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High Tech Junk
Keepiru writes "Where do old computers go? No one knows for sure, but I suspect half of them are hiding in the closets of slashdot users. " Interesting
problem. Comments that many people might buy new (and throw away
their old) computers come Y2k bugs, and talks about the PCs 18
month life span. Course those 18 month old boxes are still
bitchin' linux desktops, but they just don't have the same sparkle
as that dual xeon box either.
Haven't you heard? Windows 2000 has been delayed due to Y2K problems, and won't ship until the first quarter of 1901? :-)
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Wind and temp at my house
Hey, Windows users, there is no such thing as "forward" slash, there is only slash and backslash.
Not to sound like a flame, but: I set up a complete router in one evening, ipmasq, ipchains, dhcp, web (yeah, I worked real hard to set that up), dns, sendmail, and pop (again, real hard). My method of attack was to move to the /usr/doc/HOWTO directory and read all of the information about what I wanted to do. Then, I followed the instructions, occasionally reading some man pages. It was incredibly easy (and cool). I haven't set up port forwarding, but I doubt that it is very difficult. Probably just a matter of R-ingTFM.
. when in danger or in doubt, run in circles scream and shout --Robert Heinlein
I had an IBM PCJunior back when I was a young pup. (Learned DOS at the ripe old age of six.) Unfortunately the thing inexplicably up and died one day and was reduced to basement storage. A flood destroyed the little CGA monitor that came with it. So I hung the little board up in my room and used the little case to store books/paper/notebooks in.
I've got several other beasts that died in other ways (and became wall art) and have some stray parts hanging around, with which I'm building a 486-DX2/66 with 8MB RAM, and a 50MB hard disk. This might become my parents' machine for surfing the web and doing a small amount of word processing.
I loathe Windows, and I'm a little scared of unleashing my parents on Linux, but am also very short on cash. Does anyone have any suggestions for a good drool-proof OS?
Can't sleep, the clowns will eat me...
a lot of places like the goodwill will take your old machines and give you a tax credit for it (if you use something other than the 1040ez for tax purposes. or you could contact me. i take everyone's old machines, salvage what i can and toss the old rusted hulks that remain. because of this i currently have five ancient machines, four of which run linux (not counting my k6/2 333 (the fifth is a dedicated music composition machine)); and hopefully several more to be built.
or you could take around 300 386s and make a beowulf cluster that would run about as fast as a p5 200 8^).
Yes! This is a great use for old computers. My old laptop is a Thinkpad 486/33 with 12 megs ram. It's got Redhat 4.0 installed on it and Samba, and nothing else. It runs all the time, uses less power than an equivalent desktop computer, and it fits right underneath my printer in the paper rack.
That little beast has absolutely no trouble at all printing graphics files that are megabytes huge, and it's even doing a magical conversion from postscript to HPII printer language. For a while it was even a puny distributed.net client! 45,000 keys a second isn't really worth it though.
From the stellar print server performance of that machine I have NO DOUBT AT ALL that even an old 386/20 computer would perform just as well as a print server. Just for laughs give it a try. I bet you'll find that that old slow box and Linux/Samba will be more than up to the job.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
Uh....
if it's all in asm you can run DEBUG.EXE to disassemble it.
Opcode-to-instruction translations are literal. It's the instruction-to-C (or whatever) that poses a problem, because different optimizing algorithms and compilers might make the same high-level construct into different assembly-level instructions.
Three Step Plan:
1. Take over the world.
2. Get a lot of cookies.
3. Eat the cookies.
I have a number of old machines in my collection, and they all do something useful on the home lan. My main machines are my Sun Ultra 30 and my powerbook G3, but I have an old NeXT cube which acts as a mailserver, a NeXTstation colour turbo wfor a printserver & backup fileserver, an old 486/66 as a router, and an sgi indy for a webserver.
There's 4 or 5 other machines sitting around, but those are the main ones...
What the UofM Engineering Department did is a great example of where old hardware goes, and how it's still useful.
I have a TI-85 (and a TI-92, but that's besides the point.). Much better than the '82. I still remember spending half my time in 8th grade science class coding in TI-Basic. :) I wrote a slot machine game, and super-enhanced Arkanoid. Remember that arkanoid-type game that everyone had (it was from TI, I think)? By the time I was done with it, it had like 5-10 new levels and 3 different styles of blocks! :) I think I may have also optimized it for speed (not playing speed, program speed).
:)
After 8th grade, I got a TI-Graph Link and discovered games on the Internet that were written in assembler.
Here's what a friend of mine did as a router with a 486
Pork is not a verb
I have one Sun 3/50 with mouse, keyboard, hard drives, tape drives, SCSI cables, and manuals if anyone wants a boat anchor. As far as I know it works. It even has a whopping 4MB of RAM and integrated 10Mbps Ethernet and reportedly there is a port of Linux to it. If nothing else, it has some cool LEDs on it.
I dunno, I just can't bring myself to toss a computer into the trash... I wonder if it is recyclable?
This post is encrypted twice with ROT-13. Documenting or attempting to crack this encryption is illegal.
That's from a technical point of view, micros~1 licenses cost probably more than the computer itself, but there you go...
Why I am mentioning DOS? :-) ;) but think about it! I'm sure if I tried the same using IDL or matlab (sorry, I meant PDL and octave) I'd get worse results on my PII-400...
DOS+DJGPP was the platform I started to do image processing on. A 486DX2-66 with 8Mb RAM... That was in 95. Actually, I used TC too, but extended/expanded memory scheme was just not for me
So how much time do you think it takes to do adaptive equalisation on a 640x640 image, using a DX2? I'd say about 15s...
Okay, you need to do a bit of thinking, be familiar with hand optimisation and the like (loop unrolling and early loop breaking anyone?
The key is, it takes much more than a computer degree to do real optimisation by hand, it takes time... and who's willing to take the time?
What about Linux? (this is /. after all) :-) (I'm switching to a Pentium 133 - 16Mb RAM)
Well, Linux router allows you to do routing stuff all on one floppy. It works great on a 486, eventhough it may be a little slow a computer to do caching DNS and masquerading at the same time
So there you go, old computers are great if you can find some use for them... did I mention I love to program Z80 assembly on my Amstrad CPC6128? ;-)
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"Hasta la victoria siempre!" El Comandante
It's easy to run Windows 1.0 even on a modern computer. Just remember to use setver, because older versions of Windows need to think they're using MS-DOS 3.20 or so.
Try something like this:
SETVER WIN100.BIN 3.20
It runs on my machine under DOSEmu, and it'll also run under a DOS box in Windows. Incidentally, the file format for write was essentially the same back then...
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
I have an old 486, what can I do with it thou?
Only 'flamers' flame!
This is something I've been thinking about for quite a while now: Artistic computers. Yesterday's article about plexiglas cases was pretty nifty, but I had been thinking about cases made out of other stuff. Wood, for instance. And what about a furry router? Or a mail server with spikes sticking out of it? These could all be great machines, except for a minor detail: I'm not really willing to spend a zillion dollars trying to build such machines. Sure, 50 bucks, that I'll spend. But not, say, $3000 for PIII based components or $1500 for AMD based. (I love Amd)
I've been lurking about on ebay and I've found that 386 and 486 machines could easily be built for less than $100. Unfortunately, I'm moving soon and won't be able to bid on any of *those* particular machines/processors. But, I still think this could potentially make a great business, of sorts. Art-deco machines which are hooked to monitors which display things which are themed to the look of the machine. A wooden box running Enlightenment with a 'wooden' theme. A box which is covered in fur running some sort of Furby theme. Or, a box made of brushed-looking metal which has a sort of 'industrial' theme.
Further, Imagine the amazing stuff you could do with $1000, some time, and Beowulf or HA!? A high-availability cluster of 10 486s serving static web pages may sound vaguely lame... Until you consider that they could probably handle 25,000,000 pageviews a month. That's a whole lotta pages.
But, before I can implement any of these ideas, I need the machines. If any of you need to ditch old machines and want to put them to being an artistic expression using Beowulf/HA/Linux, drop me a line.
vegas@my.bomis.com, wales001@my.bomis.com
--Johnny Wales
Gathering dust in the closet. The orange Gas Discharge display has some dark lines in it, and it can only run DOS anyway, so forget it.
I installed Slackware on it; I have used it for text editing on trips but it has power-on problems, currently sitting in the trunk of my car.
Cannibalized for parts (I am using it's 3.5" floppy on my current main machine).
Given to my 7 yr. old son to play games on in it's retirement.
This used to be my main machine. I had upgraded it's original 486 motherboard to the Cirix one. Though it is currently gathering dust (and despite it's whiny hard disk drive) I will probably rework it into a network services machine (printer, modem, internal testbed web server that's guaranteed to be up even when I'm in Windows playing some game.
All that plus the 3 main machines in use in the house: my current Debian 2.1 Linux machine, my wife's WinBlows box and a more modern laptop for mobile web access. How many is that in all? 8! Geez, I had no idea that they were so many. And except for a couple of really old ones, they either have actual or planned uses.
OK, that's enough blathering, gotta get back to work!
--
An esoteric scratched itch:
Homeworld Map Maker Tool
I must be getting behind or something.
