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45-Year-Old Modem Used To Surf the Web
EdIII writes with this awesome snippet from Hack a Day: "'[phreakmonkey] got his hands on a great piece of old tech. It's a 1964 Livermore Data Systems Model A Acoustic Coupler Modem. He recieved it in 1989 and recently decided to see if it would actually work. It took some digging to find a proper D25 adapter and even then the original serial adapter wasn't working because the oscillator depends on the serial voltage. He dials in and connects at 300baud. Then logs into a remote system and fires up lynx to load Wikipedia. Lucky for [phreakmonkey] they managed to decide on a modulation standard in 1962. It's still amazing to see this machine working 45 years later.' Although impractical for surfing the Internet today, there is something truly cool about getting a 45-year old modem to work with modern technology. The question I have, is what is the oldest working piece of equipment fellow Slashdotters have out there? I'm afraid as far back as I can go is a Number Nine Imagine 128 Series 2 Graphics card on a server still in use at my house which only puts me at about 14 years."
My name is Junis, I am posting this from a Commodore64 and my 1964 Livermore Data Systems Model A Acoustic Coupler Modem in Afghanistan after years of oppression underneath the Taliban ...</meme>
And I suppose the instant I show any signs of lag in World of Warcraft I'll have to listen to my guildmates crack jokes about me using a 1964 Livermore Data Systems Model A Acoustic Coupler Modem ruining the raid.
My work here is dung.
is just as old as I am... I just needed a long time to know how to work it.
The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy, but the best weapon of a democracy should be the weapon of openness.
I don't really use it anymore, but I have a TRS-80 Model IV and it works. I haven't used the modem in a long time. That's only about 26 years old though. The PowerBook 165c also works, and that's from 1993, making it 16 years old. Bonus for the SCSI ethernet adapter.
Anyone seen my low uid? last seen 10 years ago while panning the #@$# out of Taco's 'web based discussion system'
My hammer was made in 1876.
I still use my old 1984 IBM Model M Keyboard. I will weep when/if that keyboard ever dies.
45 years old and still works better than half the crap pawned off on consumers today.
I've often wanted to dig up 2 acoustic coupled modems, 4 tin cans, and 2 strings, and see if I could get the modems to work over that.
www.eFax.com are spammers
I have an Atari 400 I still drag out from time to time when I get an itch to play the "definitive" (to me at least!) versions of Pac-Man, Donkey Kong and Defender. Bought as a Xmas present when I was 9 which puts it at 28 years old. :)
I also still have my old Apple ][ bought 4 years later with the "CP/M card" and a 300 baud modem. Hmm... I think I'm going to have to some surfing tonight! ;)
astroturtle
--- http://www.astroturtle.com
I keep a Hewlitt-Packard oscilloscope out in my car that was manufactured sometime in the mid-50s.
It still works, but I've only had to use it about three times in my professional life.
-- I wanna decide who lives and who dies - Crow T. Robot, MST3K
:D and I still love starting it up.. Nothing like the grinding of a floppy drive in the morning..
16-bit processor and hardware speech synthesis in 1979. It was a real pioneering home computer, and mine still works, too! It even had add-ons for cassette tape, disk drives, printers, and modems.
Well my Sinclair ZX81 still works, just about, around 25 years after we got it. Sadly the 16Kb RAM pack is toast, so there's not much you can do with it.
Most electronic equipment was built to last, hence this guy got his modem to work.
I doubt anyone will be able to run a GTX 280 in 45 years.
My stepson currently has a PowerMac 5400 in his room, with a video in card. That came out in 1996, so it's about 13 years old. Until recently, he'd use it for watching VHS movies & playing his XBox.
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
Maybe there are some ancient government computer backdoors out there that work with ancient modems. - Ferris Bueller
I had a one-night tech job a few years ago where a major financial institution was switching the network from Token Ring to Ethernet, even though all the workstations came equipped with built-in Ethernet and the building was wired for Ethernet. I made extra money that night because the younger, non-certified techs couldn't read the directions on the worksheet. They plugged the Ethernet cable into the Token Ring NIC card (which supported two cable types) and didn't run the network utility to see if the connection worked. The hardest part of that job was finding a taxi cab to take home at 3:00AM.
I live in a house that's over 200 years old. I have some 78s from the first part of last century in a cupboard - they're fairly $$$. Don't have an old working gramophone player, but do have some old functional reel-to-reel audio tape equipment. I have a PDP in the corner. Erm, lots of computing stuff from the '80s, but who doesn't? My oldest modem's a 1200 baud from the late '80s. I still prefer serial (and parallel) ports to USB. USB is a horrible, horrible, horrible, horrible, horrible standard, and anything not suitable for a serial/parallel port has other better standards appropriate for it (Firewire, SCSI, etc).
I have a three-some of working Commodore PETs (2001, 4032, SuperPET) with associated disk & tape drives. All still work though some of the floppies get read errors now. I had a term package and modem for the SuperPET... I should set it all up again sometime and try the same feat for fun. The 2001 puts me back bordering 30 years... sigh. Thanks, now I feel old. :)
Play me online? Well you know that I'll beat you. If I ever meet you I'll "/sbin/shutdown -h now" you. -Weird Al, kinda.
The question I have, is what is the oldest working piece of equipment fellow Slashdotters have out there?
Well as far as modem technology goes I've still got a classic 1200 baud Hayes modem; must be from the early 80s I would guess (perhaps older?); it was working fine when I stopped using it around 1993 or so (upgraded to 2400 baud FTW!!)* ... I'm sure it would still work if I plugged it in today but I'm not hunting down an RS-232 adapter to find out. If we want to talk audio gear I've got some much older items, including a pair of AR speakers from the 60s that still sound pretty damn good... Now get the hell off my lawn!
* (and back then FTW still meant Fuck the World!!)
Not quite as old, but I occasionally power up the old PDP-11/34a in my basement (running REAL BSD Unix, of course) and surf the web with lynx.
Pick a small set of standards that will work "well enough" and let them become the Legacy Standard. I'm so sick of going to garage sales and seeing good equipment, such as printers and scanners, that won't connect to any computer that I own. I have a drawer full of PS/2 keyboards.
I hope that someday, someone posts a
The grandson of Hemos connected to the DukeNukemForeverNet* using a computer with USB, DVI, a drive that SPINS, and only 64GB of RAM, after all, 64GB should be enough RAM for anybody.
*DNFNEt is a networking protocol that uses baling wire and bubble gum... and I'm all out of bubble gum.
Most of the acoustic couplers back in the day were fairly picky about the telephone handset used.
I make it a point to get rid of old digital gear, but I do have a telephone from the 1920s. It's still hooked up, and is one of the few reasons I still have a landline. It has the rayon-covered cord and everything.
The question I have, is what is the oldest working piece of equipment fellow Slashdotters have out there?
I have an Atari 400 or 800 (I can't remember which one but it looks just like the 800 picture on Wikipedia but my buttons are different) from about 1979 in my parent's house in my old closet. And the only cartridge I had for it was something called "Left Hand BASIC" or maybe it was just "Left BASIC" which--unless I'm mistaken--was Atari's BASIC. Considering I was born in the early 80s, I bought it for $5 at a garage sale in 1996 and did a few procedures of Michael Crichton's Electronic Life (I used to be a big fan) on it and used a black and white TV as the monitor (I remember connecting it to the UHF posts on the back of the TV?). I did some of my first home computing on that thing. The really sad thing was that the large disc reader that came with it through a serial port didn't work so I had to punch everything in by hand over many hours to get back to where I was. Last time I was home, it still worked!
If you're talking about things I purchased new and underwent serious use, I have a Dell Pentium III Optiplex from 2000 that still works great as a router to my network. It's hard drive (a deathstar no less) has been replaced once but aside from that, the huge PCI expansion bay make it great for that particular need.
My work here is dung.
I mean the phone instrument itself, perhaps with a dial? You know, the heavy duty ones that say property of Bell on the bottom?
Heh, you might check your parents or grandma... they have probably paid thousands of dollars for that phone over the years.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
The CNC industry is still using NC machines built to work with paper tape. 30 years old and still going strong ...
Technically that would be me. At some point in Elementary school I was able to successfully connect with a friend of mine's 1200 baud modem with my voice. Can't say I was able to do much after that but it did say that the handshake was successful :)
Beyond that, although my Amiga 1000 went to a garage sale back in high school I still have and occasionally use my 2000 which has the MIDI adapter I used with my 1000 from 85 so that would be roughly a 24 year old MIDI box that still gets used. The keyboard I hook it up to is a couple years older than that and the TV at our cabin was bought with insurance money from me being sick as a baby which is just under 32 years old.
Define equipment?
I've still got a working Apple 2c and a custom-modified dot matrix printer to use with it.
And a rock. I've got a rock. I bet it would still do the same job some caveman would have used it for if he found out the chief was shagging his cave-mate, though I just use it as a doorstop.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
My Apple ][+ with Micromodem II took over an hour to download a 120K photo at 300baud and then I found out that it fill up the entire floppy disk
Had an old Kaypro II, circa 1983. Single-side floppies, 9" green monochrome screen, weighed a ton. Load the OS from a floppy, then load an app from a floppy. Great stuff for its time!
If we're gonna get into a how-old-is-my-crap thread: my oldest working gear is a 1989 Mac ][ci running NetBSD that I periodically haul out of the closet to use as a testbed within my private network. Used to be my dad's photoshop box, then handed down to my wife, and finally into my grubby paws. Its small, easy to store, boxy shape has saved it from her annual pogroms against old gear.
Luke, help me take this mask off
Not that old, really, but...
Mac Plus (1986)
Atari 400 plus peripherals, including an ATR8000, which is a Z80 box that doubled as a CPM machine and an Atari peripherals controller (1983)
Sinclair ZX80 computer (1981) (I can't swear that this still works)
No sig? Sigh...
Not sure if it's one of the first two button mice, but it was purchased roughly a year before windows 3.1 came out. Good old Logitech 9pin serial. Still works, but almost hurts to use it compared to the logitech g5. Thing must be about 20 years old now...
using CowboyNeal. I imagine I can keep it going until 2073 or so. It is low maintenance and runs fast.
I have a Tandy Model 100 laptop. It has a 4 line LCD screen, 3k of memory, and it runs 20 hours on 4 AA batteries. I also have an old Macintosh with a DOS compatibility card. It has both Mac OS7 and Windows 3.1
How about oldest piece of equipment in regular use?
I use a 1991 IBM Model M at my main workstation, which puts me at 18 years. They just don't make them like this anymore (well actually Unicomp does)
to the digital world was in 1977 or so . An acoustic coupler where we had to listen for the tom\e and quickly set the phone in the cradle. I learned to plat tic-tac-toe with a western electric telex machine. It took for ever by todays standards but this kid was amazed. 300 baud? Yeah. Thats about right. Upper Perkiomen Jr. High. lol that brings back memories.
My grandfather still swears by his Quad ESL-57 electrostatics, from the late 50s.
About 5 or 6 years ago the power supply units were rebuilt and the panels were cleared of crap that had settled on them over the years, and they sound better than ever.
Back before the days of the 4004, 8008, and 8080, when we built computers, we REALLY built computers.
None of this take a pre-built-motherboard, add a pre-built-power-supply, add a pre-built graphics card...
A great example: http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2009/05/homebrewed-cpu/
oblig: get off my lawn
Karma: Excellent. 15 moderator points expire sometime.
I still rock an Apple II to play Oregon Trail and Number Munchers
https://www.speakservers.com/
I also have the original Compaq portable, which was arguably the first laptop computer. Sadly, one of my students smoked the power supply a couple years back, so it no longer works. I know that eliminates it from the category of "still working", but it did work for 26 years, which is fairly impressive. And its still fun to show people the design.
The oldest I have in service is a Cyrix 6x86 system running Windows 98 SE. I need it for the ISA slots so that I can run my *Needhams PB-10 EPROM burner.
* Since www.needhams.com doesn't come up anymore, I wonder if they are even still in business. :-(
I had a Tandy 1000 that I got from my dad when he bought it decades ago. I remember thinking how freaking cool it was when I was a kid playing games on it and printing reports for school on the dot matrix printer lol.
Sig? No thanks. I don't smoke.
... an old VAX machine from the mid-80's. We have several large spool tape drives around too, but I'm not sure they still work. Personally my wife made me throw out most of my old stuff, though I have several old floppies from my Apple II from the early 80's.
My friend still does all his accounting on TRS-80's, he runs a printing business and bought 3 units as spare parts supplies so he can have 5 9's uptime ;) Not the oldest but for still being used as a critical app that is pretty darned old.
And it still works most of the time!
The matter inside of me is just reconstituted material dating back ~20 Billion years. Beat that!
