barely capable of being a glorified word processor (thanks MS, thanks MS OFFICE!). I have 2 computers - an Atari 800XL, I use it to type up some texts and run statistical simulation (I'm a research mathematician) and a Powermac 7100 av I got for free from the university (hate the damn thing but have to use it to access the Internet). I prefer to work in the country side but sometimes I go the city to pick some atari software (there is a lovely scene in Helsinki, hi Mikko!)
US-UK-Israel: The real Axis of Evil
Making the claim that there's any 'profit' involved with these old systems is kind of silly. The Lisa originally sold for $9,995. Assuming you bought one years later for $3k, you'd still only be looking at ~4.5% interest over the 20-some odd years of the "investment." Compare that to the S&P500s average return over the last 40 years, and you'll probably say "oh, I should have done something different with that money."
Collecting old computers is all about the fun. Unless, of course, you find some obsolete hardware that your work is throwing away, and that you can ebay for a few grand...
Reid
The Right Reverend K. Reid Wightman,
While the hardware of course is historically significant and may contain some feature forgotten or unused in today's computers that could still be useful...
THE DATA can be recovered from the memory, the hard drives, even things like the modems or graphic cards can have everything ever stored on them restored for enough $$$, who knows if your old dusty XEROX machine could rewrite history?
can someone get a Commodore PET with 14" screen,write POKE 59458,PEEK(59458)OR 32 and youtube it please? :3
Four?! Wow - I only have one ZX Sinclair Spectrum. My dad got it in the early 80's and I remember we'd play games on our TV using the tape-recorder attachment. The games came as tapes. It was pretty awesome. It stayed in the closet for years, gathering dust. I took it with me when I left for college because I was sure it would eventually have some "antique value". It's a fun piece of hardware.
Vivin Suresh Paliath
http://vivin.net
I like
Just in case the tinfoil hat scenarios pan out and the doomsday trusted computing initiatives become reality...
Speaking of old demos and computers, check out Desert Dream on a Commodore 64. Amazing port.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
The Commodore Pet had a hardware bug that if you poked a certaing address you would kill the computer.
I doubt anyone alive knows how to fix them.
No - this is not a joke - I'm being serious here
how much $ could a 1984 mac fetch?
I love old hardware, it's nearly unbreakable. Like this Sun ULTRA 1 Creator 3D I'm using right now. 384 megs of RAM, 36 gig 10,000 rpm HD, Sun 21' monitor all running on SuSE Linux 7.3 (Sparc version).
"I bow to no man" - Riddick
I used to do a lot of writing for various Commodore magazines, managed news areas on QuantumLink, PC-Link, America Online, Delphi and others. I had so many requests recently for information from my past articles and programs from my older C-64 Programmers Library that I put a copy online with a small token fee to access the files to help cover my internet access & hosting costs. It's amazing how much interest there has been in this old material.... for anyone interested, see http://home.comcast.net/~c64proglib/ for sample articles and more info..... Robert Baker
- Sun SparcStation IPC, 25MHz, 24MB RAM, 270MB HD, cgthree fb, Redhat 5.3
- Sun SparcStation 10MP, 4x55MHz Ross Hypersparc, 128MB RAM, 9.1GB HD, Solaris 9
- Sun 3/80, 25MHz 68030 (I think), 68882, can't remember the ram, no HD at the moment
- Sun Ultra 1 Creator 3D, 200MHz Ultrasparc I, 192MB RAM, 4.3GB HD, Aurora Linux
- Sun Ultra 10 Creator, 333MHz Ultrasparc IIi, 576MB RAM, 6.4GB HD, Solaris 10
- SGI Iris Indigo, 33MHz MIPS R3000, 16MB RAM, 420MB and 1.2GB HD, 8-bit graphics, Irix 5.3
- HP Apollo DN300 (can't remember the specs, sitting in the garage), Domain/OS 10.3 I think
- IBM AS/400 9406-500, 1 RS64 CPU, 3 DASD, 8mm drive, OS/400 V4R3
- IBM AS/400 9402-400, 1 RS64 CPU, 2 DASD, big tape drive, OS/400 V4R4
- Compaq Portable III, 16MHz 286, 1MB RAM, 40MB HD, 5.25" floppy, 2400bps modem, orange plasma screen, windows 3.0
- Panasonic Sr. Partner, 4.77 MHz 8086, 512K RAM, 20MB HD, 5.25" floppy, green screen, internal thermal printer, DOS 3.3
- Packard Bell Legend 300CD, 60MHz Pentium (I have a 66MHz spare), 32MB RAM, 430MB and 1.2GB HD, Windows 98
- Apple IIc, RF modulator box, nuff said
- Tandy TRS-80 with assembly editor cartridge
There's been more, but my parents had a tendency to throw out stuff I left at their house. Pretty much if I know the specs for the machines above, I use them. All of the above work, and when they act up, I fix them. The SGI does some CAD work, the Ultra10 does computational fluid dynamics, the Ultra1 does finite element model postprocessing and visualization, the IPC has to have its NVRAM programmed every time I boot it (I've got the commands down by heart), I'm still learning the AS/400s, the IIc gets used at 80's night parties for games, and some intrepid programmer managed to get some entertaining movies (yes, real, honest to goodness video) to play at a decent framerate on the Panasonic Sr. Partner.