All I have is a sun3/90, Mac IIci, MacSE/30, Quadra650 that are still operational. Of course, I also have an old Wang and an IBM 7171. They're not functional, but once you gut 'em they make good bookshelves. (The wang's about 3'x2'x2' [HxWxD], the IBM's about 3.5'x2.5'x2.5')
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
Hehe, you just exactly described my Win95 box. What's it for? Word Processing and the like, and games. And I don't plan on upgrading because I still get decent framerates on games like Driver and Quake 3.
As for my Linux box (P120, 40 MB RAM), I don't ever plan on upgrading it. It's more than enough to learn to code.
Apparantly the m68k port of linux works on MacIIsi's.
-- open source? sounds like the real book --
these things are great for xterminals. i have one setup with a 170 meg hd. its got an old trident vesa card in it -- runs all its apps off my main box. basically its just slackware with the base packages and xwindows installed. of course mine has got one of those amd 486 chips and is o/c to 150 mhz (3x50mhz) with 40 megs of ram (saved my old simms), so maybe thats why it works well for me.
the thing looks like shit -- its sitting in one of those classic PC/XT 150 watt power supply boxes.
havent tried it with anything slower.
I wouldnt go that far. Although I started on an Old ATARI PC that only ran basic, Learned in order (schools choice, not mine) basic, pascal, VB, C++, ASM, then C. I currently work in a Unix/linux/Pc environment and I've learned to work my way around a command line pretty well. It just depends on the motivation of the person. If they want to learn how to use a command line after using windows, the only thing stopping them is themselves.
In any case, Linux does a really great job with scheduling. Processor power is something that is useful for raytracing, rendering, and gaming, but a fairly recent processor (low-end pentium) can handle even several processor-intensive applications (such as MATLAB) amazingly well. The best upgrade for your linux box is more RAM in most cases, I'd say. That's where most of my slowness comes from: swapping, especially in X, when you can see (And hear) some window being sucked off the disk...
-- Erich
Slashdot reader since 1997
I could pick up several cases from friends, but none of them have power supplies. See, all of my friends are like me -- they don't replace their case until the power supply dies. I know one guy who's running a K6 in an original AT case. He had to replace the power supply once, but that's about it.
Rob
- Rob Cottrell
How much space do you need, and how much do you want to pay?
Computer Surplus outlet has 200 meg hd's for $19, 3-400 for $29 and up.
I get lots of stuff from them, and someday I'll even get a chance to put it together.
George
Yeah, that's what I'm doing now. The reason I need console access is that I'm spoiled by the SPARC's and the VAXen.
dang, I meant http://www.computersurplusoutlet.com
George
I'm running a 150 (clocked to 180) With 96MB RAM that used to be a p75, and it runs great. My Laptop is a 266MMX with 64MB RAM, and I HARDLY consider it obsolete.
-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon?
-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon? :P)
(If you can't figure out how to E-Mail me, Don't.
Argl, mistyped my password. Posting again as I don't like to be anonymous...
:)
;)
Mhh, I know a good place: @my_home
1 Dual CPU SS20, 256MB
1 Dual CPU SS10, 128MB
1 SS2, 96MB
1 IPX
1 SparcServer 330
1 PPro 233
1 P5-75
1 AMD486DX4-150
2 i486DX2-66
1 IBM Thinkpad 755C
1 Toshiba Portégé 3010CT
2 NeXT TurboColor
1 Atari MegaST4
1 Apple Lisa with disk and printer
and some more in my cellar
And, of course they are nearly all running a
UN*X system (Linux, NetBSD, SunOS, NeXTStep). Love them all, use them all... 30 degrees celsius in my
server room rulezz
I traded it for a Primax 386 laptop with a broken HD, 4 megs ram, mono VGA screen.
Who was ripped off in the trade?
And why didn't we donate all of this to a school somewhere? (because they wouldn't take it)
TheGeek
http://www.geekrights.org
TheGeek
http://www.geekrights.org
Kill the monkey
And humanity will have no need for more than five or six mainframe computer systems.
And nobody will ever use more than 640K of RAM.
And we have a final solution to stregnthen the strain.
whatever.
Yeah, but if you want to make it a router for a T1 or cablemodem connection, it needs two ethernet cards. And setting up two ethernet cards in Linux is a bitch.
/etc/rc.d/rc.inet1 and you're laughing.
:-)
How so? Drop the cards in, boot. ifconfig 'em, add some routes, it all works.
Now copy and paste the lines into
I've done it probably a half dozen times now for different people. Hell one of my boxen runs as a firewall/switch just for fun and has 4 3C905s in it! What's YOUR problem?
Linuxconf, blah. Get down and dirty with the config files yourself.
Oh come on, I think he was kidding... At least, I hope he was kidding. If not then, wow, he's really got problems.
The oxen are slow, but the earth is patient... - High Road to China
Agreed. I picked up a 4 port 10/100 ethernet card there for cheap money. Also got myself a complete SPARCstation ELC system with extra ram and an external hard drive for $50.
Well, my network hinges on 486s. My main baby, galadriel, is a 486DX2-80 with 24 megs of RAM (could use a bit more, but hey, no X and she's fine) running a heavily upgraded Slackware 3.2. She routes my subnet, runs dns for about 6 or 8 domains, hosts 3 domains for web and mail, has about 2-4 shells going most of the time. Galadriel had her head removed a while back and replaced with an IBM 3151 green glass terminal, and has been chugging along quite nicely, thank you very much.
Celeborn is the second 486 on the network. He's a PS/2 77 running Debian. He also holds my monitor off my desk. His primary real task is to do backup DNS, but the visible part of his task is as a monitor of the real world (tm). He runs X/Windowmaker at 640x400 as that's all that the IBM 8513 monitor he's got will handle, and a number of little dockapps watch things for me like the weather from the local airport, the time and date here, the time in about 10 other timezones that I care about from time to time, and miscellaneous things like the phases of the moon, etc.
Although she's not in the closet, galadriel might as well be... the dust gets awfully thick down there in the corner. I've recently bought a 19" 3' tall rack to get her off the carpet. I also need to take her down and reboot a few times to find out what's going to happen at new years. I'm not looking forward to it though... her uptime is my pride and joy.
Oh well... it'll have to happen someday soon...
~acheron
Funny you should mention a P75. :-) That's what we use (or is it a P90?) on a 10mbit backbone to UUnet. Handles web/mail/news/ftp with no problems. 128 megs of RAM to keep things off the disk and 160 days of up time to date.
:-)
Now if I could only get one of the people I'm hosting for to use PHP instead of perl cgis I might be able to keep his CGIs from taking 25% CPU when they start up.
There's another P90 sitting across the room from me that does file/print serving for my office. Serves up files for 25 people with Samba, burns CDs... 64M in that one and a 4G RAID1 setup.
I just recently replaced a 486DX4/120 that was doing firewall/NAT for the office. Now it's a Cyrix 6x86-PR120 I think. The old 486 finally started going flaky.
And finally, pokey. That's my 386DX33 (original BIG motherboard, 64k cache, with the cache logic done completely in discretes. It's *FULLY* tricked out with 8 megs of memory (that INCLUDES the PEM-3300 memory card!) and 250M hard drive. It handles my voicemail/firewall/NAT for home.
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"Hasta la victoria siempre!" El Comandante
Why was that moderated UP?
Completely off topic. Who really cares what anyone has sitting at home in the back of their closets?
Come on moderators, use a little sense.
Hehe... I have a working PS/2 Model 25 here. It has a hard drive though...
I think it will be a terminal or something.. I like the nice all-in-one design and the fact that the bloody thing weighs about 40 pounds. Or if I fail at that, maybe a fishbowl...
~Acheron
I've thrown out the following crap in the past 5 yrs:
Trash 80 Model III
Apple IIc
Wang PC (don't ask don't tell)
Wang OIS 50/60
286
If you can't get your crap to actually do WORK then TOSS IT!!!
Ya like you can beowolf the above crap so you get the equivalent of an i386 overclocked to 6 Mhz.
The article is talking about 18 months lifespan for computers. Quite true if you consider the proprietary software and that you consider your computer as a whole. While hanging on Windows I noted that my P166MMX 32M 1.6G S3 TrioV2 2M became "old" in nearly 9 months. If I would keep using it for 9 months more than I would have to stop my work...
However this box still lives. After 20 monthes of using it has my main home desktop, now it turned into a small server with some secondary desktop tasks. And I'm planning to use it for a year more.
hrmm. they use WP 5.1 at my job
...
Bitchslapped? Give Rob a bitchslap from bitchslapped.com.
Apparently, San Bernadino County in California thinks "old" systems are useless. I just came from a surplus auction, I bid on a 4year old IBM mainframe, 3 year old Sparc, 4 HP netservers, 34gb of RAID, 96 P100-P133 systems, several 20+ inch monitors, etc, etc,etc. It's insane what these people throw away...I didn't bid more than $30 on any of it, and I'm most likely to win it all...don't ask me what the hell I'm gonna do with a 600gb IBM storage mainframe, but its there.
er, linuxconf *does* run under a gui in RedHat, called 'control-panel'.
Just as easy to use as any NT interface I've ever tried!
4 486 SX-25's
3 386 DX-33's
2 486 DX2-66's
1 286
And 20 ton dot matrix printer in big box...
And that is just the complete systems, I have a whole bunch of crap in my basement. Even an old NEC monochrome monitor...still works! Dual prong video card (mono/color), 3 2400 external baud modems, and enough power cords to wrap around my house.