If you can read this... 01110101 01110010 00100000 01100001 00100000 01100111 01100101 01100101 01101011
My older brother got a Sega Master system for his fifth Christmas, which puts me at three years old. So, the system is twenty years old.
We still have Afterburner, Hang On!/Safari Hunt, and Wonder Boy, and a light gun controller. All of these still function when I last checked about a year ago, although to use it now it and all of its cables must be recovered from the electronics graveyard (my dad's garage).
It has a whopping 128k of expanded memory (I think it originally came with 64k), a 5.25" floppy drive, and 2 ROM expansion ports. It was my first computer with a wireless keyboard that uses IR and runs on AA batteries. Still boots, though the floppy drive is a bit loud by today's standards heh. The monitor is a tad blurry as well but still very legible.
"Be prepared, son. That's my motto. Be prepared." --Joe Hallenbeck
It was my own design, done for a science fair, used 10KC (KHz) beat oscillator to move one audio channel up in frequency.
So it's equipment, and even electronic (tube type). Normally needs the tuning capacitor cleaned to get it to work though;
dust shorting it out keeps oscillators from running.
that is all
I still have my 1995 era OS/2 box I built. Some of the components go back to 93 or so. I paid an obscene amount in 1996 for the 2.1GB Micropolis SCSI drive in there. Hands down the best component in the thing is the STB 4Com 4 port serial card. With it's myriad of jumpers to set I was amazed it worked right the first time...
I'm not sure if this is what the OP had in mind, but I have a National Cash Register model that I believe is from either 1894 or 1904. (It's been in my garage for about 10 years, with the intentional plan of restoring it.)
All the keys and counter still work. Honestly, I'm amazed by the engineering every time I look inside.
I'm at work, so I can't verify 100%, but this listing from ebay is pretty close. (I do know it's a "dolphin" design.)
The drawer numbers don't match the register (a detriment for collectors' purposes), but it's still a cool piece of machinery. Weighs a ton.
You stereotypers are all the same...
Still works, but I haven't tried out the floppy drive (which is ENORMOUS BTW). I still have fond memories of programming in Basic on it. This was way before I even knew there was a such thing as a job for programmers!
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
When I moved I put my C64s into storage, but I brought these two with me. The SD2 was the first piece of hardware I ever fixed. (Sure, it was just a blown fuse, but there's nothing like being given something that was about to be thrown out and making it work just like new.) The monitor was stol^H^H^H^Hsalvaged though wasn't even broken (no one knew how to plug anything into it, so it was left to languish).
Of course, while I'm reasonably sure the SD2 is working (the move wasn't THAT brutal), since I didn't have room for the C64s I have nothing to plug it in to. Though my 1702 monitor works just peachy when fed a composite TV signal. In a pinch, I even used it for a - very blurry - PC monitor on a computer with TV out.
what is the oldest working piece of equipment fellow Slashdotters have out there?
There's this rock I use as a paperweight next to my computer. I figure it's anywhere between 100 million and 2 billion years old.
300 baud ought to be enough for anyone. Just bring some time.
Somewhere at my parent's house I have a PDP-11/03 in Heathkit trim (Heathkit H11). It worked last time I tried it. RT-11... Mmmmm.... Ok. No, it was nasty, but back in 1977 it was a 16 bit TRS-80 killer. I think I still have a 300 baud acoustic modem somewhere in a box. It wouldn't be '60's vintage, but mid-70's, not that they evolved much before the Ma Bell lawsuit. I do have a working TRS-80 model 100 laptop.
Now get off my lawn...
you're all a bunch of wannabes
Is a Sega master system that was made in 1987. Yes it still works and I play it about twice a year. This was the Nintendo rival for 8 bit systems.
My 1989 Amiga is plugged in and runs fine (booted it up about a month ago.) ... functional? and I have no idea how old they are, but I know they've been in the family since the 1840's. The threaded fasteners that attach the top bit (knewel?) to the body appear to be hand-filed, although the nut-like objects are tap-threaded.
My 1968 HP 182C oscilloscope still works pretty well.
My (grandfather's, which I inherited) Simpson 1932 voltmeter works okay, as does a roughly 1940 Starrett 0.0001" (yes, ten thousandths of an inch) dial indicator.
My (great grandfather's) post vise for blacksmithing, from circa 1880, also works pretty well.
A set of andirons for a fireplace is also
Nostalgia's not what it used to be.
My parents bought me a my first computer, a Commodore Vic-20 in 1982.
Sadly it doesn't work anymore. A freak lightning strike 5 years ago blew the tops off several capacitors and left noticible markings on several chips. :-(
I have a Quadra 700 with a PowerPC upgrade NuBus card installed. It has 12MB of memory and an external 9GB full hight (12 pound) hard drive. I have it connected to my network with a 10Mb/sec AAUI dongle and host a website from it.
No, I won't let you slashdot it - because my crappy DSL would be out before the web server would go down. :)
...with a 1541 5.25" floppy drive. It's been about 5 years since I turned the computer itself on, even longer since I tested the drive, not to mention any of the floppies. (Which I still have a few, but haven't been tested in probably 15-20 years.)
:)
It goes without saying, my wife doesn't like my pack-rat habits
You stereotypers are all the same...
according to dell's website, it shipped in march 1996. this thing is a rock, all original configuration hardware-wise. installed redhat 6.2 (damn, that was a good o/s) and it's never turned off, unless there's a power outage, or i open it to vacuum out the dust. currently used as my cvs server and local dns. i can't believe the hard drive is still spinning.....
When you recognize love in another and realize how precious it is, everything else seems so insignificant.
Token slashdot "involve your audience" question: isn't there some news worth writing about today? This isn't it.
Oldest equipment I have on the internet would have to be my 1983 Commodore 64, which is a terminal off of my Linux box. Basic RS232 connection.
Karma Whoring for Fun and Profit.
Now imagine a beowulf cluster of those.
The HP Laserjet 4 on my desk has a build date of December 1992. It's already out of my employer's inventory, but I've graciously offered to only use it until we run out of toner. Of course, the office that it came from purchased four spare toners to go with the fresh one that's still in the machine, so I figure the machine will probably be old enough to drink by the time I actually have to get rid of it....
922k pages over it's life time. Here's hoping I can get to 1 million before it croaks.
There are some people that if they don't know, you can't tell 'em.
I have a 14" Radiation King that refuses to die. It's from about 1990, just before radiation levels became a marketing thing. Now I guess we just assume low radiation, as I haven't seen that touted as a selling point for quite some time.
Loose lips lose spit.
Well, i like a lot of new AND old computer technology. Given that is the case i have a few relics of my own. I have a 25 year old Commodore 64 with monitor and disk drive that still work fine. I still play games on it occasionally. Additionally, I have a Pentium IV PC that is a frankenstein. The newest component in it is about six years old and the oldest component in it which is the DVD-ROM drive is 10 years old and still works perfectly. It also has a 30GB WD hard drive in it that is over 8 years old and still working perfectly. In my closet I have an original model IMac which still works perfectly. I still have all the manuals and the restore disk from apple for it. For that matter the newest Piece of hardware I have is already 5 years old. It is a Sony VAIO P4/3.0Ghz PC which still works great. The only thing I did to it was upgrade the memory in it to 2GB RAM. By the way, 32 Bit Vista works fine on it and I have a DX9 compatible video card so it works fine with Aero etc. I was skeptical that Vista would work reasonably well with it but it does! :) I have two older PIII PC's that are in various states of disrepair and will be an upcoming project to combine some of the parts in them into a working machine. The old "frankenstein" P4 system has Ubuntu 9.04 on it now. Fun stuff. :)
I regularly use pens (fountain pens) that I purchased 25 years ago. They're working just fine still. Every now and then they get a proper bath in the ultrasonic cleaner and continue to write like new.
Before he retired a handful of years ago, my father, a research engineer, regularly used a custom computerized debugging and test rack that he built in the early 1980s based on a Southwest Technical Products MC6809-class computer.
In my laboratory, I use oscilloscopes that are 20-30 years old (Tektronix, and periodically recalibrated). And my supply of platinum wire is from the 1940s (inherited from another laboratory). I have bench power supplies from the early 1970s that are in regular use as well (Lambdas never go bad). And a custom-made 6-channel differential amplifier that looks to be from the 1960s. I have a custom-made wire twisting apparatus that I built 15 years ago. My office stereo is about 20 years old (Proton 300). For laboratory work, I use monitors that are 7 or 8 years old (big honking CRTs), but my computers are all 3 years old or younger, with data being migrated from older to newer at each upgrade.
Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
I still have my Heathkit H89 packed away in the basement. I tell my wife that it's my payment into the Old Programmers home when I retire...
All ideas^H^H^H^H^Hprocesses in this post are Patent Pending. (as well as the process of patenting all postings)
He recieved it in 1989 and recently decided to see if it would actually work.
Wow. And I thought I was bad about putting things off.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
I have an IBM PC, and IBM-AT and a Tandy 102 (The ORIGINAL notebook). All work fine. I use the Tote-02 for a terminal every now an then for text based CLI routers and such. Every year or so I fire up the PC and the AT just to make sure they still work.
I remember 300 baud modems. Cool that one still works today. The oldest operating bit of technology in my house is my 120 year old Seth Thomas kitchen clock, which is currently being cleaned, but I use it daily.
I using my new fangled IMSAI8080 and my father is using his old PDP11. After talking to you young-uns I'm playing Global Thermonuclear War with the Whopper....
The oldest thing I have is a PCPI Applicard that I bought circa 1984.
I actually overclocked the thing to 10 MHz by replacing the CPU with a Z80-H, replacing the RAM with faster chips, replacing the crystal with a 20 MHz one, and replacing the NOT gate chip being used to oscillate the crystal with a mil-spec version that could go that fast. At the time, it was able to compile code in Turbo Pascal so fast that you couldn't see the line numbers from under the blur of the overstriking cursor. I brought it into school one day and it was actually faster at compiling code than the then reasonably state of the art PCs they had on hand.
In fact, the Applicard was a CP/M machine of its own writ small. It was a Z-80 with 64K of RAM and communicated over a single-byte parallel port with the host. The 6502 ran full speed while acting more or less as an I/O coprocessor for the Applicard. I even wrote some 6502 device drivers for it so that I could run CP/M from my hard disk and could use the 800K 3.5" floppies. I even got it working with my old Apple Cat at one point.
Alas, I no longer have an Apple ][ to use it in, so it just collects dust in the garage. :(
I have an Atari 400 I still drag out from time to time when I get an itch to play the "definitive" (to me at least!) versions of Pac-Man, Donkey Kong and Defender.
Since when is the Atari 400/800 version of Donkey Kong the definitive version? In this page, compare the "Atari 800 Donkey Kong" sprite (first in the "Early Home Ports"; the second is from Mario Bros.) to the "ColecoVision" sprite (third), and then compare the "ColecoVision" sprite to the first sprite in "Mario 1.0". Nintendo thought the ColecoVision port of DK was so authentic that when it designed the Family Computer/Nintendo Entertainment System, it based the PPU's architecture directly on that of TI's TMS99xx VDP in the ColecoVision and Sega Mark I.
SUN SparcStation 10.... still working, last used as a router. Circa 1992, so about 17 years old.
In the past could years, I've really become very interested in classic computing. I'm buying all the computers that I lusted over but couldn't dream of ever being able to afford. I had an amiga 500 back in 1988 and used apple 2es at school since 1984. But now I have two Amiga 2000s, a 600, and most of a 1200. I have a platinum apple 2e and an apple 2gs. I also have a commodore 64c and a 128d (the one with the steel case). I'm still shopping for the other amiga models and as many upgrades for each of them as I can afford without going crazy. I'm also interested in an original IBM 5150, 5160, and 5170. I have plans to hack a modern computer into a 5170 case and a modern slot-loading dvd drive into a commodore 1571 floppy drive case. It would be nice to play with a PCjr also. And an apple 2c would be fun. I also recently bought the first macintoshes i've ever owned. I have a quadra 700 and a IIfx. All of my machines work except for the IIfx which just needs an OS installed. I have nearly every bit of software ever created for the amiga and c64 (in disk image form). I'm also in the process of collecting mac and 2e/2gs software. I also have a catweasel board for writing classic floppy disks, although it still doesn't have 2e write support. My lack of 2e/2gs software has created a chicken/egg problem. I don't even have appledos or prodos disks. But there's a way to boot apple 2e machines using this thing called ADT and IN#2. You literally program the 2e/2gs over the serial cable transferring all of prodos. But first I need to get the quadra 700 on my network. Then the fun can begin. :-)
I've got a metal-envelope RCA 6N7 tube (dual triode with a common cathode) in my stereo system's power amplifier that dates back to the pre-WWII area. And some of the other parts in that amp are of the same vintage, including the power transformer and a few resistors.
