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Fun and Profit With Obsolete Computers

Posted by Zonk on from the what-else-are-you-going-to-do-with-them dept.

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. '

2 of 186 comments (clear)

  1. Oh yeah, get a load of this! by voodoo+cheesecake · · Score: 0, Flamebait

    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.

  2. Re:Best for learning programming by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Flamebait

    What in the name of jesus are you ranting about? modded +5? holy fuck the mods on this site are unreal in there stupidity.. like muppets to the flame.. no wait thats mods..

    FYI, "instruction timing based optimisation" (what ever the hell that is, but I'll take a stab) is just how many cycles it takes to complete an instruction.. now in the 286 is was FIFO style, now you have PIPELINES which are as far as I am aware are taught as part of CS courses.

    APIC as far as I am aware is just SMP PIC (just confirmed on wikipedia), which has FUCK all to do with complexity in the usage of it, it's just the name for the hardware that handles MORE THAT ONE CPU.

    Now the IO your talking out your ass about.. what the hell is "original IO on x86"? ISA? bridge programming? WTF?

    Dude, I may have got some details wrong here but your talking crap and the mods here at /. are fucking tards. That's me done with this hole.