"Imagination is the only weapon in the war against reality." -Jules de Gautier
The various Ham Radio clubs in the Washington DC metro area put on similar flea markets, which they call "Hamfests" or "Computerfest/Hamborees". There's usually one every two months or so. They're great fun for kids and adults who act like kids when exposed to cool computer equipment. Interested Slashdot readers may be able to find similar events in their area by looking up their local Ham Radio club's website. I love hamfests.
- Tim
as a linux zealot i must flame you for running win95 on that 486.
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Bitchslapped? Give Rob a bitchslap from bitchslapped.com.
eBay is a good 12 step program for these PCs, after 12 succesful auctions, you should have a new addiction.
Seriously, I sold an IBM AT for $100, quite the bidding war. Oddly enough all of the early IBM machines that I have worked on (XTs, ATs, etc) used AMD chips.
For nostalgic purposes, I'd love to get one, but they're hard to find. Not even sure what I'd do with one, I just want to have it. :-)
D
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The Palms have a 680x0-class CPU running at 16MHz, which makes them more or less similar to, say, a later Mac II, a Classic II, or SE/30. So, no. That old machine isn't ten tims more powerful, unless, say, it's a Pentium or some such.
At work I have 9 Mac Classic IIs stacked on my desk. They're like sculpture. They're soothing to look at, what with that playful smirk the of the floppy drive and that sort of wide-eyed toddler look of the overall design.
The recipient pays for shipping, otherwise no money changes hands. You can also give away literature or Linux CDs there.
--
I don't see why computer recycling isn't more popular. Just because the processor is old - doesn't mean the other electronic parts are bad (unless they've been burnt out by lightning). They may not be able to be used in some of the latest computers, but these parts can be used in other electronic devices (or to repair them). Duh... Just doesn't make sense to me...
My pentium with win95/linux just plain doesnt run most DOS games right. It won't run x-wing, horde, nascar with sound, sim city 2000, and most other DOS only games. there are too many conflicts with the win95 crap. I just run them on my many 486's. That and I prefer to keep as much space free on this comp for my MP3 collection and my graphics work.
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I like your way of thinking.
If I'm too stupid/lazy to get my hardware (which someone paid > $2000 ten years ago), I'll just throw it in a landfill.. Then brag about it!#
God forbit I actually donate it to someone who will put use to it. No, I'm too cool for that. I'll throw it in a landfill and let the environment deal with it. Or people 50 years from now will deal with my ignorance and have to dig it up for scrap parts (you've obviously never heard about what happens in Indian Landfills).
So, now I'm gonna go buy a new P3 600mhz with the money my daddy gave me.
Excuse me while I go throw away some more *old* computers.
...
Bitchslapped? Give Rob a bitchslap from bitchslapped.com.
"But always she's the spectre of uncertainty I first endured, then faded, then embraced..."
But I don't have any spare cases, monitors, hard drives, or CD-ROM drives. I seriously doubt it would be worth the money to build systems around these, so they just sit and collect dust...
An at case is an at case.. surely there is someone you know who is throwing away an even lesser machine whose case you could salvage.
here's a solution: stop reading this crappy site.
slashdot is about as worthless as linux itself. don't let them brainwash you.
the one-piece design of the really old macintoshes meant that they could be reused really well once you took out all the hardware. For example, they reportedly worked very well as a home for fish. There used to be plans for a MacQuarium floating around the internet but i'm not sure where they went. I have also heard reports of people making bongs out of them (if ANYONE out there has pictures of a MacBong, send them to me.. :). The best part about this is, you could still use the mac-- it would just be naked and caseless.
me and a couple friends got a couple of old broken 286s at a school "garage sale" for about a dollar each. We then threw away the cases and cannabalized the rest for various things. This one girl was planning on making earrings out of a chunk of motherboard, and i have an old expansion slot card that i'm going to hang from my rear-view mirror, the way people used to hang dice there, whenever i get around to it. The card has a parrallel port or something on it; i think it was meant to be a joystick attatchment, but the important thing is it looks neat.
Also, i've heard that old RAM DIMMs make good wind chimes.
The point is, even if it won't boot it isn't useless.
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
...rotting himself right now.
It's only logical. He started out rotting grain and now he's rotting.
Good judgement comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgement.
- W. Wriston, former Citibank CEO
I've come into the possession of an Osborne portable from 1981. Its a big beast, and it still works. It has dual 5.25" floppies and a little 4" screen. Do you think it would be worth anything to hold on to?
IBM 5150? That's the one with APL?
I've got a 5100, and a 31 year-old Friden 130 electronic calculator...
-- ----------------------------------------------
Vive le logiciel... Libre!!!
I just finished rewritting an Xmodem program for it (I also disassembled the ROMs). I'll upgrade it to 256K (it's an 8085). I'll then start writing new programs in Small C, use xmodem to d/l the programs to the NEC (~1982) and use it as a controller interface to one of my control systems. Not bad for $5.
I also picked up a Z80 starter kit (~1980) ($5) and I will write an assembly language program to change the LED display and use it as art work.
I have other older computers which still work, just too many to remember how many.
Just because they're old doesn't mean their junk. Thay can be used as the base for controller projects (a prototype system). You don't always need more than 8 bits for small projects. It's a matter of costs vs power. Besides a lot of libraries exist for various jobs. Makes small custom controllers a breeze.
Neil Cherry - Linux Smart Homes For Dummies
Just because the planned obsolescence timer on the chipset has expired, there's still a perfectly good metal case and power supply.
Weird. Seems the only parts I consistently have to take to the trash are the cases and power supplies! They're too big and heavy for it to be economical to ship them to someone who might want them (assuming that person exists). They don't break down into smaller components the way that obsolete and/or broken drives and circuit boards do, and they're not all that aesthetically pleasing. Not like the shiny platters in an HD, or the glistening copper coils of a floppy drive's motor.
There are three gutted 386 cases w/ power supplies sitting out by my trash can right now, and one from a 286. Getting rained on. The drives are now works of art; the boards soon will be (I hope). But there's just not much I can do with a big beige metal box.
Ideas, anyone?
A friend recently gave me an old Apple //e computer with about 1000 (estimated) disks full of every program that I drooled over when I was 12 years old. (including a CP/M card!) It actually was quite fun for about 2 weeks going through a bunch of it, but I finally (and somewhat reluctantly) put it all in the trash. I just couldn't think of a real reason to keep it all.
McFly777
- - -
"What do people mean when they say the computer went down on them?" -Marilyn Pittman
distributed.net is good for a 486. only do seti@home if you _really_ like waiting two months between work units. trust me. i know.
I sure wouldn't want to run W2K without a P3, or a K7 (or at all for that matter...) :)
I'm a gnu world man.
The thing I hate most about old machines isn't
their slowness. It's the clunky cases. I often
feel old machines could be great single purpose
devices (not just network stuff), but I just can't
like the clunky cases.
So what I need is a crash course in how you go
about repackaging old machines so they still work,
but they're smaller. Can anyone point me to something?
A special part of repackaging is interfacing. A honkin' huge monitor just doesn't seem right for a
single purpose device. How about a tinier CRT,
or LED display... know about that?
Tweet, tweet.
Anyone else into making stuff out of old PC parts?
I think I saw Cliff Stoll make a goldfish bowl out an old Mac monitor before on TV that was pretty cool too.
To err is human,
To really screw up, you need a computer!
This is just the sort of thing I'd like. Having owned only PC hardware all my life, I think it would be interesting to play with somthing like this. But where do you get them? I'm in Perth, Australia, and shipping is so expensive it makes it impractical to get it from interstate or overseas. Any ideas?
harshbutfair: you know it makes sense
www.harshbutfair.org
Are you kidding, I used my Mac Plus until three years ago when I bought a PowerMac 6100/66 DOS. (Tried to load Linux/x86 on the DOS card...couldn't find the floppy or hard disk!) Anyway, I used the Mac Plus for everything: word processing, budget spreadsheets, drawing maps, and doing MIDI sequencing. It worked great. I had one MIDI sequence that had so much data that my poor 68000 would crawl to its knees and MacOS 6.0.8 would crash. Ah, the joys of MultiFinder (lament).
That computer's UI was as fast as my 233/128MB NT machine is now (of course, I'm running SQL Server 6.5 for dev.:0 ). My Linux box makes it eat dust though. Even MKLinux on the PPC made it eat dust, and made MacOS eat dust. Oh, and the 9" screen!
Long live the 8/16's and 16/32's! They are just damn fine for word processing, spreadsheets, drawing figures and bitmaps, and maybe doing some miscellaneous tasks.
I have lots of old computers... we use it for all types of things, mainly Linux servers. Just simple stuff... and for 40 bucks you can't lose (thats the going price for one nowadays)
:)
I just wonder if it would be possible to use these old boxes for Seti@home... THAT would be useful (the combined computing power wouldn't be bad, right?)
But don't get rid of these things... they can be used just so you can say "I have [blank#] Computers! Bow down before my geekness!"
Heh. I tried that once, deathmatching with my 386/25 against my then-roomate with his fancy P5/90. Laff. Considering that I was playing with a postage-stamp-sized view, it's not surprising that he kicked my sprites all over the maps.
Then I got the 486/133, and life changed in that dorm room...
--
A host is a host from coast to coast...