I have a shrink wrapped "Microsoft Window 3.0" (c) 1990, with the label on the front:
"New! Breaks the 640K memory barrier. Unleash all the power of your PC."
I use as a door stopper, but I'm still to embarrassed to post this under my account.
An Emerson that has chugged along reasonably well...a few of the buttons got cracked pushed into the unit, and it flips out and blinks repeatedly if a tape is ever ejected for more than 5-6 seconds. But it still records just fine.
"the original serial adapter wasn't working because the oscillator depends on the serial voltage"
-----
Sorry, I'm only a 1336 h4x0r.
He isn't really surfing with the modem. He's running a terminal over the modem and displaying the rendered page as fetched by the remote server running lynx. This is less bandwidth intensive than the actual browsing would be, which is amusing to think of given how slow even drawing the screen was over that link.
Just the HTML for http://en.wikipedia.org/ is 57K. That would take approx 30min to transfer over a 300 baud link.
I have a Atari 2600 still actively in use to play Kaboom with the old paddles I also have a bunch of old Apple kit that still works, such as Apple IIe 1983 LASER 128(Clone) 1984 Mac SE 1987 Quadra 630 1994 Centris 660AV 1994 Powerbook Duo 280c 1994 Powerbook 540c 1994 Newton 1995 All this before the age of 30. Im gonna be drowning in stuff by 40. My wife says I should get rid of some of the old stuff. Ol' dusty and ol' obsoletey as my wife calls them. Naaaaaaaaaah
I have a Toshiba T1000, which would now be 21-22 years old. I have a lot of other old equipment, including a generic XT clone from the early 80's (so, about 25 years old) and its CGA monitor, oh, and my NES, which would be about the same age (although I'm not sure if consoles count in this discussion).
The oldest networking equipment I have is probably a U.S. Robotics 56k modem that used X.2 or whatever they called it, not V90/V92. Wonderful modem - even if it does only connect at 28.8kbps now due to the fact nothing is using its native protocol, when using it, I had the fewer dropped connections than with any other modem.
--- Mr. DOS
I got this abacus here that's at least a couple hundred years old. Amazingly, it still calculates just as well as it did when it was first made....
This guy's the limit!
65 year old feet used to walk!
10 year old bicycle used to ride!
Wait, what's the significance of a modem, modulating and demodulating as it was originally intended?
I read the script, and I think it would help my character's motivation if he was on fire. -Bender
I have inherited my Great Grandfather's Victrola - wind up spring to spin the 78RPM discs, friction lever to control the speed, pickup through replaceable sharp steel needles that drive a speaker plate that resonates out through a cabinet with a slide-door volume control. If you take it with you jogging you'll get a tremendous total body workout, though you might need more than an armband to carry it.
Of course, it won't play modern media, but neither will your modern audio gear play the classic 78RPM cut of "Digga-digga-do".
They had 300 baud in 1964? Raise your hand if you were still using 110 baud in the 1970's.
It's nice to see computer equipment which is backward compatible to 45 years ago.
The bad thing is that hardware and software for handling the data has very poor backward compatibility... I have piles of floppy disk, MD which I don't have any device to read. Hope that libraries, labs etc keeps the devices to read ancient tapes, disks or whatever.
If we're talking about mechanical stuff, I have a clock that dates back to before the Civil War. I have a 1957 model sewing machine I use whenever I need to sew something. I have a gold pocket watch given to a distant relative in 1916--he died in combat in France shortly thereafter. I have a fountain pen engraved with the year 1910 that still writes, and several that date back to the 1920's-1950's, all in working order. I have a Colt 25 caliber automatic pistol that seems to have been manufactured around 1914--called the "Vestpocket" pistol. My upright freezer was first purchased 32 years ago. All this stuff has been in the family, and the secret is that it's all been used and cared for.
My oldest piece of working electronic equipment is a 1992 vintage Mac Duo Dock subnotebook.
Take care of your stuff, and your stuff will take care of you.
"Here's what's happening. You're starting to drive like your Dad..." - Red Green
So I have the following (it all works unless specified and I fire it up at least twice a year unless specified). And yes, my office looks like a train-wreck twice a year when I pull all this stuff out to keep it alive..
2 Commodore 64s (one works, the other is for parts), and a Commodore 64C
1 1541-II disk drive (works) and a bunch of software.
1 Commodore 128 (Has a couple of broken keys on the numeric pad), and a 1571 disk drive
1 Laser 128 (Apple II clone) with two drives. Works fine and I have a bunch of games and office type software to go with it.
1 Amiga 500, the internal and two external drives (one pulled from an A1000 so it's very big. Another is an off-brand, very small and cool 3 1/2)
1 Commodore Plus/4. Works great.
1 Commodore Vic-20. Works great
1 Commodore 16 which is unfortunately busted
I have a serial modem (14.4) I use to hook up the Amiga to a PC. I cheat because it's actually just doing telnet, but it's cool to get on the web with Lynx by using a kermit terminal program (my Amiga software is so old that it doesn't have a TCP stack). At some point I started getting some public domain amiga tcp stack off ftp but I needed a hard drive to hold it all so I stopped (even emulation is better than the real thing when you don't have enough hardware).
And of course I also keep a bunch of emulators on the modern machines so I can try things out and have interesting stuff to run (being able to run it on the actual hardware gives you a reason to want to pull it out). I love retrocomputing. In fact, that's how I plan on teaching programming to my kids. Yes, they'll use modern hardware too, but for programming I want them to see how there can be very little between you and the metal and you can still accomplish a bunch. All the layers of abstractions can actually make the basics (like why assembly is important and how you actually talk to hardware) a lot harder to understand. If all you have is a Commodore and you have to send commands to the drive to initialize the hardware, and you have to poke values in order to create a little assembly routine or change colors, it just makes it so much more *real*, and there's a lot less to explain of what's going on in the background. Since everything is an extrapolation of that pattern of thought anyway, I think it's better to start the understanding at that level.
- No Sig Today
I have a first generation Sega Genesis. That's the oldest piece of working hardware. The oldest piece of hardware I have is a VideoWriter. Unfortunately the vertical fly on the display is bad so I'll have to try and fix that.
My liver.
Oldest machine I have in working condition is a 64kb Dragon 64. Was a great little machine in its day, featuring multiuser / multitasking on a 6809E running OS/9 (yep, you could log in over a serial terminal ;-). Also featured a parallel floppy drive which put the C64's 1541 to shame.
Great times, niche machine, died along with the rest. Manual claims it's from 1983, so a bit more than 25 years, I'd say.
Ever wondered whats wrong with the world? http://www.ishmael.org/
I still have working, fully loaded SS-50 bus machines from about 1982 with all kinds of cool cards in them like speech synthesizers, A/D and D/A, graphics cards, memory, etc. I wrote a lot of 6800 and 6809 assembly code back then... in 1994, I wrote a complete 6809 system emulation, including the OS from the time (6809 Flex) and emulation of an arcade graphics subsystem I designed so I'd always have a working "machine" to fool with my old code. Virtual disk drives, ports, timers, etc. Still runs great; I run it under XP, which runs under Parallels, which runs under OSX. :o)
I also have a SOROC terminal and a paper tape reader, and a mint tiny BASIC on paper tape (for the 8080.) The first machine I had that I didn't actually build out of TTL was based on a National Semiconductor ISP-8000-8A SC/MP I got in 1976. I published an article about using the SC/MP as a Baudot printer driver with the SWTPC 6800 in the November 1977 issue of Kilobaud. My first published work, in fact.
The first machine I ever owned I built out of TTL in... I think 1970... as there wasn't any other option at the time. A couple of 74181 ALUs in the middle, all manner of other stuff in there, register memory files.... Man, that was a wild nest of wires and sockets. The power supply was a nightmare. But I learned a lot doing it. You can't (or maybe you can) imagine how enthused I was when the 8080 and 6800 hit the market, and the downright euphoria I felt when the 6809 came out.
I still think that the 6809 was one of the best designed MPUs ever from a programming standpoint. I can still write 6800 and 6809 opcodes straight to paper. Even fairly complex things like the 6809's LEA instructions. And calculate its 2's complement branch offsets more or less instantly. Now there's a chunk of neurons I'll never get back....
I did some work for Centuri (an arcade game machine manufacturer) where I built them boards that would plug in where the 6502 was in their then-current hardware, and put a 6809 there instead. Just a few gates and some socket hardware, and goodbye 6502! Lord, I despised the 6502. What a bass-ackwards... nevermind. Then I wrote them a few graphics demos that left a few executives spitting coffee. Nothing like a hardware multiply (and the ability to do easy division by multiplying via a table of reciprocals) to step up from an MPU where the main claim to fame is bloody 8-bit role-reversed index registers...
Oldest working non computer hardware I own is a console AM radio from the 1930s. It's even still mostly original... it'd almost certainly work better if I went in there and replaced a lot of components with their modern equivalents, but it's more interesting as is, and in fact it still works quite well. Doesn't complete with my current radio gear, but then again, the currents stuff doesn't have the charm of a polished wood cabinet, either.
Darwin, I'm oooold. :o)
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
The oldest working piece of electronic (I have slide rules that are older) gear I have is my first computer, a TRS-80 Color Computer 1 from 1980. 32K of RAM, and Microsoft Extended Color Basic. 300 baud modem, and cassette tape for data storage. Still works perfectly.
One of my friends came up with a Western Union teletype that still had some paper with their name along one edge. The paper was yellowed with age. The teletype used a 5-bit baudot code, which wikipedia says Western Union stopped using in 1950. We hacked a printer port into an Atari 800, and started putting out the baudot. We had plans to write things like "JAPAN BOMBS PEARL HARBOR!" or "DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN!" which would have looked wicked on the yellow Western Union paper, but we settled for writing things like "The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog." and "All good men come to the aid of their country."
-Loyal
I aim to misbehave.
Learned TI Basic on it. Still works like a charm and I still break it out once in a great while when I'm feeling nostalgic. Still save to cassette tape when I use it.
It's not ludicrously old, but: my DSL modem died a few months ago (my own fault -- if it has air vents in it, they may actually be there for a reason, not just to look cool and futuristic). I went into a bit of a panic, because, really, where does one get a DSL modem, especially if one suddenly has no Internet access? I feared calling Verizon would result in long delays, pricey expenditures, and/or bafflement.
Fortunately, a friend of mine up the street who I knew to be a bit of a tech hoarder still had his, even though he had switched to line-of-site wireless years ago. The modem was nearly 10 years old, and twice as big as the one I'd been using, but sure enough I just plugged it into my phone line and worked great -- same speeds I was getting with the old modem (2.8M down, 600K up). I was sort of shocked that something that old could just plug in to my current set up with no changes, but I suppose there haven't exactly been great strides in DSL technologies over the past decade or so.
Every single one of the electrons in my Macbook has been around since the beginning of the universe. Beat that.
Unicorn Setu. "Eagles may soar, but weasels don't get sucked into jet engines".
It's a cheat, 'cause I don't have 'em any longer, but around the time I built my first computer (with a soldering iron...you kids...) a Sinclair ZX-81, I went looking for a printer.
At the time, printers were maybe $1-2,000, and $1-2000 was a hell of a lot more money than it is now.
I found 2 Baudot-code teletypes at the SC School for the Deaf, and they wanted something like $50 for the pair. I borrowed the van from the A/V company where I worked and lugged them back home, to the great disdain of my soon-to-be ex-wife.
They were amazing pieces of gear - way ovebuilt, a lot of machined cast metal, huge synchronous motors, and a current-loop interface that I never did get around to interfacing with the ZX-81 (though I did get 'em to talk to each other).
They were huge (think of large heavy desks full of dusty gear about 4-1/2 feet tall), and I dragged them around for a few years. A couple years after my divorce, I moved out of my parents' home and eventually they told me to get the things out of there. I called museums, couldn't get any takers, and though it broke my heart, I had to let the trashmen drag 'em off. Really a pity.
I know someone would want them today. And I could interface them today (but for my very young child - takes all my time). And I still have the ZX-81.
And Baudot, for those who don't know, is what you had before you had EBCDIC or ASCII. it was a 5-bit character code, with a control character that shifted the character set up, and shifted it back down to extend the characters it could communicate (think of the shift key on your keyboard as "push-on, push-again-off". Very, very steampunk...
Oldest one I own that still functions is an original Atari PONG home console from 1976 (model C-100).
Last night I played a blank tape at full volume. The mime next door went nuts.
I've got a very-much still working CIT-101e vt100 dumb green screen from 1983.
Works great as the serial console to my embedded firewall.
I don't fire up my Apple ][ (non-plus model) often, but I know that still works, and it's got a modem, cpm card, and maybe an integer basic card, but i can't remember. That's about 77-78
I don't think i have anything anymore that breaks the 35-year mark, though.
