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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'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.
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.
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.
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
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
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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.
In another 30 years, many of these oldies will have died (if they haven't already) due to a variety of reasons. Mostly plain mechanical parts (cheap plastic, foil keyboard switches, rubber rolls crumbling and so on). Also think of programmed parts (EPROMs, programmable microcontrollers included for a specific task etc) that go into an erased state after a long, but finite time (usually several decades).
But if your machine still works after 30 years, plugging it into a monitor won't be the hard part. Last time I checked, even many of the latest LCD TV's have a variety of analog inputs. Why? Because analog inputs are often useful to hook up monitors to the widest possible variety of replay equipment. Even if many modern equipment is 'digitised', you're a fool to think that the option to display analog signals will disappear completely. Think of analog signals in general as a lower-level thing than most digital signals, meaning it's easier to do something with it, and easy to include in display equipment at near-zero added cost.
With audio, things are even easier/simpler.
For example this Sinclair ZX81 produces a TV UHF signal, but it's easy to pick up a plain composite video signal from its insides. Some soldering of wires might be required, but I expect you'll have a hard time finding a brandnew LCD TV that is not capable of producing an image with that.
One thing I personally like about these early Sinclair machines, is that they're built simple enough to recreate them with plain discrete logic, and perhaps a few analog parts. No complex video circuitry, no audio, a well-understood CPU and so on. Enough for instance to program a FPGA to behave like a ZX81 (try Google if you're interested). Also makes these machines relatively easy to repair. For ZX81: if you got the time, tools and knowledge, you can repair/keep these machines running as long as you want. I myself own 2 of these, last time I checked both were still working. 25 years old by now, and I'm pretty sure I can have these in a working state longer than a PC bought new today.
I don't have the time anymore. It's hard work being a full time employee for the man and raising a family and commuting an hour to and then from work because the man doesn't pay enough to live close to work (yet he pays himself enough to live in the most expensive suburb, another rant entirely).
I used to collect Commodore and Nintendo stuff. I have a pretty good collection of Nintendo hardware; NES, SNES, N64, a handful of games, extra controllers, light guns, the works. I even have the beginnings of a Sega collection. It's all operational as well after a lot of cleaning and TLC. It takes a lot of time to resurrect the older hardware and make it functional. If you don't have the tech skills to replace fried components or even repair damaged PCBs and connectors its really not worth doing. You often buy two or three dud machines to turn them into one functional one.
There's no point having a machine if you don't have a decent collection of software to run on it. Sure, you can often download the software illegally but for cart-based systems then you need to find a working cart emulator, assuming one existed for your platform and you still can't play anything with SuperFX-type addons on cart emulators.
Collecting the retro stuff is also time consuming. You have to be on the lookout everywhere. Ebay is good, but there's a lot of crap on there that people are trying to flog off for more than it's worth. I see a lot of stuff that says "condition unknown" then with a min bid of $50. That could mean it's totally fried but you have to decide whether to take that gamble. There's always stuff advertised in the local trading rag and the local news, as well as other websites and swap meets that come and go. If you don't keep abrest (all you nerds tremble before the breast) of current prices you're lialbe to get royally screwed.
I sorely miss being able to play some of the games that I played as I was growing up, but I remember back to when I used to play. We'd sit up all night hammering away at the game. That was the only way. When you're on a limited time budget (as you are when you're working for the man and have other commitments) you can't do that anywhere near as often as you'd like.
Good luck to those who want to get into the collection hobby. It's fun and rewarding. If you just want to hoarde junk stay for the sake of being able to say "i have that" without ever actually doing anything with it then you should probably find another hobby; there are some of us who like to restore hardware and it's difficult to do unless you can get enough bits. If they're getting snapped up by hoarders then it takes the fun away for a lot of us.
I drink to make other people interesting!
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.
It must be rare _and_ interesting.
A dull Dell box (pun intended) is not interesting unless it has a unique form factor.
That 21 inch screen notebook monstruosity is such thing. Buy it and keep it functioning for the next 30 years and you will have something. There was also a Compaq desktop with a built-in LCD. I have a Monorail PC that still boots - it had it's HD and CD-ROM changed because they no longer worked. There is also a Sony Vaio whose keyboard folds up to cover half the screen as it becomes a stereo. There were a couple Compaq models with integrated monitors that were interestingly iMac-like.
Those are interesting PCs. No grey box, no matter how rare it is, will ever become interesting.
Anyway, most interesting computers are not PCs. A Sparcstation 1 is interesting as is a Voyager. Just about every SGI box is somewhat unique. If you are shopping today, buy a Tezro. If you want a Sun, buy a desktop SPARC (the amd64s are just PCs). IBM RS/6000s are a bit on the PC side, but are OK. Apples are very diverse and an interesting piece of study. The "flex-chassis" series is very interesting because of the modular mobos. The tower G3 is interesting because every time you open it, it draws blood from your hand. An IBM 3290 terminal is unique as it had a red plasma screen. An NCD 16 X terminal is interesting because of the square CRT. Any Lisp Machine is worth having. The Convergent non-PC x86 machines are very interesting as is their OS.
Rarity is for newcomers that don't really get it. It is a tool for those who can't see the other forms of value and for those who do to get rid of rare and dull hardware.
http://www.dieblinkenlights.com
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?