A host is a host from coast to coast...
Unless it's down, or slow, or fails to POST!
Perhaps for a sysadmin. We're talking about a home network here. I personally have no experience with ipmasq, ipchains, port forwarding, or any of the other fun stuff. Therefore, I highly doubt I can set them up in 10-20 seconds.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
The PC Weasel
Looks just like what you need... once they're on the market. Of course, they likely are worth more than the hardware that they're going into. Then again, if you *really* need fast and continuous access to the console, then you're likely doing something that either deserves more reliable hardware or you can afford it. My preference is to just attach a set of KB/Video extension cables and have then close easily accessible to plug in when necessary.
Hey, nobody is *making* you read /. If you don't like it just go away. Or start your own site. I'm sure that Taco would be happy to refund the subscription that you paid for this service...
Yea, over the years I've upgraded and replaced.. but I've yet to throw anything away that was totally broken.
I've only thrown away one monitor (after it was dropped and smashed) and one computer (386... by the time it broke the 30 pin SIMMs were only good for keyrings, the motherboard was fried, the case was non-standard...). But all parts were sold to a recycling centre (only a couple of dollars each however).
Everything else I still use or keep for memories.
- Hugh Buchanan
- Userfriendly.com
There are always a ton for sale here in Southern Louisiana. There is even a store in Baton Rouge! Check your local thrifty paper.
I used to run UNIX System V on an 80286 system. The 80286 has protected mode and can do virtual memory if you don't mind swapping segments instead of pages.
Do you know of any actually hardware requirments for using pvm? For some reason everytime we get something going with pvm every machine but one locks up and we have to hard reboot them.
There's a flea market held over here at MIT every thrid Sunday of the month. Lots of hardware ranging from microwave trancievers, to ocilliscopes, to sun machines, VAXen, to Pentium 3s. It's really cool. There's tons of stuff from like the 70s and all kinds of weird hardware junk. Like, really weird stuff. Lots of stuff is given out for free by the vendors who don't feel like bringing it home. I've gotten 9 free monitors in the past three months. It's a cool place. Check out the MIT site for more info.
# wrote sig.txt, 23 lines, 31337 chars
in your /etc/isapnp.conf file, you'll have to specify io base and irq for your cards. then in your /etc/conf.modules, append io=whatever irq=whatever. PnP cards [are supposed to] have a unique identifier serial number, so if you put one card in first and do a pnpdump, you can read the output and find out what its serial number is. then you'll know which card is which once you put them both in.
Hmm...let's see what I have here that the wife wants to throw away...
And of course various other bits of stuff that people give me or that's been pulled from the trash at the local university. Of course, I would love to get Linux running on all of them. Elks might work on the XT, but I think the SE is the only one that Linux is out of the question for (68000 with no MMU).
the good ground has been paved over by suicidal maniacs
i know i have a problem.
my friends say i should get help
my basement:
2 nextstep cubes
amiga 3000 (my newest aquisition) and some other amiga
2 ibm 386's
2 working 486s (GREAT linux boxes)
1 ibm 286 (a one piece deal)
1 zenith 8088
1 k6200
a million bajillion mother boards (486 386)
~clearcutting prevents forrest fires
They go to college kids (like me) who use them for servers (like mine).
Run LUNIX on the 128! Can't remember the URLs, though...
Little Debian: America's #1 Snack Distro!
hmm, everyone at work knows they end up at my place... hehe .. haha and its fast DUH!
lets see.
I've got enough parts to make about 30 z80 CPM
machines... !!
and yes with 8 inch Floppies!!!!
A Motorola 68000 Unix machine vintage 1985
A Sun 3/80 whose hard drive I have to spin up
manually cause the bearings are gone.
multiple 80x86 machines
an old LINE PRINTER
and my latest acquisition, a 1989 vintage photocopieer.
muahahahaha
but the cream de la cream are the 1 foot by 1 foot
magnetic pole memory cards that each hold
1 K or memory!!!!
I read a few years back that people were taking 3/50's and putting a minimal installation of *BSD on them (or letting them boot from a remote host) and then just using them as an X Terminal.
I used to work on such a beast and it would be a nice nostalgia piece (anyone got a 3/160 connected to a Pixar Image Computer via a VME card? That would be even better!).
the good ground has been paved over by suicidal maniacs
I thought the whole point of PnP was to keep you from having to specify io and irq addresses for hardware? Does the Linux ISAPnP implementation not have this basic feature?
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
The 286 has a full multitasking protected mode.
:). To get your 286 out of protected mode you triple-fault it, which causes the processor to reset.
It's just 16bit. It works fine. The 286 can take up to (IIRC) 16megs of RAM (tho few MB's will take it).
IBM originally came out with OS/2 for the 286.
Interestingly, Intel never provided a way to switch out of 286 protected mode -- they figured you'd boot in real mode, switch to protected as the OS loads, and never look back (they forgot they had M$ to contend with
If that's a real offer and it's in good shape, I'll pay shipping, cash-on-delivery (if shipping costs aren't excessive).
:)
I could use it for a terminal or a DNS server, NIS+ server, print server, or a tiny (very tiny) file server on my home ethernet, use it for parts and experimentation (a purpose a 486 is also currently serving), or I could loan it out to a friend I was going to build a low-end 386/486 for.
I promise I won't toss it
!?!?! No, running os/2. Playing scorched earth. Running john. Old computers have use. Let them do trivial tasks that take a long time and are not mission critical or time sensitive. Hell, play Wolfenstein!
I'm keeping my old ZX Spectrum Plus and Commodore Plus4 on ice, maybe they'll be worth something as collectables soon :-)
That's what my old P133 is doing. Now what am I to do with the 486DX2-50 and 386DX-20? :P
Being young, infinitely interested in computing and eager to have something else to put on my CV ;), i've always wanted to get my hands on a Mac of some description so i can claim experience.
Thing is, not knowing anything about Macs, and not knowing anyone who does -- what should i be looking for in an old Mac? What spec, hardware etc would be best while still being cheap?
I'd envision that i'd mostly want to mess around with networking it, using it as a terminal, a web browser, and maybe a little bit of programming too.. anybody have any suggestions, including where i might pick one up and how much i might expect to pay? (in the UK)
- doctea
Stupid people throw their computers away because of y2k. Instead, why wont they give their boxes to me? I plan to set up a little network in my new home but im having trouble getting the 30pin simms for the 386 motherboards. Anyone got some extra of those? :) :) Obviously the cmos battery is empty. But there is a minor inconvenience: you have to re/set "bios" settings almost every time you boot.
There is another problem: documentation. I have an I/O+IDE card for ISA bus, full of jumpers, without ideas of what each of them does. Some might think of asking manufacturer if they _maybe_ got some spare manual for their 9 years old product, but what if the product is some noname stuff from Taiwan?
And dont tell me that 286 is not y2k compliant. Just flip the clock back if you want to secure yourself or forward to see what happens. When I ran my dusty 286 after some 12 years of sitting in the closet i found out that it is perfectly y2k compatibile. The clock is still at 1 1 1980 after about three months of running
To completely wake up this interesting old toy, I had to lowlevel format the 5 1/4" harddisk to remember it of its function. I also had to replace the fan in the power supply and add one to the cpu to stop constant lockups because of overheating. Now it runs dos3.3 and serves as a terminal to my server, which is p200. Im waiting for the ELKS team to make their product just a bit more useable. There is also a lack of unix programs which will run on a 286 and lower. Any archive anywhere?
And... how would it be to collect a few thousand of thrown-away 386 boxes and put them together to a cluster just to show that these old pals do not deserve silence yet?
Actually, I'm about to attempt this soon (tomorrow), with two ISA ne2000s. My only fear is, how will I know which card is eth0 and which is eth1? I plan to install one, get it working, and then the other, but how does linux decide which is which? This only applies to ISAPnP, naturally, because with specified info I can just say:
alias eth0 ne2000 [card0 info]
alias eth1 ne2000 [card1 info]
Luckily these cards come with dos utils (boot to floppy, run utils...) so I can fall back on specified vals, but I would prefer to figure out the PnP solution.
i just aquired another 286 --ibm ps2 with a 30 meg hd, 1 meg of ram--
what are my options for a web server
ps2's are MCA, so i dont think they will run linux, but what about dr-dos, is there a web server for it? this is purely for novelty not performance.
~NED
~clearcutting prevents forrest fires
Here's what i've done with my old boxen. Take the old box and install linux or your favorite *nix and then put a modem and a network card in it. Make it dial your isp and act as a router for your network you can learn all about this here IP Chains. It's cool, and fun and gives you a real excuse to have a network closet at home. and make sure to get an external modem and hang it up next to the hub so you have cool blinking lights
Obsolete, my ass. Who writes this stuff? Old computers never die, they just become routers and servers and things.
You have to remember the writer is probably coming from the Windows world where they do become obsolete if they can't handle the load of Redmond's latest bloatware. That's why the PC manufacturers love MS so much: new OS - time to get a new machine because the old one is too busy swapping. I can't believe that people really put up with this forced obsolence crap. It's like the 50s where people expected to buy a new car every 2 years. I guess that makes Linux & Free Software the Japanese car invasion.
the good ground has been paved over by suicidal maniacs
There is a company in San Francisco called HMR. They specialize in recycling old PCs, Monitors, Mainframes, and just about anything else of value. If you have boxes to get rid of, they can take them. They also have lots of cool used gear for cheap.