And here I drove my Vax 11/750 complete with 4 RA81 hard drives (all working) onto the rubbish dump because I couldn't even give it away (advertised free to good home for 2 months)...
*Sob*
Still have all the Digital folders that came with it though...
I'll be showing this article to my girlfriend though, will stop her bitching about the pile of ancient Sun gear in the back room (affectionately known as "The Ton of Sun", still running a sparcserver 1000 w 6 attached SSA's, the old Sun3's still work too )...
My friend however is on a goldmine. His "Stack of Mac" takes up most of his house, and I know for a fact there are 2 Lisas (in working order) in there along with at least 1 of everything apple has ever produced (he still uses his newton and a DuoDock...)
Lesson to be learned here, never throw anything away...
Nobody mentioned this venerable computing apparatus. The one I bought in 1979 for $1,500 came with a dazzling 16KB RAM, 1200 baud audio tape storage, 2 MHz Z80 CPU, and a fantastic 80 character, 25 line screen. The Apple I at the time only had 40 character, 12 or so lines and a 1 MHz CPU. This was clearly the superior computing machine so I bought it. The only thing was that you had to solder components to the board, make the cables, and basically put all the parts together. Heathkit was nice though. The CPU board and the monitor board were pre-wired. They were multilayer and ham-fisted amateurs like me would probably screw them up.
:-) I immediately upgraded to two hard sectored 160KB floppies and added RAM (to 48KB) so I could run HDOS.
:-)
:-) I've got 7 computers running on my home network now. I have no idea what's in their ROMs and I'm still learning Linux. My last compiler was Pascal (I learned Algol 60 in college) so I might be a bit behind the times programming wise :-) Still not bad for a retired hardware RF engineer who never did RF in a 29 year career with the US Government.
I have serial number 188. Never buy anything with a serial number below 1000. There were a few "features" in the early machines
One of the "features" included adding the second (external) floppy drive. The first one was internal. The mod kit came with shims for the rear hinges of the case to create a gap for the ribbon cable to get out. Later versions actually had connectors for this! Such sophistication was not for me
I knew the monitor ROM (now called BIOS) inside and out. I had to to get things to work. Nothing was standard including the floppies. I found a copy of CPM that the H89 could read and my horizons were lifted. I still had to enter the CPM programs in split octal (like hex only weirder). Anybody but me know what split octal is?
I finally ended up with a whopping 1.6MB storage on 5 floppies (each using its own standard), 64KB RAM (max), and a graphics card that was compatible with nothing. I did enjoy drawing sin(x)/x though. It took about a day. By the time I bought my 286 in 1989 I had invested $5,000 in this puppy. I still consider it a good investment for a hardware oriented RF engineer who didn't have a clue what these new fangled computers were all about and was working with computers.
It's still in working condition (as of 15 years ago). It's in a garbage bag in the basement for the moment. I have all the floppies, but it's hard telling if bit rot has killed them. I keep wanting to fire it up again. Procrastination and the fear of black smoke has delayed my experiment.
Ah the good old days
Rick
WA3VTF
was on that box...wrote a PVD overlaid on ONC flight charts to display radar tracks i scarfed from EADSim logs... showing entity state PDUs was cheatin;-)
fun times...
I want a few things for my collection...
w as_wondering_if_any_PC_manufacturers_are_going_to_ build_an_iMac_rival.html) can hardly find pictures anymore and no idea where to get
Panda Project archistrat (http://www.byte.com/art/9510/sec6/art7.htm) Cant find
Panda Project Rock City (2, 1 original, and one for the case to build in) (http://www.g4tv.com/techtvvault/features/4244/I_
a maxed out TI-99 4a (I know where to get these (http://www.99er.net/)
All the old TI cartridges
ART
Create like a god, command like a king, work like a slave. -Guy Kawasaki
I know the discussion is about the equipment itself, but old PCs usually offer much more value than other tech.
This is not my sig
What eerie timing! I just got back from lunch with an old friend, and we were reminiscing about the delightfully evil brutality that was multiplayer Lemmings on the Amiga. I mentioned that, having played Lemmings on every platform for which it exists (got the classic GameBoy cartridge for Christmas!), all versions are a pale shadow of the Amiga version.
I come back to the office and check Slashdot, and here's another reference! I'm gonna have to dig out my A1200 and see if the wife will let me hook it up to the TV.
Boundless Expansion, Self-Transformation, Dynamic Optimism, Intelligent Technology, Spontaneous Order- BEST DO IT SO!