Support FSF: Stop thinking with your wallet, and think with your imagination. (cc/non-commercial)
25 years old
I still have an Amiga 2000 standing around from 1989 with a 8 Mhz 68000 CPU and 7 MB RAM. Funny thing about it is that it can run the relatively modern AmigaOS 3.1, for which reasonably well working graphical web browsers exist. Occasionally I fire it for fun just to demonstrate that 80's hardware can show web pages in a semi decent way. Configure it to run on a 640x400 screen with 8 shades of grey and it still shows most of the modern web sites that have some sort of accessibility fall back. It can do tables and basic CSS, so in some cases the results are almost indistinguishable from what you see on a modern browser. Of course it is awfully slow and needs several seconds to render a medium sized PNG image.
It's particular cool to show it too kids that think you need GHz's and GB's to surf the web.
Since the question only specifies "equipment" and not computer stuff in the understanding of today's whizkids, that would be my HP 15C calculator. I got that little gem in the autumn of 1983 or nearly 26 years ago. Amazingly, it is still only on it's second set of batteries (they are close to needing replacement, though). I love that calculator so much that, since about two years or so, I install a complete HP 15C emulator (including the looks) on every computer that I use. Nothing beats the real thing, however.
Linux user since early January 1992.
How about rocks? They're useful for clue applications.
:).
And many of them are at least 6000 years old
Hmmm...
I've got two original IBM ATs - 10MB (yes Megabyte) hard drives, 512k of ram. But I don't use them.
I've got a 486DX based server from the early 90's, but I finally shut it down a couple of years ago. Novell 4.12 on it, it ran flawlessly for over 10 years.
I do, have a Compaq Prolinea 590. Mfg sometime in 1995, it is in daily use. It's my firewall.
But oldest currently-in-use would probably be my 1993 IBM Model M keyboards. They'll never die.
Then there's my 1980 ski boat, which still works beautifully, despite approaching it's 30th birthday.
-- "Never underestimate the power of human stupidity." - R.A.H.
With 16Kb memory expansion (up to 64Kb) with 80-column card and hard-hack for lower case letters. I think it just had its 30th birthday.
Opera Mini does a good job at getting pages crunched down, and can be run on a desktop. You'd probably want to turn off images, and browse in mobile mode, but it'd probably be an acceptable experience. Figure 30-60 seconds to load a short page? It'd be compressed and text-only, although you're wasting bandwidth sending the HTML rather than with lynx where you just send the text.
Your mom.
I've got a DNS server that's running on a Pentium-83 overdrive CPU in a 486/VLB mobo, with 32MB of RAM on 30-pin SIMMs. It connects to the network with a WD8013 10Mb Ethernet card, and 10base-2 cable. Disk? WD Caviar 340MB, baby. It's been serving DNS 24/7/365 for I can't even remember how many years straight (total downtime on the order of a day or two in several years), and still is doing so right now.
-----Chaz
I had a Ven-Tel 300 baud acoustic coupler and a Lear-Seigler ADM3a terminal as my first bit of computer equipment. Don't know whatever happened to it - probably gave it all away.
- Tim
I still have slide rules I used in high school, which makes them some 35 or so years old. I also still have my CARDIAC from the early 1970s.
They both still work perfectly.
The oldest tech gear I use on a daily basis is the MPU board in my 1980 Stern Seawitch pinball machine. The serial number is quite low, so it was made in 1980 at some point and still works like the day it was made. It's received some TLC over the years, but.. rock solid reliable.
Before that, my oldest tech would have been the MPU in my 1978 Stern Lectronamo. It's since been sold to make way for other machines.
Check out Seawitch:
http://ipdb.org/search.pl?searchtype=advanced&mpu=34#2089
F.y.i. For those of you with H89s, TRS-80s or Apple II's that want to keep them working, this guy sells a virtual floppy drive that allows you to save disk images to a Windows or Linux machine and access them on you vintage machine.
http://www.thesvd.com/SVD/
I haven't used one yet, but when I find some time, I plan to hook one to my H89.
All ideas^H^H^H^H^Hprocesses in this post are Patent Pending. (as well as the process of patenting all postings)
http://www.sixmoons.com/audioreviews/trends/hero_1_3.jpg
Sixmoons did an audio review using it and here's an excerpt: "...Other than not having a remote control, this C$50 (shipping included) eBay item actually made a very competent top-loading CD player, probably the best in that price category. What I heard was perhaps a little direct and blatant -- not enough suavity and grace -- but it didn't rob me of music enjoyment. Vocals were arguably a little harsh and spicy but pianos were strikingly forceful, especially when I split up the output signals from the headphone jack with a Y-adapter and fed one pair of headphone-to-RCA cables to the paired Quest QS8II powered subwoofers. You'd probably notice from the photograph that the listening room was actually more of a TV room and therefore far from ideal. The speakers were spaced 10 feet apart, with a 46" DLP back-projection TV and two almost equally big cabinets in between. Yet, the TA-10 and the Quest had enough music to fill up the entire gap in the middle, voiding the void, projecting a soundstage right through and beyond the three bulky eye-soars and mental blocks as if they did not exist. When Alexandre Tharaud's inspired reading of Ravel's Mirrors [Harmonia Mundi HMC 901811.12] was played, the Steinway was there, literally 6 feet behind the TV. What about the pungency in the tone? Yes, the NEC is designed to read computer data at 3 x speed and the Quest is built for home theater. The sound they produce might be by audiophile standard a little too fast, too grainy and could be interpreted as stressed."
Sig Follows: "Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself." -- Mark Twain
...not subscription or service fees. When AT&T broke up, they generously offered to let me buy the phone I'd been using for something like $20, rather than turning it in. I think I actually took them up on it, and still have the thing in a closet somewhere, complete with rotary dial and acoustic-coupler-compatible handset.
I have a Sega Master System I still play from time to time. It was released back in 1985, which makes it 24 years old. Mostly I play Fantasy Zone, one of the first "cute 'em ups" and Spellcaster, a strange hybrid of platformer and point and click adventure.
As for computers, I have a Sony HB-75, which is from 1984. But I'm in the middle of repairing the keyboard (hard to find those microswitches these days). Mostly I use it for fun Basic programing and playing Hydlide, my one MSX cartridge.
Black rotary phone, 1952, still works on pulse dial (if you time it right, you can dial it with the switchhook). Didn't ring, but figured how to rewire it thanks to the Internet, now it RIIINNNGGSS when I get a call. I also have a Powerbook 140, with a working modem...i need to find a SCSI ethernet adapter and it will surf the net with Netscape 1.1. I have a Newton, too, I heard those were networkable. I have a TI-99/4a, I think it has a modem packed with it. I need to dig that out and see what it can do. Last but not least, Commodore VIC-20, and I know modems were made for those because it says so on the box but I haven't been able to track one down yet.
12:50 - press return.
I have a Sparc2 (circa 1990), it still works and I can't bring myself to throw it away. Better still, I connect to it with a DEC VT100. If you don't know what that is, check to see what your favorite text-only program emulates.
-- Consensus - 50% probability that the majority are wrong.
I have, and still currently use, a 1991 Ensoniq EPS 16+ 16-bit sampler with a SCSI interface. I have it connected to a SCSI ZIP drive on one side, and the other side of the ZIP drive is connected to my PC. I then use a piece of software that can read/write to the ZIP disk (and can do other disk-utilty things). This allows me to search the net for any given sound effect/instrument wav file, convert it into an EPS 16+ instrument, write it to the disk, and then load it into the EPS 16+ and play it on the keyboard.
So I suppose I can say that it is connected to the Internet, in a small way.
"They said I probly shouldn't fly with just one eye," "I am Bender. Please insert girder."
I have an IDE card, a keyboard card, a mouse card, and a token ring adapter. I don't know how old they are, but the keyboard card keeps telling me to get off his lawn.
I have a sliderule. I don't know how old it is, but I can guess. My dad used it when he was in high school, and he would have been in the class of 1963, so it could be as old as 1958 or so, depending on what math classes he was taking. He is a math whiz, so it is conceivable that he was taking more advanced courses earlier than later.
Related, I have a Monroe desk calculator that I do use every time I pay my bills. I don't know its age, but I would guess at around 1980 or so. It has a vacuum fluorescent display, and can run either on 4 C cells or a wall wart. It doesn't have a printer like many in that era, but it does use the accumulator approach to addition and subtraction.
www.wavefront-av.com
I restored a Southwest Technical Products machine back in 1998 that is still running. That's from 1975 and is my oldest machine. I also have an Apple ][+ (1977) with a ProFile hard drive that I recently got working. That is from around 1981. Mine is a 5M version. I don't know the exact manufacturing date on the HD, I suspect that it was closer to 1983. I also have an old acoustic coupled modem. It doesn't work, but I will probably fix it at some point. My oldest PC is an old XT clone with a real 8086, from the late 80's.
I still have a working Mac SE, vintage 1986 or so IIRC. It's running some variant of System 7. It works, but I can't think of much to do with it, so it's essentially a decoration in my living room. Originally came with 1mb ram, 20mb hard drive, and low-density 3.5in floppy drive and sports a 8mhz 68000 processor.
FWIW, it has an Ethernet card which I think only supports 10baseT. I've tried to hook it up to my router, but MacTCP doesn't seem to support DHCP and I can't get anywhere giving it a manual address. I installed a floppy drive a while back that supports high-density and windows disks, but the only computer I have with a floppy drive runs Windows, so it's a big pain to get software onto it.
I don't reply to ACs
Was built in 1785 :P I know that's pretty low tech, but it's impressive considering how well this place has stood the test of time (in upstate New York with its endless blizzards), and now we've got modern half million to million dollar homes that are made with plywood and pressure treated boards and have problems from day one. Just more examples of how newer is so very often NOT better.
http://www.oldversion.com/ For the win.
This sig will self destruct in 5 seconds.
I have an grounding cable going from my computer to the Earth.
That's makes it a 4.5 billion year old piece of equipment!
...there is nothing "cool" about getting a 45-year-old chunk of hardware to "work" on your modern computer system. What would be "cool" would be to be able to actually browse a web site or download something larger than an SMS message. Otherwise, it's just another addition to the junk heap.
Joe Dougherty, Florida, USA
The words I thought I brought, I left behind. So, never mind.
The oldest piece of equipment I have that still actually works is a VAXstation 3100 m30 with a few modern SCSI drives w/ SCA adapters built in 1987 I think. I still fire it up once in a while. I have a couple serial terminals dangling off of it. Technically, as configured it's a VAXserver 3100. It has 16MB of RAM.
It runs ULTRIX 4.4 and NetBSD 1.4.
It's 22 years old. Still running strong. Still capable of running a modern version of BSD........slowly. I think it's clocked at around ~11mhz but the official speed rating is 2.8 VUPs. Clock rate is pretty meaningless anyway.
I got rid of the other old crap years ago.
I still occasionally play the various Carmen Sandiego games on my old Apple II. Just picked up sealed boxed copies of old early '80s arcade games for the Apple II, too. My daughter is just getting to the right age for some of these old games, and I can't wait to introduce her to LOGO. (I was six when I started out on LOGO on an Apple II+. The school had three of them in the library, and it was a special honor to get to use the computers.)
Another non-functioning site was "uncertainty.microsoft.com."
The purpose of that site was not known.
...from a company that was spun off of AT&T back in 1984. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consumer_Phone_Services ...and yes, I still have one in my basement!
Computer related? ASR33 teletype (1965). I occasionally fire it up to show off my AIM-65 (1976).
Audio equipment? 1958 Harmon Kardon Stereo Festival TA230. I play MP3's through it on a pair of Klipsch KG2s (1982). Still sounds great.
Beta sux! Join the Slashcott! http://hardware.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=4760465&cid=46173047
still working sporadically on a 1920s Kellogg oak wall phone, which still needs a network. got some working 00A, 01A, and D5A tubes, too.
no really fusty computer hardware left, except a core board from an old posting/billing workstation by NCR from about 1964. 2K, no expansion possible.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
A couple of years ago I fired up my old Amiga 1000. What's that, circa '84, '85? Nifty machine. Still have my Apple II+, but that's been in storage forever. Also have an original Macintosh, but no peripherals (was someone's paperweight). I powered it up, sounded like it was working, but no screen. Haven't got around to cracking it open to play with the innards. Oh, forgot the old Okidata dot matrix printer for the II+. Wonder if I could get that to work? I'll have to find it. Come to think of it, I don't think I've ever thrown out any computer equipment. Well, at least they eBay now!
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
On which I can run WorldWideWeb.
That's *the* WorldWideWeb.
A NeXT workstation is not as old as that modem is, but it is still a pretty cool piece of equipment.