You can recycle them... I sometimes do. Example:
486SX20, 8Mb ram, 540Mb hd == good IPMasquerade based router for a small business, also serves as local e-mail server (uses fetchmail to pick up mail for a larger Linux box; sendmail queues outgoing mail & fires it out every fifteen minuts or so). Runs like a champ.
--------- Webmaster, http://www.cpureview.com and
Here's an old 486 with an important job:
$ uptime
10:53pm up 68 days, 6:44, 2 users, load average: 0.19, 0.05, 0.01
$ uname -a
Linux hp-monitor 2.2.9 #1 Wed Jun 9 15:19:35 MDT 1999 i486 unknown
$
It's a headless 486 in a basement downtown. It has 16 MB RAM and about 400 MB disk (which are very excessive for the job it was installed to do - I was originally going to send it down with 8MB and no hard disk) . Its job is to monitor all the other servers at two locations using little script (all hail Perl!) that I wrote for the occasion. If a server goes down and the primary monitoring server is down, the 486 sends nastygrams to people's pagers. It also receives syslog messages from the other Unix boxes, so that if another system is lost we still have its last words. It's got plenty of free memory and clock cycles to handle other tasks, but we don't have any for it yet.
No, I don't know why I picked that subject, other than that the 486 checks the health of the other hosts.
Old computers, and I dont just mean 486's, are still perfectly useful. Sure, if you insist on / absolutely need to run Word 6, or want to run Quake, or need to have a dozen browser windows open at once, you'll hit the ceiling. Even an old Win 3.1 box will still allow you to, say, track your finances better and faster than you can with pencil and paper, whip out a few letters, and use a moderate speed modem to check email via POP or telnet. (And c'mon, isn't this supposed to be the biggest Lynx-using crowd anyway?)
L0pht is/was a tribute to retrocomputing, and a good example of computer recycling. They once had a web server running on a Mac Plus. Friends of mine rigged up an abandoned IBM XT and used it as a cheap 4-screen terminal and ftp client.
Just last week, we saw the news about a low-output web server made out of two chips and a few wires, smaller than a finger, and most of us were amazed or excited. We don't get nearly as excited about web server running on a Commodore, even though it would be quite a feat, IMO.
And whatever happened to Linux-on-a-floppy? There is no need for these machines to go to waste.
Regards,
Terrorists can attack freedom, but only Congress can destroy it.
I love my SE/30. It's a great little machine. It was my first Mac and I was amazed at how well built it was compared to the PCs that I was used to (it survived a toss into a construction dumpster w/o a problem). It's amazing how many people are still using their classic Macs and the number of web sites devoted to helping people find software for them or providing tips to keep them running. I got to hand it to apple for putting their old OSes and applications on the web. I doubt MS would ever do such a thing.
the good ground has been paved over by suicidal maniacs
It seems like the organization that is promoting this software, the not-for-profit (www.newdeal.org) would do better if their software had open source code. That way, there could be better auditing and more ease finding bugs.
Oooh, Aaah, assembly language! I remember that from back in the day.
There already is a website and organisation: The Free Hardware Foundation.
I was particularly intrigued by the comment from the African user who asked that the western countries not donate old junk, noting that to really be useful for the needs of those nations, the computers shoulf have at least 486s (assuming that they are PCs.)
Look inside a PC box-- you have a power supply, hard drives, various cards, etc. that can be salvaged from a pre-486 machine.
With simple acts of salvaging, the people of developing nations can still get cheap internet worthy machines. It's not as good as getting the brand spanking new equipment but just look at how many slashdot members use old machines.
I have an 'old' Pentium 133, and a 286. Experiment with them. Use them for terminals. Install different operating systems on them. I got my ZIP-drive working on the 286, which is great when the only other removable storage on there is 5+1/4" floppies...
Past that, cluster them, and ultimately see if they can be sold, junked or recycled.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
No kidding. I still long for my old PCjr. I had it all through HS and college. It went through several upgrade cycles (SCSI HD, 3.5 floppy, 768K memory, black paint job, etc.) and it looked more like a mutant NeXT cube. It was the after hours computer center for my dorm wing for a long time (WordPerfect + laser printer made it very popular). I would still have it if our basement hadn't flooded. It was like a family member died. Seeing one at an online computer museum or in a computer junk store still makes me sad.
the good ground has been paved over by suicidal maniacs
Compared to my air conditioner, running a few PCs w/o monitors isn't that big of a deal. My utility bills nearly triple in the summer because of the AC alone. I don't mind though. I would rather pay $150-200 more during the summer than sit around in 90+ temps.
the good ground has been paved over by suicidal maniacs
You can check out those old games at MobyGames.
"But always she's the spectre of uncertainty I first endured, then faded, then embraced..."
I'm running a 150 (clocked to 180) With 96MB RAM that used to be a p75, and it runs great. My Laptop is a 266MMX with 64MB RAM, and I HARDLY consider it obsolete.
I myself have a P133 (can't overclock it easily with my current mother board) with 80MB RAM and I wouldn't call it obsolete. Using ATI Xpert@Play it even runs most of todays games quite well (though I rarely play with it). Basically it runs everything I need it to - word processing (even M$ Word, but I try to avoid it), spreadsheets (even Excel which I also try to avoid..). Win 98 is a bit slow, but Win 95 runs smoothly. And since 98% of time it runs Linux, I have no problem using it as my primary workstation while it runs a www-server (I don't even notice some 20 hits/second, even though it's started from inetd), ftp-server, samba, etc.
--
It has to work - rfc1925
Anyone interested in ridding themselves of the storage problem of old 486, pentiums, or newer if you are looking to get rid of them, as well as old monitors and components, pls drop me an email. I am looking to start a small start-up and could use the machines, for spooolers, firewalls, IP serving, etc; and any that I can not use would be greatly appreciated at local schools.
I love my old Amiga 1000, C=64, IBM 5150.
I dunno, I also got various 486's layin around. Weird I've started retiring Pentiums too. Some stuff is worth savin and other stuff isn't. One of our dns servers still runs on a AMD DX4-133 (or somethin like that). But those 486's are still totally cool for Linux and basic stuff like email, dns, proxy. Now if I can just finsh that tcp/ip stack for my 64..
I've never tossed any computer, and I've still got every machine I've ever owned (current count:24 machines). While I run my 386+ machines in various places around my house, I'm stumped as to what to do with my REAL old machines. I've got 2 Commodore PET's and a 128D, several old Tandy's (TRS-80's, CC's, & 1000's), XT's and AT's galore, and even an old Heath kit. All of thse machines still work, but what use are they? What can I do with them? I don't have the heart to toss them.
:)
Maybe I should start a museum
There is nothing so pathetic as seeing a beautiful young theory roughed up by a tough gang of facts.
I've got a 286 in my closet. Is there a branch of linux that works on older x86 chips? I am not sure why i would even want to get it working. It would just be another unused node in my dan (dining-room area network). If not linux, do any of the *bsd's work with older computers?
thanks
Hell, I put ALL of my old computers to good use. I haven't thrown ANY away, not even the 8088 tandy that sits in my room for late night games of zork. I have roughly 9 computers here, only one is a pentium. The rest are 486 or less. I give some away to my friends who don't have any computers and the rest are my toys. Most run distributed.net crap or become dedicated DOS game boxes cuz my pentium with win95/linux will NOT run the old, cool games. I say anyone that throws away a computer just isn't creative.
---------------------------
---------------------------
www.ourlan.com
:)
This is a 100MHZ 486 with 64MB Ram. It is my web server, firewall, file server, print server, ftp, email.... etc. It runs Red Hat 5.2 (soon to be 6.0). Works great for me.
BR
Computers do not become obsolete in 18 months. The Pentium-166s with 32M that I bought 2 years ago are still humming along nicely, thank you. So I can't play System Shock II on them, fine, but that's hardly obsolete... I can still do 99% of my daily work on them.
And I've got a wall full of 486's that I couldn't live without.
Obsolete, my ass. Who writes this stuff? Old computers never die, they just become routers and servers and things...
My word processor was written by Stanford Professor Donald Knuth. Who wrote yours?
It also requires at least 400 mhz or so...
And notepad has a 32 kb limit...
I have wasted lots of time trying to get old junky machines to work. Even if you manage to get a 486 class system running with a couple of hours work, you still have an obsolete system that takes 30 minutes or more to compile a kernel. I finally decided that my time is worth something. A decent Celeron system can be built for $400. If I can't get a 486 working right away, out it goes.
I live in Fairbanks Alaska. Recycling is a joke here since all the stuff has to be shipped two thousand miles back to the states. My old systems go to the rifle range. A couple of Soviet 7.62x54R AP rounds through the disk drive makes unauthorized data recovery a difficult task indeed.
Maybe because:
:)
(a) You aren't the editor.
(b) There aren't any "bitchin' DOS desktops". (I like DOS, but desktop is associated with GUI... Maybe if you ran GEOS on it.
(c) A 486 makes a lousy Windows '98 desktop.
(d) A lot of people on Slashdot like and use Linux. (in case you haven't noticed.)
(e) Try some advocacy. Maybe if you've done it, mention that you can run minix on a 286 or FreeBSD on a 486, and tell us how it runs.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Hot damn you are one clued mother fucker.
The revolution will be mocked
Oh NO!! Not the American manufacturers! The poor poor innocent little things, don't hurt them!!!
I am sickened by how some people trample on the rights of American manufacturers. What would the world be like if American manufacturers would not be allowed to export landmines, electroshock batons and other torture devices to dictatorships everywhere? We, the rest of the world, who wish with all our soul that we can leave our fetid cesspools and breathe the fresh, fresh air of America feel ANGRY when we hear that the world conference on the environment had the audacity to suggest that American manufacturers play by the same rules as manufacturers in other countries and do their part to lower emissons. We feel shaken to our very souls by the tought that the interest of human rights, the environment or the very life on earth could ever be considered before the rights of the American manufacturers. With tears in our eyes we thank the Republican party for killing all the bills that in any way touch the sanctity of the American manufacturer. Imagine the fascists who wish to restrict the right of the American manufacturer to keep detailed personal records of customers and sell them to anyone, to secrety film and tap their employers (not to mention people in other countries with helps from the wonderful Echelon system). We must ever remember that the whole point of America, indeed the world, is the unhindered growth of American manufacturers, for the sake of the American manufacturers.
Yes! A big THANK YOU to president Clinton for pointing out that wishing less lead in the environment, in animals and ultimately in ourselves is an ILLEGAL TRADE BARRIER!
Hallelulia!
Being bitter is drinking poison and hoping someone else will die
mmm.. I couldn't get it to run in Win95, sadly. Too bad it wasn't networkable. I spent many a late night emulating this in SoftWindows on my 25Mhz Quadra.
"Please don't sigh like that, maam"
Yours was the first /. comment about the environment. I mean, the whole article was about the ecological threat of all this junk, and what do the Slashdot crowd do? Two hundred articles about how nostalgic they are about their old 386....Jeez.
Being bitter is drinking poison and hoping someone else will die
We're talking about 18-month old computers here. They make "bitchin' win95 desktops" as well. I have sitting in front of me a 19-month old Pentium II 266 with 96 megs of RAM, a voodoo2, and 14.8 gigs of hard drive space. It runs Win95 quite nicely, so obviously you don't need Linux to get your 18-month old hardware to run.
Perhaps your 72-month old hardware, but that's a different story.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Everyone out there with 486DX4-100's send em to Rob!
that way west michigan can have the largest beowulf in existance and rob will have a place to store all the mp3's!
Think of it! yes you'd lose 2 feet off of each wall, but you'd be warm in the winter!
"Where's that file? what do you mean it's "somewhere" on the servers??"
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Ohhh you sweet thang!
I just love it when fine upstanding citizens make sure they deprive those in need! could we get together and possibly roll some homless people? they might have 5-10 bucks.... we could use your baseball bat..... or better yet... we can get a list of the welfare recipients and extort money from them or steal their kids toys form the front yard!!
Come on all! join the fight to keep the needy opressed! smash your computers now! smack that soup out of the bum's hands at a local soup kitchen!! remember us rich americans are the only worthy ones!!
Opress the needy! opress those that have not!
opress!!! opress!!! opress!!!!
#end sarcasim
I would just take the thing to the local homeless shelter... They can use computers in the office. to hell with scrambling the drive just erase it... I doubt that anyone on the planet gives a rats rear-end about your data let alone if you even are still breathing...
if you think someone wants your data then I would seek some mential help.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
It occurs to me that whenever a big company designs their next colossus. It produces vast amounts of heat as a byproduct of it's marginally superior computation. It is also inevitably the case that within no more than a few years, it produces mediocre amounts of computation as a byproduct of heating. IT seems to me destined to always be so with current technologies.
I look fondly on my 2 670 MP's both with dual 40mhz sparcs and lots and lots of 30 pin simms. I am fond of them because it is cold now, so I switch them on and gain two slowlaris 5 boxs but within 45 min it's a nice comfortable temperature in the room. My first server, spiral a 133mhz pentium with 80Mb and 2 2bg disks, Wow!, was retired from active service last week but can't really cut it in generating as much heat. Shame,
will be used for testing though. Does anyone know
where I can get hold of a Cray 1 or a pdp 11? An old 360...
Cheers
4920616d206e6f742061206e756d62657221
I just reincarnated my trusty 486 with BIOS dated '94. That beast has taken on numerous forms, originally my OS/2 workstation, a Linux server, a short stint as an NT box for VPN purposes, and now a VPN firewall/web cache/DNS caching server/MP3 file server/mail server. It is now running Linux of course. Somehow a 486 still has plenty of horsepower to do all of this. Granted its not the same as it started, 4 meg RAM and 340 meg HD, now it is 32 meg RAM and 10 gig HD, but the CPU hasn't changed.
Hell, I'm even thinking of letting it do SETI@home or distributed.net work when it is bored. :-)
This is quite typical...
:-) same place I got my UNIX manuals...
A library here did the same thing but for the "card catalog" software. I asked why they replaced the old terminals and they said that they werent Y2K compliant!! I laughed so hard I almost puked.. after I got off the floor I asked who told them that a text terminal has to be y2k compliant the person responded, "It's a highly technical reason why the software required new terminals"
In other words... someone either got a kickback or there's an "expert" working there that "think" they know what they are doing...
needless to say.. I now have 5 Wyse Color terminals! freshly picked out of the trash bin in back...
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
A few friends and I decided to put together a beowulf cluster of 486 machines. So far we have about 8 Machines on it. Not really doing much though but it is kinda funny. Maybe if we get a few more we crank stuff out like a pentium 200.
The webpage for it isn't up yet but will be soon.
Well, some of them anyway. But who's interested in old PC's, what about more interesting things? I've acquired for little or no money a SparcClassic, various PC's, various old micros.. my latest addition is a Parsys SN1000 multicomputer - 64 processors and half a gig of ram, and I got it for free. It looks lik a fridge and makes a good table. Anyone help me with software for it? :>
I had a 386 last year with 5 MB of memory, 42 MB MFM hard drive stacked to 89. It was given to me. I had DOS 3.3 on it and played Ultima and Tristan pinball.
For my husband i put on windows 3.1 and he did the checkbook in it with some program i have forgotten the name of.
Something went wrong and the drive died. Now we have a pentium 75 with 48 MB memory and 8.1 GB scsi HD, but i miss my 386.
--- If you don't want to know the answer, don't ask the question.
Yes! Though it wasn't me that grabbed your old 2400 baud modem, I intentionally put my beloved still-jumperable-before-the-days-of-PnP 28.8 on the shelf and plugged in a Boca 2400 external for local BBS'in. Message boards and games like Trade Wars or L.O.R.D. never need more than a 2400 (although sometimes the modem has to keep up with the typing!)
When cable/dsl/whatever internet access becomes commonplace, I hope a lot of people move back down to 2400 baud modems for local BBS'ing. The community of an old boards leaves much to be desired, even from heavy-copper or fiber 'bones to the net! Keep up the old parts!
P.S. a Tandy "Personal Computer" TRS 100 makes a very nice linux terminal for an in-car mp3 machine! although there are only 40 columns and 7 lines, console usage of mpg123 is never a problem!
-DANGER: Running with 10mb MFM in hand!
.... um, i lost you after "0110100001101001".
Why would anyone want to throw away a whole computer? Just because the planned obsolescence timer on the chipset has expired, there's still a perfectly good metal case and power supply. People who replace the entire unit instead of the motherboard deserve to have disposal problems.
Heck, I still use a computer that was manufactured in 1991 on a daily basis, even if most of the motherboard's functions have been overridden with addons.
Oh, and back in January I decided to get a new graphics board (PIV). I gave my old graphics (CV64) board to a friend. He installed it in his machine and gave his old graphics board (Spectrum) to a friend. It's pretty easy to get rid of stuff if you really want to; someone always wants it -- and this is relatively obscure stuff (Amiga hardware) that I'm talking about! For "mainstream" stuff it ought to be trivial.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
I also agree with this idea... if you are anywhere near the Philadelphia Area, try to contact a place called Nonprofit Technology Resources. They refurb old computers to give to underpriveledged schools and kids, it's a great cause, and the people are nice. I personally very much enjoyed spending a few days with them last year helping give something back
Tell a man that there are 400 Billion stars and he'll believe you
I can already run Red Alert on Linux thanks to WINE, but it takes a bit of struggling (and can screw up the X server :-().
The few I've ditched (a Morrow Z80 box, a monochrome Mac left by a lodger, etc.), I've put out on the sidewalk on Saturday or Sunday (for our Monday trash pickup). Not one of 'em has made it to sunset of the day it went outside.
Hell, someone was kind enough to give a new home to the 2400-baud external modem I put out last month.
On the other hand, the 386DX-25 my sister returned (now that she's got a Pentium laptop) is gonna be the firewall for my home network. It'll have more than enough bandwidth until we get fiber hereabouts.
I refuse to believe corporations are people until Texas executes one. -- desert rain on http://www.dailykos.com/user/
Build a beowulf out of them. (I realize this is a basic Slashdot post cliche, but it actually applies)
Take a mess of old PC's and build a beowulf. Now true, it wouldn't be a great machine and I would be cautious to use anything older then a 486DX (need a math processor) but it would still function.