My Gateway / Webserver / Fileserver is a Dual Pentium Pro running FreeBSD. I recently bought another of these machines (Compaq Proliant 2500r) for spare parts, because the voltage converter (VRM Modul Spare Part 225529-001) gave up. Again.
I have no clue how old these systems are, but they sure look old. And big.
I'll probably replace it with something more powerful, this year. Like a EeePC 700 or so...
Could be worse. Could be raining.
I was unaware of any plans for 'preventative detention' here in the U.S., but I've heard of something similar in the U.K.
I was entertained the other day watching CNN, they were debating waterboarding. The commenter asked the anchor if she'd enjoy being waterboarded 78 times, and she protested,
"But I'm not an accused terrorist!"
So...what exactly is an "accused terrorist"? Is terrorism actually a crime now, like manslaughter? In places subject to rule of law, we call someone accused of a crime either "a suspect", "a defendant", or "preparing to launch a libel suit." Even after being convicted by a jury of their peers, we still hold that murderers, rapists, and enemies of the people should not be subject to any cruel or unusual punishments. What makes someone exempt from any virtues and rights of common humanity, or of our own justice system, merely by being labelled as a terrorist? Surely to act thusly is a greater crime than any committed against us.
So, too, with this 'preventative detention'. We do not need ways to harm or detain people that 'cannot be tried' by the courts. No one is above the reach of the law if he is guilty, and no one who is not guilty should ever fear punishment. These people must be either tried and found guilty, or allowed to go free. Accusing them of a crime that actually exists would be a good start.
I programmed a PDP-11 in graduate school to pull data from my vapor deposition rig. Circa 1975 or so. Gotta love those 8" floppy disks. I don't know about today, but four or five years ago I went back to my graduate lab for a visit, and there it was still chugging my code along. Why replace it if it ain't broke?
Jealously hoarding mod points since 2007.
Used almost every day for the last 35 years.
is a digital rainbow still runs and has an acoustic coupled modem - unfortunately I no longer have a land line to see if it will still connect. Lining the bottom of the box, where this is stored are logs from the W.E.L.L. and chats I had with Timothy Leary and other notable folk who were "tuned in" at that time. I don't miss the noise of the dot matrix printers but do like the never ending feed of green bar and the sexy squeal of the modem connecting
no matter how good it is, it is human nature always wants to make things better
Guess this puts my family in the computer era of 1981 or so. Yup, I'm a geek. It still works. Gave away the TI-99/4a, the C64, and the Original Nintendo, plus the Amiga, the Vic, the TRS80 model 1 and 2s, etc over the years, all working. The C64 is still in use by my boss for giggles for his kids :)
...which is 51 years old. A little out of date and throughput has suffered as the insulation on some of the wiring has frayed a bit. Input and output errors too have increased and don't get me started about those faulty peripherals!
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
1972 TI 2500 Datamath : one of the first pocket calculator :)
1974 HP 65 : first programmable pocket calculator
1978 Digital Equipement Corporation VT100 hooked up to my Linux PC. Already surfed the web with Lynx on it and it's fast enough
1979 Apple ][ europlus, still working great !
Original NES, and a Gameboy :)
If you can't see the value in jet powered ants you should turn in your nerd card. - Dunbal (464142)
I have a 6 foot long HeNe laser from the 1970s. (It still works too)
Spectra Physics 125A
It was before they had laser classification so it doesn't even have warning labels!
I was listening to my Sony ICF-2001 (1981) radio last night. I still pull out my TRS Model 100 (1985) now and then. The readout's a little funky, but my first Casio calculator (1976) still works, and while very rarely used, my Sans & Streiffe slide rule (1969) hasn't dropped a bit yet. And my Vectrex video game (1981) still buzzes along just fine.
I think I have that beat... I have a Betamax still. I honestly don't the the exact age... I should research it, though. I am reasonably confident it is from prior to 1991, though.
The last time I used it, it still worked. It doesn't rewind anymore, though. (I guess the rewind motor is shot.) The seek-rewind works, so if you watch a movie, you have to seek-rewind for like 20 minutes to rewind the movie. lol
"Never give up, for that is just the time and place when the tide will change." -Harriet Beecher Stowe ^_^
The page recorder uses 8.5x11 sheets of mag-tape wrapped around a drum which spins and the record/playback head follows a lag screw down the cylinder. Think about a lathe turning metal.
My oldest computer; I gave to my brother. It is a Altair 8800b Turnkey. Came with 1K of RAM and 1K of PROM which contained the boot loader. Mine was real fancy and had a 4K memory card and you can load CP/M from tape. I gave it to my Bro because he used to work for MITS in Albuquerque.
Now I feel older than dirt... Get off my lawn!
:q! Oh crap, not again...
My wife's Mac SE is still running System 6.0.8 just fine too.
And my mother-in-law gave me her Esterbrook fountain pen which she received as a graduation present in 1950 which works wonderfully, though I mostly use a Sheaffer Agio w/ custom ground 0.8mm italic nib (the 9312 medium italic for the Esterbrook is a bit wide for day-to-day use).
And there's the Remington No. 4 .32 rimfire rolling block rifle which my father received in lieu of money from someone on his newspaper route when he was a boy during World War II --- made in 1898 or so.
William
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
110 baud. I had it logged into an AT&T 3B2-600 Unix system 20 years ago. The teletype's modem is a whole lot bigger - it fills the whole stand. PCs are little play-pretend toy computers. You guys bragging about your Tandys and Commodores are Johhny-come-latelys. There are still a lot of teletypes around. \DON'T \FORGET TO \ESCAPE \YOUR \C\A\P\S!
Micromoog synthesizer from the late 70's is the oldest piece of gear that I actually use.
Escape Pod Films: Sketch Comedy and Web Series
SMS is pretty old... cool that yours still works! :-) I have a few old consoles too... I even still have my Atari 2600 (Sears model heavy-sixer) and it still works just fine! I think it is 30-31 years old, since it was purchased in 1978.
I also have an old Pong game that is actually older, but I forget who made it. I will have to pull it out someday to check it out again. It worked the last time I tried it, btw.
I used to have a Fairchild Channel-F, which is also older than the 2600... It was the first console to use cartridges. I wish I still had that thing. lol
The oldest computer I have is a Commodore Vic-20 from 1981, I believe. Still works too! :-D
"Never give up, for that is just the time and place when the tide will change." -Harriet Beecher Stowe ^_^
Kind of reminds me of the film 'Hackers' and the line by Phreak:
"Yo...this is 'insanely great,' it's got a 28.8 kbps modem!"
Wonder what Phreak would have made of this?
'nuff said! ('though it was tempting to post as AC)
Ahh - My eye!
The doctor said I'm not supposed to get Slashdot in it!
I'm amazed at the mundane responses so far...
My QVT and Wyse terminals date from the 70s. I still routinely pull out one of them when I want a second screen on a system. Simpler and cheaper than a second monitor, with a surprising amount of utility these days. EVERYTHING still uses a serial port for I/O. There are numerous times I've had an ancient terminal under-arm as I've walked into the server room... Even the fastest laptops can't compete with the durability and instant-on of an old terminal.
As serial ports begin to diappear from laptops, and only ONE is available on most modern PCs rather than the two of old, I've long thought we are over-due for some other standard to develop for headless comms. USB seems a likely candidate, but nobody has even begun to push such a standard as of yet. And with higher-speed buses comes the (also long overdue) possibility of directly connected GUI terminal standards, which would offer extremely cheap multi-user access to a single system, and finally make management of Windows servers tolerable.
But I digress. My 8-bit, 1200baud dial-up modem in my 286 feels far more antiquated than my terminals, but even there, there are unexpected benefits, like extremely fast and very reliable call-setup in just a couple seconds, rather than 30 seconds of wirrrr-graaaahhhh-zzeeeee-buzzz-beep and a roulette game to see what speed you end up getting.
I'm sure there's plenty of people here with old dot matrix printers, if not TTYs that make my equipment look young... Even a Edison-era stock-ticker probably qualifies, since early (~50 char, all-caps) TTYs copied their line signaling standard.
Come on... Enough of the lightweights... Let's hear from the guys around here that have the really old computer equipment.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
I haven't played with MacTCP in at least 10 years, and never on my local network. When I haul out an old powerbook loaded with Open Transport, DHCP over Cat5 and 802.11b work fine. This guy shows how to get your ethernet'ed-model online with DSL by using Open Transport and OS 7.6.1, which would get you linked on your local network as well.
Luke, help me take this mask off
I've had it for 25 years now, used it through high school to university to work and it still sits on my desk at work, its solar cells going strong, helping me at work from time to time.
I have an Epson 8088 with a 20MB hard drive and CGA graphics. I'm pretty sure its modem is 2400 baud but that was a latter addition. It still makes an excellent Frogger machine.
I would have to think it's about 20 years old but it was a gift from my parents to my sister and me for Christmas and I have no recollection of what year that was.
I've had older (Atari 1200XL 64K w/300 baud modem), but I still have a pristine Atari 520ST 1MB with a 19.2K modem.
I know I can get the ST on the 'net using a SLIP or PLIP route (hosted off a Linux box), but what I really want for it is an Ethernet adapter, but I can't find one. There's a myriad of dead-link ST hardware pages, but no clear path as to what hardware and software can be used.
"Yo..this is 'insanely shite,' it's got a 300 baud modem"
The oldest thing I still use is a DECtalk speech synthesizer dating to 1984.
It's a huge VCR-size box with a 68000 (a giant 3" long DIP chip) based board inside that converts text coming in on a serial port (DB-25) to speech. It also supports phoneme input and is flexible enough that it can do a passable job of singing. It can also connect to a phone and answer calls, response to DTMF touch tones, etc, if you want it to - you can use it to create touch tone driven voice response systems.
This was one of the first commercial speech synthesizers, and was based on years of research done at MIT.
Unlike most modern speech synthesizers that basically concatenate small human speech snippets to create their output, the DECtalk is what is called a formant synthesizer - it simulates the human speech generation process whereby the sound produced by the vocal chords is shaped by the resonant frequencies (aka formants) of the mouth. It's a much more flexible approach - seeing as your controlling the speech generation process, you can programatically create new voice, create your own intonation, make it sing, etc.
I've also got a couple of c. 1977 Processor Technology Sol-20 computers (an old S-100 bus 8080-based computer, with wooden side panels!), complete with their 8" floppy drive subsystem, at home collecting dust - not sure if they still work or not.
When I was a kid, in the mid 80's we got a stereo cabinet containing a stereo and turntable which looked 5-10 years old. We still have it, and it works, though it is not in active use. So, thirty years?
My B-52 (strategic bomber) still works and was built in the 50s. :-)
But generally military stuff is not planned for 5 years, even if it uses high tech electrical components, which became quite obsolate in 10-20 years.
..don't forget about it. Plenty of crap has been made by humanity since Grog first hacked a sharp point onto the end of a stick. Only the well-built stuff is treasured and squirelled away.
Anecdote; How many of you have / know someone who has an antique firearm? "Still fires!", "Feel that action, smooth as ever", "Look at the expert tooling on the barrel" are things you hear, not "Was garbage when new, jammed every third shot, came rusted from factory, looked like something to scrape out chamber pots".
I'll bet dollars to doughnuts there was a Soviet equivalent of this acoustic modem that was junk, and has been completely forgotten.
The Sharp is actually a Pocket Calculator, though it has a 24KB ROM with BASIC in it, and a qwerty keyboard with little calculator buttons. It was fun to learn on, but the one line LCD display got a little boring in the end.
/proc/cpuinfo /proc/meminfo / /dos
:-)
;-)
Otherwise, I am very proud of my still working mail-server, which is a Digital Multia with an AXP21066 CPU, which is the smallest 64bit CPU ever made, fully loaded RAM (128MB) and a (now rather small, but still fine and working) SCSI disk:
$ cat
cpu : Alpha
cpu model : LCA4
cpu variation : -4294967301
cpu revision : 0
cpu serial number : Linux_is_Great!
system type : Noname
system variation : 0
system revision : 0
system serial number : MILO-2.2-17
cycle frequency [Hz] : 166629900
timer frequency [Hz] : 1024.00
page size [bytes] : 8192
phys. address bits : 34
max. addr. space # : 63
BogoMIPS : 323.24
kernel unaligned acc : 0 (pc=0,va=0)
user unaligned acc : 0 (pc=0,va=0)
platform string : N/A
cpus detected : 0
$ cat
total: used: free: shared: buffers: cached:
Mem: 129015808 126205952 2809856 0 2613248 13729792
Swap: 269467648 7520256 261947392
MemTotal: 125992 kB
MemFree: 2744 kB
MemShared: 0 kB
Buffers: 2552 kB
Cached: 12344 kB
SwapCached: 1064 kB
Active: 4744 kB
Inactive: 11240 kB
HighTotal: 0 kB
HighFree: 0 kB
LowTotal: 125992 kB
LowFree: 2744 kB
SwapTotal: 263152 kB
SwapFree: 255808 kB
$ df
Filesystem 1k-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda3 17213849 10246172 6085553 63%
/dev/sda1 52088 564 51524 2%
I believe the date on the motherboard is 1994 and the BIOS says 1995, with an option of loading Windows NT
I don't really remember, and I don't like to boot it, because the mobo-battery (for the BIOS) is not good anymore and it is only barely that I can remember to boot it.