If this isn't adequate I would look into LAST(PDF)
--- Linux... a college project gone horribly right
Yeah, no kidding. Intel is really pushing research into faster hard disks (99% of the time we spend waiting for computers nowadays is waiting for the hard disk) because who is going to buy a faster processor if they are already just waiting on other parts of the computer?
Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.
That's a good point. My computer is 18 months old, and it's nowhere near that nice. In fact, I'll probably end up buying a computer like that in another 6 months or more, and it'll be about the same, although probably with a faster processor.
;)
However, in 6 months, shouldn't you be running Windows 2000?
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
That is a very good idea for very young kids. But as they start to get older (ie: 5-6 years old), I don't believe that they should be learning old machines, they should experience the technolegy (spelling) of today. If you really want your kids to learn dos, great, let them (or linux, if you really want you kids to be geeks). But I still say, should let them learn on the products of today.
Its not what it is, its something else.
Every time I upgrade I set the old one aside for inclusion in the yet to happen beowulf cluster.
There's more to it than this.
Yes, I like macs better that PCs, but I like linux better than Macs. I have about 4 old macs that are still more usefull than my pentuim 100. The GUI is a great no Bulls**t way to get things done. The mac quadras and mac IIs are great terminals and net machines. fire up an old copy of ClarisWorks and they make a darn fine wordprocessor. you can get 7.5.5 and clasrisworks 2.1 free off apple ftp sites. The mac se/30 makes a great terminal.
Everyone loves Linux ELKS for their 286.
My old computers don't go. I don't use them any more, I don't really need them. I just keep them in the basement beacuse I don't want to throw them out. I can still remember playing Police Quest, Tetris, Antix and (my personal favorite computer game ever made) Commander Keen on my 386.
I learned to program (yes it was BASIC) on my Apple IIE. These thing bring back too many memories to throw them away, so they just sit in my basement.
That's my 1/50 of $1.00 US
JM
Big Brother is watching, vote Libertarian!!
--Justin Mitchell
"2nd Place is a fancy word for losing" --Bender (Futurama)
mmmmmmmmmmm.....scorched earth....yummmm... I remember playing that on my TI-82 calculator to pass the time in my math classes all thru high school... I still have that calculator. I wonder if I can get the games back on it from my friends that are in high school...
hmmm.... Anyone want to see a scorched earth mod for Quake 3????
Off and on I try to find a working 8086 machine so I can bring up the copy of Microsoft Windows 1.0 I got with my IBM PS/2 Model 25 which died so many years ago. (It came on three 720k 3.5" floppies.)
:-)
Win1.0 crashes on startup on a 286 and 386 (haven't tried 486 or DOSEmu.)
Thought it would be a hoot to post some pictures of Win 1.0 for those folks who haven't experienced it first hand.
It sucked way back then, too (gasp!).
I'm looking at my ten-year-old computer case, which has faithfully been upgraded from a 286 to a 386 to a 486 to a pentium, and gone through two power supplies. Given that it's a horizonal case, and vertical makes more sense, and it's got drive rails (remember drive rails?), and it's currently gone through its second power supply, I *think* it's time to recycle it.
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
I tend to trickle my old systems down to family members. When that doesn't work, they become Linux boxes. I have a Cyrix 6x86L-PR150 sitting headless that just cracks RC5 keys because I can't find anything else for it to do. (it "only" has 16M RAM and a 600M hard disk) My K5-100 box is my modem ipmasquerade box, print server, file server, Postgresql/PHP/Apache test box, etc. I just put a MII-300 CPU in it because it was only $30.00 and it looked fun to do.
I'm running out of wall outlets though, and my 'office' in my house is getting harder and harder to keep cool...
Further, my wife is getting suspicious of how the CPU boxes seem to mysteriously multiply.
Jeff
Opinions expressed are my own and not necessarily those of my employer.
Give your old hardware to charity!
I've spent several happy afternoons taking a pile of "obsolete" hardware and software (anyone remember WP 4.2?) and turning it into useful workstations for a local charity.
How about using old hardware for furniture? It doesn't work that well for PCs, but I have, for example, an old rackmount ethernet switch (24 inches high?) acting as and endtable (I just covered the top with some rabit fur I had lying around -- It's amazingly inconspicuous!), and in my bedroom, I have a few old Mac II's as a bedside table (my bed is a mattress on the floor, so this works well)
:)
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Not everything uses VMs running on VMs and 256MB RAM. My 8088 is an excellent dumb terminal in my bedroom. My 386 is an excellent fileserver. My Pentium 75 is an excellent workstation. And so on. If you start breathing heavily when you see a Palm Pilot, remember that your old box you were going to throw away has ten times the capabilities! Go play Zork! Use Lynx! Use a command-line interface! Screw the ability to play a 3D game by raytracing images in realtime! Some of the greatest software in the world was written on these old machines. I've spent hours playing the old games with simple graphics instead of Quake at 800x600.
My point is, old machines are *not* obsolete. They just don't run the stuff you don't need. Keep one up-to-date box if you really must join distributed.net, and keep an army of 486's in the basement! They're fun to experiment on, you don't have to worry about blowing them up when you attach an accelerator to the cooling fan, and you can get them cheap in mass quantities if you ever need to build an experimental cluster or a neural net or pull some kind of neat robotics hack.
I say long live the veteran computers!
~ Give me 101 plastic soldiers, and I will conquer the world.
Let's see, the (67 watt) power supply finally died last year on my mom's IBM/PC (4.77 Mhz 8088 power!), so I swapped the supply out of the Extension Unit and it ran great. Even so, we finally gave it to Goodwill. (Probably the deciding factor was that the WordPerfect 5.1 install disks developed a bad sector, so I couldn't put it on.) We got her a 286 and found a 486 motherboard to put in it, 20 megs RAM and she's happily running Win95 and getting everything done that she needs to.
She also had a souped-up PC/XT (with an Orchid 286-8 card in it) that she used at the school she teaches in for wordprocessing and "Where in the USA is Carmen Sandiego." The school finally got a grant and put iMacs in all the classrooms, so it finally got sent to Goodwill last spring.
And we still get good use out of the Epson FX-80 (prints company checks better than anything else around!)
That's two computers and a printer with a useful lifetime of 15 years. This 18 month lifetime crap ticks me off. Is it that they don't make them like they used to, or that we are just so darned rich that we can't stand to be a week behind our neighbors?
Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.
Cases suck. Take'm apart, put'm back together in some artistic way. It has to still run though, or it doesn't count. I have a nice 486 running RH 5.2 that I use as a masqurading router. I call it the dustpuppy.
I talk to it. I live alone...
Open source means never having to say thank you.
Heh...privacy issues aside, I hope they are enjoying my Q3test games...
Seriously, I'm sure this isn't the optimal method for doing IP-Masq, but it does work, and intil I have the $$/time to add another NIC, it will have to do...
Ender
Just saying 'no' prevents teenage pregnancy the way 'Have a nice day' cures chronic depression.
Nothing to see here
Everybody else is jumping all over the question, "Why would you even want to get rid of the old box?" I'd like to sidestep that and address the industry complaints about the proposed European regulations regarding monitors.
Face it, people are going to get rid of their old computers. Not everyone wants a network in their homes (Ghu only knows why not -- I think it's just darn cool, but anyway...) and most people do want to be able to run the latest eye-candy video games or the newest MS Bloat. So, the manufacturers will continue to sell brand new devices into homes that already have computers in them. It's the same as cars: you don't really need to buy a new car every 10 years, but many many people do.
...
Yeah, my heart bleeds for those American manufacturers. We're already pursuing HMDs and non CRT based visual output devices, and undoubtedly if the resolution passes it'll have some kind of grandfather clause as well as a phase-in period. There may be some cases where a substitute material just isn't going to work, but there are plenty of cases where it's just a question of cost. Oh, that new computer costs so much that you won't be able to sell a gazillion of 'em? See the rest of the comments on this board regarding the "uselessness" of older hardware! The way I see it, we're just figuring out that we're going to need parachutes before we are in free-fall, which is just a tad earlier than usual. Of course, we're already in the plane, but some warning's better than none, I reckon.
Oh, go on, check out my job.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I didn't expect to read an article on "old computers" that discussed 386 systems.
In my house right now I've got a TRS-80 (Z80), a DEC Pro/350 (PDP-11/23), a Sun 2/170 (68010), and an AT&T PC6300 (8086). *Those* are old. I might even agree that my Mac SE/30 (68030, but no 32-bit-clean ROM) is old.
But a 486?
I run my main mail/news/web server (for aisb.org) on a 486 (admittedly with 40M of RAM), and it runs just fine. My laptop is a 25MHz 486SL, and it's usable (with Linux, not with Windows) as well.
(Of course, I'm a geezer at 31, so my perspective on "old" may differ.)
Perhaps we need a website for old computers (I have a 486 that could host it, if I had a fast Inet connection) Where people can get rid of thier old computers for cost of shipping, incedently. I have some Motherboards, HD's >100MB, and even a 386 I have no use for (gf said 5 running computers was enough).
It's the 21st Century Do you know what your government is doing
First of all, you have to make the distinction i think between business' and private persons.
...
i have the impressions private persons probably will keep them somewhere in a closet untill they get dumped.
Business' however have various options :
After that their hardware is written off, they have following options :
1/ Sell old hardware to their employees (then see above)
2/ Donate/sell for educational purposes.
3/ Dospose of them as scrap.