It is however, the most stable system I have ever had, and a few Intel/AMD based PC systems have come and gone in the mean time.
As far as I remember, Slashdot originally ran on a similar platform?
I, and quite a few friends and colleagues cried a few tears when Compaq bought Digital, and a few more when AXP was discontinued!
Not that I am a fan of VMS, but it was sort of fun to play with, in its own archaic way. Sort of like the fun of trying to sleep next to a hungry tiger
But then, back in my day, we wired our boards ourselves and even soldered the LEDs.
I have a rock that's a couple of billion years old.
Still trying to find an interface for the rock. For now, it's merely a handheld device.
This thing has to be faster than an N64 and I rigged it up to play one game and one game only so now it's a console lol. But it's an AMD K6-2 machine at like 450MHz. I bumped it up from 64 MB of ram to 192 and put an ATI Radeon 7000 PCI graphics card in it so it can just barely play Stepmania, a knock off of Dance Dance Revolution. It runs Windows ME cuz I needed that for the PS2 to USB dance pad adapter drivers to for sure work. Also it wasn't fast enough for Ubuntu lol. The first thing I did when I got it was see that it had a PCI network card and I was like "yeah, I don't think so" and took that out so there's no way the winner of the DDR competition in October will try and connect it to the internet after they get it home. It's an old HP compaq case with the wavy, bulgy front that looks kinda neat once you paint it red and the body black and with. It seriously looks like an alienware now lol. People will ahve no idea what they're getting but it looks cool! Well as long as all they do is boot up and open Stepmania, they're fine :D Pretty neat, huh? Especially since I got it for free. btw I also got a $10 monstrous CRT monitor at a rummage sale and gave it and some small speakers the same black and red paint job so the whole set looks like it costs $2000 instead of about $40 lol.
Google's Super Secret Search Algorithm: SELECT @search_results FROM internet WHERE @search_results = 'good'
I'm running Windows Vista on my work computer, and I hear Vista still has some code errors involving dates that goes back to Windows 3.1 because they wanted it to be "compatible." Maintaining bugs for the sake of compatibility. Leave it to MS. So, it's not hardware, but I'm running 17 yr old software (Win 3.1 was from 1992). :)
SIG FAULT: Post index out of bounds.
I have an early wooden Comptometer produced some time during 1887-1903. Still works. Amazing piece of engineering.
http://members.cruzio.com/~vagabond/Models.html
Aside from stereo equipment (I have some old Dynaco speakers and a Dual turntable, for example), the oldest piece of electronic equipment that I regularly use is probably my TI SR50 scientific calculator, which I bought new in college in 1974 for $125.
I also regularly use several DEC MicroVAX systems, circa 1988. I have some working DEC PDP-11 cards, but I don't really use them.
I also have some C programs that I wrote around 1976 that I still use...
I'm claiming that I have the oldest operational car amplifiers until I find somebody who can best me. Two Kenwood power amps. Circa late 70's, early 80's. Model# KAC-7020 and KAC-8200 Details: http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=1111037 Enjoy.
This ain't no upwardly mobile freeway This is the road to hell
I've got an ITS system that I occasionally fire up in an emulator if I'm feeling really retro. I don't actually use it for anything, though.
There are a number of people at my workplace who still use their old Symbolics LISP Machines on a daily basis. They swear that there has never been a better development environment, and that it's really a tragedy that lispms failed in the marketplace.
noah
Though I can't get online with it.
The tapes that are still in the box with it (Trivial Pursuit and The Last Samurai) don't work either.
But the machine works when plugged in, and you can still code basic on it.
I have a working 1888 Commission Rifle. I have a nonworking one that's getting steampunked. I also have a working 5.25" floppy drive 80s vintage. It came in some sort of external box with full sized 50 pin D connector.
I'd go on a Vegan diet but the delivery time from Vega is too long. --brownkitty
I have a few oldies:
I had a Sinclair QL, too, but sadly I chose to sell it to another geek coworker at Quarterdeck back around '93. I regret not keeping that one!
I have an old FASIT Mechanical Calculators that was made in 1967. My dad found it recently cleaning up at a relatives home and gave it to me and I got it working.
I'm not sure if this counts, but I once fixed a Commodore 64 with a fuse from a 1972 Buick Electra. The C64 has a big automotive-style fuse holder right there in the middle of the motherboard.
I still have a CPM card for the Apple IIe made by a little company known as Microsoft. The logo on the manual is nothing like the normal Microsoft logo that we all now know.
I have a system with a 5.25" floppy drive from 1988 (21 years). It's the last remaining piece of my first PC. I kept it around because, for years, it allowed me to maintain the fiction that I was "upgrading" the original computer.
Fascism starts when the efficiency of the government becomes more important than the rights of the people.
I'll piggy back on this topic to ask Slashdot what I should do with some old equipment that I can't hold on to anymore... I have an Osborne Portable 1, Commie 64, TRS-80 Model 100 (with acoustic coupler), and more. I don't want to trash it, but it's not doing anyone any good sitting in storage. Any ideas?
My Commodore 64 and Amiga 500 are still functioning, 'though not pulled out of the garage in a while. So I've got mid-1980s tech. Got an old Apple Mac II out there, too, but I think that was from later in the '80s or early '90s...got it second-hand.
My favorite cell phone is still in the basement, but no carriers around here support the original Motorola brick. Got mine about 1991-92. Sweet 9-number memory, and one-line 10-digit display!
End the FUD
Awesome anyways, but the system isn't really connected to teh intertubes, no ip-packets are routed to the laptop.
I've got an old 1979 TI-36 around somewhere. Still works, but very very slowly.
I have a 1953 "Sargeant" television set that still works. The tubes are a bit gassy, the picture a bit bluish-white. I quit turning it on about 8 years ago, because the conductive coating on the outside of the picture tube is coming loose, and parts of it pop off when the tube powers up. You used to be able to buy an aerosol spray to recoat the tube (made by CRC, IIRC), but I can't find it available anymore. I so want to hook it up to a digital converter box though.
that is awesome that this guy got that modem to work. I find it kind of fascinating too that something as fast as a 300 baud modem was around 40+ years ago. People were using 300 bauds in the early 80's and I'm sure were blown away when 1200, 2400, 4800, and 9600 bauds came out. I'd have to say that my oldest machine is a TRS-80 Model III that I bought at local band-boosters auction. All the participants laughed at it and of course nobody bid on it except me. Cost me only a buck, and it came with all the original documentation including a great book on TRS-BASIC. It plays Asteroids, some old Pinball game, and it still works like a dream.
*plays the Apogee theme song music*
In the computing line the oldest working piece I have is a Sinclair ZX80 circa 1981. Still working, but I have had to replace the Z-80 CPU on one occasion.
Patent litigation: A doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction... in which everyone seems willing to push the button
The both still boot, except the one with 5.25in floppy drives attached always wants me to insert a system disk.
I've got 2 Amiga 3000 desktops ca. 1991 which are two of the six networked computers in my house.
I also have an A500, an A2000, a CD32, 2 Apple IIes, a Timex Sinclair 1000, some old early Pentium/II/Pro boxes, and even a 486 box. Most of that stuff is in boxes -- still all works though.
The A3000s are more dependable than any machine I've purchased since. Slow by today's standards *for some operations*, but dependable.
Well, you asked :)
My oldest electronic device is my 1937 Hallicrafter S11 Super Skyrider shortwave receiver.
I bought it used from a college professor's wife (he died) at Ohio Northern University (Ada, Ohio) in 1954 or 1955.
Nice in the winter for keeping a room toasty as the tubes do get warm and they give off a lovely glow.
And in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make
And the whole of the thing.
This however does not properly relate the 1 meg ram modules I've had stashed in a plastic tote since '91 to the current hardware situated in the same tower I was using back then. Maybe if I pulled out a slower processor and a floppy drive I'd be able to use quarterdeck Mosaic again. Take THAT Google Chrome!
Well, I suspect the oldest device is the air conditioner in my 40 year old house. :)
The oldest computer related gadget I have is probably an Intellivision, since I had to get rid of my PDP-11. :(
I have a Commodore 64 that still works. Also an Amiga 1000 and an Amiga 2000 in working order. All three are currently in storage in my garage. The place were I work has a Intel 286 or 386 (not sure which) server running a custom pricing program under some ancient version of Novell Netware. It has a 25MB (yes megabyte) RLL 5.25 inch hard drive in it and token ring through a coax to a satellite driveless workstation which loads up the OS from the server and runs the pricing program remotely. Runs every day.
Let's see, I have an original Macintosh that still boots, a TRS-80 circa 1977 that I think works (but haven't tried it lately), and an H19 terminal (kit) circa 1979 that I still actually use as the console for one of my DEC Alpha computers. I also have a prototype (wire wrapped) Lisp Machine circa 1980 from when I worked at the AI Lab; this was running fine when I last turned it off about 12 years ago, but I would have to do serious maintenance on it (mostly on the disk drive) before attempting to run that one again, for fear of destroying something. I also have some Symbolics machines from the late 80s that probably work. I think I lost the bare 3x1" circuit board and alligator clips 300 baud modem that I originally used on the H19.
I have 4 Northgate keyboards, circa 1990-1992. They weigh 5 pounds, have clicky keys, and are built like tanks. I can pound away on these keyboards all day (I'm a fast touch typist), and as long as I can keep them interfaced with current and future PC technology, I will never use another type of keyboard.
Little nit-pick: The guy in the vid says that the tones are interrupted to represent data. This is wrong, the tone actually switches frequency. It's called Frequency Shift Keying.
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_103_modem
Thing is, running Vista, with its sluggishness and lack of response, it feels 50+ years old.
My web domain.
To have an operating computer that is almost as old & heavy as you are? What might I be referring to? The Altos 8000 series... Manufactured in 1978 this bad boy is a workout in itself when you go to move it. I learned BASIC & COBOL on this thing when I was a kid. I'll have to get the thing out of storage and play with it again. It's been a handful of years.
Computer stuff: a couple of Sun Ultra 5 workstations. It's not that long ago that I ditched my IBM PS/2-25, bought brand new in 1987. While it was useless for anything real by then, it lived on for a long time running cross-assemblers for PIC microcontrollers.
Other tech stuff: Collins 51J-4 radio, circa 1957 (low serial number). Works. Various Kodak cameras, mid-1930s. They work too.
...laura
I have an original Star Wars Stand up arcade game from 1983; with the manuals and schematics. Still works!
Tektronix 453, serial 13084. No idea on the date (1960ish), but its a beauty of analog engineering. I use it to troubleshoot my basket case 7603, which is gathering dust waiting for me to get around to cleaning off the work bench. I don't use it for anything that requires exact measurement, as it tends to drift quite a bit.
About 10 years ago I worked in a shipyard as a test electrician. We had the old Simpson multimeters that were built into their wooden cases. Some of them were manufactured in 1925. We would hook one up to each phase of the supply going to a switchgear and take periodic readings. They handled the high temperatures in the bowels of the ship much better than the newfangled digital thingies. You also had instant deflection of the needle if something spiked or dropped, whereas digital meters take time to autorange.
Still works, but up in the attic. I built in 1978. So nowhere near a device purchased 1 year before I was even born. Wow.
I'm still looking for a PDP-8, if anyone wants to part with one for next to nothing.
Wont swap it for the Acorn though, I love that to bits.
Open Source Drum Kit, LPLC deve board - mjhdesigns.com
An old friend of mine, the late Bob Long (W6QBN) once spoke of an incident when he was a tech at CDC many years ago. "Seymour hated phones" he said. One day he came to visit the Arbor Vitae Cybernet site in Los Angeles and everyone carefully removed all the telephones that would be in his path.
Unfortunately, one phone was overlooked, a hand set in the corner of the room that was dedicated to the use of just such an acoustic coupler. Murphy being an employee of the installation, the phone rang just as he walked through while talking to a couple of colleagues. Seymour ripped it out of the wall, opened a window and threw it out. "He didn't change his stride or even comment on it."
Ahh, acoustic couplers -- remember whistling into the phone and getting one to send an ack?
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
Toshiba T1200 Laptop - DOS 3.3, 640K memory, 20MB hard drive, 1200 baud modem (that was an option), monochrome screen. My first
laptop and it still ran last time I fired it up - last year. Everything older then that went to the public schools at some point.
I wonder if you can still get thermal paper for a silent 700?
Squirrel!
My oldest piece of gear used to be an LGP-30 vacuum tube computer from about 1959. I eventually gave it away because I didn't have the room for it, and never actually got it completely working (they were notorious for scratches on the drum by the heads if you turned it on too soon after you turned it off). Now, my oldest is a 1976 IMSAI w/floppy that I soldered together myself (and is still working, though finicky), and an IBM 5110 BASIC/APL. Will eBay the IMSAI one of these days when I get around to it. I also have several Atari 400s, 800s & Amigas, and an old Mac or two.
I'd just about kill for an original IBM 2741 terminal w/APL keyboard though.
Slightly tattered but still working Sinclair ZX80 from 1981. No tapes with programs for it and I can't remember how to program it any more - but it still works!!
I still have my Netronics Elf II computer - the first one I owned. RCA 1802 processor, Hex keypad, 2 7-digit LED display!
I no longer have the OSI C2P that was my second computer, or the thermal printer/terminal with APL keyboard and integral 300 baud acoustic modem I used throughout college. I even had a beautiful ADM3A terminal for while.
-a.e.mossberg
My cellphone is 10 years old
I am assuming that it's a 'regular' modem answering the call on the other side - could somebidy explain to me how the two can handshake and sync, then? I always thought that the handshake/syncing part would at least require a bit of 'intelligence' from the modems involved?
I stopped using it, only recently. It jams too often. But, for a $25 cartridge, I was able to print for years. I could probably fix the jamming, but it's probably not worth it.
I once read that hp considered their HPLJ IIs and IIIs to be big mistakes, because they lasted too long.
And it still works! This 4th generation iPod has black and white screen that can't even show pictures.
And it's strange. When it starts to play songs, it makes a little vibration-noise like there's a motor going inside of it.
Still, it's amazing - you can play music on it. My Dad showed me that it had songs called "Disco" on it. There are songs from some group called the Begees - really weird stuff that is from a history book.
I think the songs may be even older than the 4th generation iPod. Hard to believe that the iTouch came from something as clunky as this.
I also like the idea of using that old hardware, or at least, starting on using something where you can easily prod at the "guts" of the device. It might be just as easy to whack some version of Linux or BSD on an old PC. But I think it's useful to get them exposed to the idea that there is more than one way to do things. An old Mac, an old Commodore, Linux, a Dos box... maybe even Windows.
The biggest asset a kid has is lots of time and a clean slate (they don't come pre-addicted to windows). The biggest danger is that they will get sucked into something very addictive and never be able to addict themselves to something that will earn themselves a living. I think it would be to their advantage to feel most at home with the Unix paradigm - I think feeling comfortable with vim, scripting, bash etc. will be the most useful computing tools they could learn. You can make them feel at home with powerful tools without them resenting you for making them endure a steeper learning curve. When they finally encounter the easy to learn but weak alternatives (e.g. notepad.exe), they will wonder why anyone uses such junk and thank you for giving them such advantages. They will also learn that free is just as often better than "paid for", however, it's harder to find (which isn't a disadvantage if you are smart enough to do your research.
I've thought about teaching them Dvorak, but doubt the benefits (RSI reduction, slight increase in speed) outweigh the costs (e.g. having to use other people's computers and experiencing difficulty, or even if you are coding for QWERTY users, understanding what a convenient shortcut key is).
Another thing of benefit would be to encourage them to join some sort of FOSS project and progress through the ranks of bug tester, patch submitter and eventually developer. Maybe a game project of some description.
But I agree with you, I also want to also teach them not to be scared of interacting with the actual hardware when necessary. A lot of these things (including the actual electronics) aren't intrinsically hard, they just require some specialized knowledge.
The key I think is to figure out what they might or are interested in, and use that to your advantage - it gives them a reason to learn. At the end of the day, you want them to be as capable as possible, for as little cost and time as possible, teaching them how to teach themselves... while not getting caught in the trap of heading down paths that give other entities income streams at your expense - e.g. really easy to use stuff that is not powerful and costs money (or has to be stolen), or convincingly marketed stuff that is no better than the free alternative. I also would prefer for them to get addicted to something that will provide them an income stream without getting addicted to things that will only eat their time or cost them money. Games have some use (e.g. RTS games have taught me to pit strength against weakness, and adapt to your problem), but I don't want to create a WoW addict for example.
If I have seen further it is by stealing the Intellectual Property of giants.
I remember my first 300 baud modem. Back then 300 was screaming fast! You could actually see the letters appear on your screen! Having to call your friends and agree on what baud rate, what parity, how many data bits, how many stop bits, and reminding them to put their modem on "answer" and remind their family not to pick up the phone, ah, what fun. I remember calling into sites at work and getting horrible transfer rates, and being pissed that I had to get in my truck and drive 4 hours to the middle of bum hole Kentucky to install an upgrade because you couldn't connect by modem. Fun times. Back then "wireless" meant the modem you were calling was not on an actual phone line but connected to a radio receiver on one or more repeaters from an actual phone line. The lag time was incredible! Back then the internet was called CompuServe or a local BBS. Love those 80's :)
I have a system down in the basement that is running a few old SCSI drives that date back to the early '90s. (Cannibalized from StorageWorks bricks.) The darned things have been running continuously for well over a decade.
The keyboard that I'm using to type this was made in March 1993. The KVM in the basement has one made in 10/92. (Yes, they're both Modem Ms.) I have an old ALR/386 with an ATA VGAWonder graphics card and the original NEC Multisync monitor that I bought back in the late '80s that I use (very occasionally) for an ancient DOS game. The oldest modem I have that I know still works is a Viva 2400 baud. I guess I could use it in case of an emergency though I have other, much faster modems I'd probably use if the need ever arose.
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
I have an old Dell server running SIMH emulating the HP2000 Time Shared Access operating system I learned in junior high school. I used to play text-based blackjack for hours after school, printing out on roll after roll of paper.
A former Navy communications specialist and teletype repairman gave me a model ASR35 Teletype that I hooked up to the SIMH software and server.
Someone on the SIMH newsgroup was the person who scrapped our school system's HP2000 computer in the early eighties. He had a backup tape image and sent it to me, and I found programs written by a friend of my brother's in the main program library.
I can run the same computer system in my house that I dreamed of having as a kid. Totally useless, but totally fun.
Ask Me About... The 80's!
I was around during the time of 300 baud modems. Let me explain just how slow they were....
300 baud = 300 bps (yes, baud sometimes != bps but in this case it does)
300 bps = 30 bytes/second. 10 bits per byte (1 start bit + 8 data bits + 1 stop bit)
Average sized song from iTunes is about 5MB
5MB = 5,242,880 bytes
Do the math and it works out to about 2 days to transfer one average sized song from iTunes. I think I'll stick with today's technology thank you.
Our main TV is a 26" Philips KTV660 dating from late 1979, the TV repair man says that it is very overdesigned. I also have an HP-41C programmable calcutor with several kilobytes of RAM which I bought in 1981, and a Casio FX-3200 slim-line calculator from 1980. The calculators all work, but I very rarely use them.
As a practicing flintknapper, I can tell you a cut from a stone flake, conchoidally fractured of course, hurts more appreciably than a steel razor shaving cut, unless the steel is first passed through A LIME into your little finger.
Which came first: the clovis point or the Lime?
ob1
I still have the slide rule that I received in about 1959 in junior high. It's a good companion for the monochrome vacuum tube TV and the mid-50's military radar transponder. Honestly though I have to keep this stuff out of my wife's way in order to avoid unwanted scrutiny of my vacuum tube collection and the books about designing circuits with vacuum tubes, and the use of analog computers to solve engineering problems.
I've got a couple of TRS-80 Model I Level II's in the basement. Its been awhile but they still work... Hey, 16K of RAM, who would ever need more? Floppy drives? We don't need no stinking floppy drives, we have cassette tape!
I used to have some old CP/M machines that were being thrown out at work but I gave those away when I moved from Virginia to Germany in 93.
While I can probably dig up some stuff that's older (audio equipment comes to mind), one thing I use regularly is my HP41 calculator that I bought around 1980 (it's sitting to side of my keyboard right now) ... love that RPN notation for solving problems on the fly. Doesn't have graphics (why do you need graphics?), doesn't plug into a computer (okay, that one might be nice for program storage), runs a year or more on four "N" batteries, and nobody wants to borrow it ("...where's the equals key?").
I'd buy a second one for when this one bites the dust, but they are considered "collectible", and would cost about as much today as it did thirty years ago!
I'm using a power cable from 1984.
TRS-80 based, MS Basic *is* the operating system, essentially, its how you operate it. Runs on double A's
I've got a Heathkit H19 dumb terminal on my desk that's hooked up to my MacMini via serial-to-USB converter.
I don't do a lot of "work" with it but I wrote a Ruby script for it to talk to iTunes via AppleScript and grab the album art then pass that through ImageMagick to bump the contrast then convert it to ASCII text using jp2a.
You can see some pictures: http://www.flickr.com/photos/drewish/tags/h19/
Or checkout the Ruby script: http://github.com/drewish/textFlow/tree/master
Did he play Global Thermonuclear War, or just a nice game of chess?
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
A bunch of SPARC gear, SPARCStation2, IPC, IPX, etc, that all worked fine but was so slow that it was no longer relevant or capable.
All from the early 1990s.
Then there's the ZIP/JAZ drives that still spin... the modems are still packed away too...
Actually they -current- engineers already did. Else it wouldn't work today.
Somewhere in a box, I have an old TRS-80 Model 1 system from around 1980. Been years, but it worked last time I tried it. Can't find the cassette recorder for storing programs though... But I do have the 300-baud modem with it.
My grandfather-in-law's slide rule is considerably older and still multiplies. My Magnavox tube radio and my Dad's Kodak Medalist camera using 620 film (which is 120 film on a fatter spool) are probably about the same. Assuming I don't have it, a museum astrolabe is far older yet functional, as is my answer to today's poll (the screw).
Analog gear: I have an Ediphone from early 1900s, like 1907 I think.
Digital gear: a Kim-1 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KIM-1 from around 1977.
Both still work just fine.
I have old (1920s) radios, old cars (1929, 1967, etc.), a 1983 5 MB hard disk, a 1968 modem (never tried it) ...
My PDP 11/23 still runs, both RT-11 and Fuzzball and if I fire it up with the Fujitsu Eagle with 150 pounds worth of 474 MB hard disk glory, it heats the room in the winter.
I think a Fuzzball with a GPS time source would be anachronistic, in more ways than one.
I have 4 TRS-80 model I's (my first computer), but my heart is set on eventually interfacing modern storage to the DECSYSTEM-20 in my garage. Alas, it's only a KS, but they're hard to find.
I haven't lit up the TI 99/4A in quite a while, and I really should put the boards into the 4 microVAX chassis I have waiting to be assembled.
Emulators just aren't the same.
I happen to live next door to Stonehenge!!
- IBM Model M keyboard
Part No. 139401
ID No. 167088
Date 18 AUG 89
Plt No. J1
(will be buried with me)
-Atart 1024ST (still makes music)
- Tandy CoCo (Motorola 6809) (music)
-HP Vectra
96MB EDO RAM
Dos 6.2/WFW 3.11 w/32-bit libraries and Trumpet Winsock
(DOS games in RAM disk)
*can also boot OS/2 and GemDOS for amusement
-Intel BX440 mainboard in server full tower case with ATI Rage video
Palm Vx (2) (using ORB monitoring software as displays)
Casio BZX-20 Watch (occasionally forgets itself and thinks its 1995 but looks bitchin' and can communicate via IR with PC)
Sure you can buy a cheap crappy one, but it will break quickly and you have to buy another and another and so on. Depending on the item, that policy can quickly get more expensive than buying a good one in the first place. It's a con to make you spend more. It's actually in a company's interest to make something crappy that breaks, but make you think it's good so you buy another when it does. What I think I've noticed is a company making a good product, then cashing in on the brand name they have built up. This of course compromises the brand name in the long run, but when it does, repeat! I think there should be a stated life span for the item, that if enough items don't make, the company gets into trouble with regulators, that means we can compared on life span and price. Other measures of quality are more subjective....
The corkscrew my grandfather brought home from the railways over 60 years ago. I can see it becoming obsolete sometime this century :(
-- Foolproof systems do not take into account the ingenuity of fools.
I have a 5.25" Floppy in storage with a copy of DOS1.1 on it.
Conservation of angular momentum makes the world go round.
Well, to play the game fairly, the oldest piece of equipment that I still own today, and that still works, is a Kenwood TS-930 HF Transceiver. It was built in the 80's some time, but I am not sure exactly when. I have made MAJOR repairs to it over the years since they were so crappily made.
The oldest computer I have that still works is probably my Athlon 2600+ based machine that I use with Ubuntu Studio to do recording.
I have owned computers as far back as the TRS-80 Model I, and I still use an HP48GX calculator that I got about 10 years ago. I hope and pray it will never break.
I have a screwdriver that was manufactured in the mid nineteenth century that still works just fine.
"The question I have, is what is the oldest working piece of equipment fellow Slashdotters have out there?"
I doubt a pair of (currently in-use in my home theater) ~40-year old Pioneer 16ohm bookshelf speakers count, or is very impressive in comparison, but they sound awesome.
I took my 22 year old Leading Edge Model D [complete with 640k RAM and huge 40 Mb HD] to the recyclers yesterday.
My first real computer, purchased with my own money.
LEWP was a decent word processor.
RIP.
I have an Acoustic Research AR-1 speaker that is over 50 years old and working like a top as a subwoofer. :) One of the things I like about analog audio is the shear durability of the products compared to anything digital. The golden age of audio was the 70s and 70s Sansui, Pioneer, and Marantz amps and receivers are VERY in demand, name ANY digital product that was better 30+ years ago? I do like advancements in processor speed HD capacity etc, and filling up landfills with working 6 year old computers? Not so much...
Tired of all the isms, don't exploit people as an employer, or a government, mmmmK?
I have a Teletype 15 with documentation dating back to 1939. It was installed at Peterson AFB and transferred to Cheyenne Mountain after the war.
Works great! Needed a little oil, but it was designed to withstand an atomic war...
I still use an ancient 5,25 floppy drive for small files because I don't trust usb flash drives anymore. I once detected very suspicious net activity every time I plugged in a Kingston module, God only know whatever microcode they have running on the chips that covertly insists on calling home.
US-UK-Israel: The real Axis of Evil
If anyone has any Model M's they hate and want to get rid of, I'll pay shipping. :-)
I have 4 at the moment, but spares and gifts are always useful...
The oldest machine that I work on is a QBUS Digital RT Vax 1000. It has a whopping 80 MB MFM hard drive that is about 3x as big as a 5.25" hard drive. The machine dates back to the early 80's. Amazingly enough the machines still run pretty well. Once you get them booted they'll run for years. The weakest point of them is the hard drive. It's not uncommon to have a 20 - 30% failure rate on drives fresh back from repair.
"recieved" - "i before e, except after c".
I still have a working PCjr, Commodore 64, and also a Commodore 128. I got rid of my HP PA-RISC 712 pizza box, my Sun lunchboxes and pizza boxes, and my IBM RISC 7012. In college I sold my blazing fast AMD 386SX40 with 40MB HD for cash money (which I ran Linux 0.99pl14 on), when I found an old DEC VT102 terminal - I used it to dial up the modem pool with my Ven-Tel 1200 bps modem and access the DEC EP/IX system at school. ATDT, baby. The Intertubes now are not what I thought they would become back then.
I own a warehouse full of old computers, all versions of TRS80's, Apple's, Amiga's, Zenith kits, NeXt, Heathkit's, and many more. They all work and have 8" drives, old external floppies for TRS80's as well as 5 Meg hard drives. Software for all the systems. All versions of DOS and Windows (version 1 up), old versions of many old software packages (especially versions 1). Want to create a computer museum someday (especially if I can find someone who would like to help) I live in NC.
Without too much effort, I've been able to surf the web with my 1979 Heathkit H89.
Proverbs 21:19
I restore early systems as a hobby and have the following in bootable, working condition:
An 1976 IMSAI 8080 with 64K RAM, dual 8 inch floppies, and 5.25 and 3.5 drives, equipped with a Centronics printer and a ASR33 Teletype with paper tape reader.
A 1977 Genrad Futuredata firmware development system with dual 8 inch floppies and EPROM burner
A 1974-era duplicate of Jonathan Titus's Mark-8, a 16K 8008-based system as shown in July 1974 Radio Electronics
Recently sold my working 1975/76 Altair 8800 with dual fixed-format 8 inch floppies, 64K RAM, Centronics printer, ASR33 Teletype with paper tape reader. All original MITS boards. Would boot Bill Gates original BASIC, as well as Altair DOS and CP/M 2.2. Complete with original doc in MITS binders.
A 1977 TRS-80 Model I 16K
A good number of misc S-100 boards for IMSAI and Altair
80's stuff:
Original 128K Macintosh with dual 3.5 drives - boots and runs
Cromemco SBC with 3K Basic in ROM
Masscomp 68010 RT Unix - boots and runs
A bunch of old accoustic modems...
I think the oldest crap I have is a still in use HP LaserJet IIId purchased around the time when I was born, and an early 80's HP Pen Plotter that also still works.
blazing along at a smoking 16MHz :-P
10 Megabyte hard disk, 256 Megs of RAM
It still works. I considered gutting it and using tat case to make a portable gaming rig, but I can't quite bring myself to do it.
And somewhere around here, I have my original SoundBlaster 8-bit - I don't know if it works, because I can't find and ISA slot to test.
I still have the Osbourne 1 luggable running CP/M. It still works if I could find a working 5 1/4" floppy that still worked. 28 years.
There may be no "I" in team, but there's also no "F" in way.
"But I'm not an accused terrorist!"
What an ignorant, ignorant response. More appropriate would have been,
"But I'm not a self-acknowledged terrorist who claims to have information about future terrorist attacks on the US!"
If I'm not mistaken, three terrorists were waterboarded. THREE. It's not like we were waterboarding them just for the hell of it.
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
Still got an Atari Pong game that our family got for christmas 1975, and a ti57 and a ti59 calculator from around 1977. And I had a pdp-11/23 cirka 1979 in my dorm room a decade ago. And I generally don't even like old stuff. Go figure.
I also have my 1986 Prospeed 286. I also found on my current hard drive a Wordstar file from May 1986 which I was able to successfully open with Lotus WordPro.
This was always one of the things that came to haunt me for using an (3.0 based) Amiga for so long - no TCP/IP stack built in...
I've got a Curta calculator (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curta) that's about the same vintage (1964, but earlier models date from 1948) that still works. Does that count?
Phil McKerracher
Combination hammer, axe, prybar. Used to be my grandfather's. Stamped "Made in Texas 1901".
There are more stampings, but I can't make them out.
I also have his old rail pike, used to manually bend rail track sections into place(remember when Arnold got staked to the deck in T2?), but I have no idea how old it is.
Old computer hardware?
AMD 386dx40 mobo with only ISA slots, plenty of peripherals including an ethernet card with cat-5 and coax connections, and a true VGA-only card. Runs Slackware in 16MB SDRAM and 100MB disk drive. Makes a great X server.
DEC Alpha 233MHz Noname mobo that still works like a charm. Runs old Red Hat.
I'm sure my dad still has a trx80 somewhere...ooh I forgot in the garage he has an old fashioned Teletype with paper tape punch/reader on the side. An authentic 110 baud machine.
Good judgement comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgement.
- W. Wriston, former Citibank CEO
Former work: German Navy Enigma machine. [At home] WW II AR88 receiver / contemporary Morse key / 1927 BBC radio. Working laptop - 386SX/16 from ??1992??
I've got a Hammarlund HQ-129X from 1946 that still receives just fine and sounds great as does my 1952 Collins 75A-2. On the transmitting side, my original Heathkit DX-40 that I built in 1957 still gets fired up occasionally and does the same job it did back then.
"Do the Right Thing. It will gratify some people and astound the rest." - Mark Twain
I still use an old Compaq Contura Laptop(150MB HD 4MB RAM) from about early-mid 90s? It has Windows 3.1 and it works amazingly well still.
I've got some old Sun stuff around that still runs - 3 or 4 SPARCstation 1 boxes (1989), an Enterprise Server 250 (mid-90s), Ultra 60/Creator 3D (?). They all work, to some degree but some make better furniture than workstations right now.
For example, the Ultra 60 is covered with a tablecloth and is a side-table next to my couch. The tower of SPARCstation1 systems is similarly decorated and holds up a lamp. The E250 was mostly used as a heater in old apartments.
My dad had an old tandy that we just sold at auction a couple years ago. I believe our first IBM Compatible 468's original 125mb hard drive is still in a box of stuff in my mom's basement somewhere. I know there's a 14.4k modem somewhere in that box too.
You're nothing; like me.
I have a Model 15 Teletype, a 1930 design built in 1944, not only working, but printing RSS news feeds. The Reuters RSS feed gives me a nice news report. Each time Reuters posts a new story, the Teletype motor turns on, the big machine prints the story, and it shuts down again.
I also set it up so that I can send text messages from the Teletype keyboard. All upper case, of course.
These machines are incredibly overdesigned, which is why they still work after 65 years. Unless they've been physically damaged, it's not that hard to get one running again. Mine just required thorough cleaning and oiling (over 500 oiling points), a new ribbon, and a roll of paper. I had to build a level-converting interface for the thing; it needs a 60mA current loop with 120VDC powering it. So I designed a small PC board for that.
A standard PC serial port will talk to it, at 45.45 baud, 5 bits, 1.5 stop bits, no parity. Which Windows will happily do. (Linux won't; the Linux scheme for selecting baud rates uses a fixed list of baud rates left over from the PDP-11 era. There are driver-level hacks to get around this, but the stock serial driver won't do it.) I wrote a Python program to handle the Teletype's Baudot issues and machine control, and to poll RSS feeds, printing each new story exactly once. It also does NOAA weather reports.
I've tried various RSS feeds. Reuters has the cleanest ones for this purpose. Each story comes with a heading and a brief, coherent summary. Most of the other RSS news feeds either just have the headlines, or truncate each story arbitrarily, ending it with "...". Reuters adds about one new story per hour, on average. It just printed "OBAMA TO NAME WHITE HOUSE CYBERSECURITY CZAR". (This is an upper-case-only machine, remember.)
Once I build a transparent case for the machine, I'm going to loan it to the Exploratorium or the Computer Museum. It will be set up to print news, and maybe incoming text messages so kids can text to it.
Suggest some good RSS feeds for demo purposes. Reuters has about one story per hour. A feed that produces something every 5-10 minutes would be useful.
I've got a couple things. My grandfather was a radioman in WWII and he somehow came upon two German field radios. I think they're the same as the one in this auction.
I've got an old Pong console (ie, of the gaming variety) that my dad got for his 15th birthday - that'd have been in 1974. It wasn't an official Pong console, which didn't come out until the following year, but a knock-off.
I've got (at my parents' house) a massive TI calculator with a solar panel on it. Probably one of the originals, don't remember the brand. That's got to be at least 35 years old, and it's got all the functionality of those novelty "wallet calculators" that companies will sometimes use as business cards.
I've also got a fair collection of old IBM hardware. First on the list is an IBM Personal Portable Computer (IBM Portable PC 5155), circa 1984. It still works, to the exception of one of the two floppy drives, as far as I know (I've not had a 5.25" floppy for over a decade.) It's got an old (can't even remember the interface) 10Mb hard drive which also still works. I've thought of getting Linux to run on there several times, just for S&G, but never got around to it due to lacking a proper interface card or an easy way to get it on there.
And then there's the pile of a dozen or so IBM Model M keyboards, dating from 1980 through 1992. Yes, 1980. Maybe it wasn't technically a model M (according to wiki, the Model M came out in 1984), but the ones I've got from 1980 and 1981 are identical and part compatible, as near as I can tell, with the post-1984 "Model M" keyboards which are marked as such on the back.
I also have my original NES, which was mid-1980s. Hardly old, but there you have it.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
I don't think your floppy will demodulate enough to surf the web ...
--- I am known for the ones who want to find me on the net. Is that a privacy risk or a privilege? One might wonder..
I'm from 1976, I used to be able to whistle back to modems to let them either connect or disconnect.
Of'course, I couldn't whistle fast enough to get a steady 1200 baud connection, ...
but it sure helps when you needed to reach the other end running a BBS having troubles
Maybe an idea for Slashdot to ask their users to post photo's of this post, since all that material is connected to the core of all of us. My worst mistake of most of my material to render it inoperative is having it in the basement. I've got dozens of old hardware and software like games (Sierra, Lucasart, Origin, ...) which are probably ready to throw in the dump... It's a shame a basement can ruin a lot like that, even when treated for waterproblems. I've managed to salvage a lot by storing a lot of oldies at my mom. Maybe it'll get hooked up once I'll get to it...
If electricity still exists that time .. not being bitter or something.
--- I am known for the ones who want to find me on the net. Is that a privacy risk or a privilege? One might wonder..