As a scrap dealer myself I'm most knowledgable in this last solution.
in every area you willhave companies that are specialised inthe collection of electronic scrap.
Part (minority) of this material will be recycled for reuse : SIMM, CPU, IC,
The major part is recycled for the (precious) metal value. Most electronic devices contain a small amount measured in ppm of gold, silver, palladium. Through shredding and refining these metals are reclaimed and find teir way for a second life in the international metal markets.
Think about your electric bill! Are you actually PROUD of all the fossil fuel you're burning?
Ditch them all and get a new low-powered laptop; a new machine can replace rooms full of old clunkers.
How about we let the mfgrs. compete for a "most MIPS per watt" award?
And this WTO crap is annoying. Why do we penalize countries that want to move forward? We should reward them instead.
There is a setup called PicoBSD. It is a set of minimal distributions of FreeBSD that fit in 1.44 Megs. There is a router distro, firewall, dialup, among others.
Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.
I think they just couldn't resist saying the words Y2K. My old tandy understood the year 2000. Generally there are no post 1980 computers that didn't understand 2000.
Some, even today have have the date reintered, but hopfully that isn't to difficult to do. Anyhow about computer garbage I don't know why people throw away their entire computers instead of just upgrading them. Though I do have to wonder about the motherboard fairy. I should have about 5 old motherboards in my closet. And not one of them is there anymore. they just simply dissapear
Two things:
...
1) Not everyone has the disposable income to provide 'the technology of today' to their kids.
2) It is good to find out how useful something is without obsessing about always having the newest / coolest, and this is a lesson that kids need probably more than adults. Not that it's not widespread among adults (like me!), but it's probably better to try to head it off then correct it later on. And comptuters that are a few years old (a 486 as in the first poster on this thread) is plenty fast enough for more than I'd like to admit, since I have a 233MHz K6
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
I meant, that the computers need to have the date reentered. Or umm nevermind
However, in 6 months, shouldn't you be running Windows 2000?
I don't see that coming out untill 2001. Microsoft is going to go with the technical definition of the Milennium rather than the popular one
Seriously. Then get a tax writeoff for it.
I was just talking with some school board candidates and principals, and I think now that Linux is cool (for the mainstream, not just us) this is regarded as "a good thing".
If Red Hat was smart, they'd offer a free support account and CD for each school that did this. Now that they have the cash, that is.
(0 shares and counting)
Will in Seattle
Damn them all to HELL!
How do you know Big Brother isn't snooping all your local LAN traffic?
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Hey, mr. BSD or mr. BeOs, why not come up with your own articles ...
...
I seriously hope you're not suggesting we run W2K on those boxen
Will in Seattle
From the ages of 10-15, I used an 8088 with two 360K floppy drives, and amber monitor. By learning how to use an older computer, I am now much more adept at things like command lines, programming, and software/hardware troubleshooting. Usually, newer technologies are used to further distance the user from the machine, not to increase productivity. It is very, very easy to learn DOS (or *nix) first, then learn Windows later on. However, it is nearly impossible to go from Windows to an OS with a command line interface. Another example of this is programming. It is difficult to learn C or ASM if you only know VB, but trivial to learn VB if you have even a rudimentry knowledge of C. Let the kid have linux (or DOS or whatever) and when they want windows they'll install it themselves.
I wonder if they realize that the B tag does not work inside of the TITLE tag?
.sig this pop I as Watch
+--
stack. the off
+-- (Score:-1, Moderator on Power Trip)
I've got a Quadra 700 (what, like 8 years old or so?) running NetBSD as my firewall/router for my DSL connection. It does a serial console so I am able to run it headless. Of course it has to boot from Mac OS so I need Timbuktu if I need to do anything but reboot the thing (which I haven't done in a long time). I just set up a IIci (10 years old) for a friend for wp, email & browsing. Slow, but it works. I'll probably upgrade him some time soon but I don't know what to do with the IIci, I can't throw it away.
cheers,
Matthew Reilly
Until there's a 12-step program to stop the addiction of collecting computer junk, they will continue to collect at my house. My current collection of about 11 systems include an Amiga, Mac ClasicII, NeXT slab, DEC alpha workstation and a bunch if intel machines. Oh yeah, I also have a TRS-80 clone!
Programming people and programming computers are very similar, You spend most of your time bebugging old code.
My "crappy, old, outdated" PC (a 233MMX w/64 MB of RAM) gets lots of use. It does everything I need it to do (programming w/XEmacs/gcc, writing papers with LaTeX, surfing the web, burning CDs, IRC, email, etc.). I feel no need to upgrade it at all, I only got it because it was a cheap, good deal. It replaced my Pentium 75 w/32 MB of RAM.
I find that real "power users" (like most Linux and FreeBSD users) usually have what others would consider "old" machines.
That being said, there's nothing wrong with having a shiny new fast machine if you so desire. But with relatively efficient OSes like Linux and FreeBSD, even a "lowly" Pentium 75 is enough for a lot of tasks. Some people think a Pentium 400 w/64 MB of RAM is the minimum for email (with programs like Micro$oft LookOut) but even a 386 does a fine job with pine or mutt.
Oh, well, let them keep buying their expensive machines. That just makes Celerons and PIII's even cheaper. Maybe I'll buy one of those one day.
That 386 sx 25 laptop that was sh!thot in 91, well, hell; it still is good for cranking out code and compiling (yes, even with the old Borland Turbo C version 2) when your significant other is using your screamer for typing out her dissertation... the TRS-80 with the 8K memory mod that was so heavy it made the thing tip over backwards if you didnt put a book under the backside? Plug it into the color TV and revisit the wonders of the years when BASIC was just BASIC. Write a program that uses basic geometry to paint pretty spirograph patterns to your TV. Stare at it for awhile. Remember when you and your 1 other geek friend got that 1st IBM AT and played ZORK all weekend? Fire it up and do it again - by now you have certainly forgotten how to exit the spinning room next to Flood Control Dam #3. Fire up the debugger! Write a command in 8086 assembler! - I've done all this stuff and it's pretty fun (if not arcane) to visit old friends.
m0ng00se
Is madness a syptom of genius or vice-versa?
OTOH, I have a Smith Corona WP (takes floppies) that I bought in 1995 for $200 brand new. When my brother crashed my computer, it was a handy back up for my writing - and any other time I didn't feel like staring at a monitor.
OTOH I also have two manual typewriters I can find ribbons for. My dad bought a Brother EP45 typewriter around 1989 - I think. Damn fine little machine, but he's damned to find cartridges for it!
I don't know. I've pounded out many things on my little blue Royal and my little grey factory-reject. There is a certain rhythm that makes it so enjoyable.
Ah well. If Y2K comes around and my computer crashes, I'll have three machines at home to keep me happy in the meantime
iSn't all of Micron's stuff made in Idaho? hmmmm.
matt
I setup 3 network cards in one system at work with little problems. The real time waster was that I didn't realize I was using a regular cable I made instead of a crossover cable like I should have since it was NIC to NIC. oops. I'll never make that stupid-ass mistake again. Other than that, it went pretty well and easily even though I had never done even 2 cards in one machine before.
Well over one hundred of them have gone here (http://www.oberlin.edu/~ocrp). It's such a good way to get re-use older computers. Even old Mac SE's and low end 286's are perfectly good for word processing and use as consoles.
itachi
I could find a LOT of uses for a 486. Heck, it'll even run Windows NT (barely).
I don't have any complete systems laying around. All I have is parts. The last complete system I bought was back in '93, and I've just been upgradig since then. So now I have such thing as:
* 486DX2/66 chip on a VLB/PCI/ISA board
* NexGen P100 chip and board (was GREAT for Linux)
* assorted video cards and sound cards
* a few old FPM SIMMs
But I don't have any spare cases, monitors, hard drives, or CD-ROM drives. I seriously doubt it would be worth the money to build systems around these, so they just sit and collect dust...
- Rob Cottrell
d
www.HearMySoulSpeak.com
At www.newdealinc.com you can download an all-assembly software suite that will run on both old and new versions of MS-DOS. It contains a GUI similar to win95, an office suite, and a web browser, and it runs quickly even on a 286! It requires only a few Mb of HDD space, and will run with only 640K RAM. If you can run DOS on the machine, you can run this suite. For setting up old machines for word processing, generic web browsing, etc... this is a great way to salvage 286s. It'll run under win95, so you can test it out on your real machine first, too.
I live in New Mexico which is (terrible Latin pun ahead) state-a non grata to our carrier, US West so all I can do is live vicariously through all you people with your DSL and cable modems. Damn you US West! I'm just hoping that the merger/takeover by Qwest will improve things. :)
Sorry, just had to get that off my chest.
Even though this 486 is orders of magnitude slower than our new PII 400, she wanted the old box.
I think that kids would like to have a slow box of their own than to have to share a faster box with others.
----
Wind and temp at my house
Hey, Windows users, there is no such thing as "forward" slash, there is only slash and backslash.
Did anyone stop and consider what these legions of 486s in every Slashdotters' basement are doing to the environment? Granted, putting them in a landfill or burning them isn't a very good idea, but dedicating a 486 Beowulf cluster to SETI@Home or distributed.net could be using up natural resources or causing the construction of new nuclear power plants or dams. Modern computers should be spending time in sleep mode, not running processor-intensive screensavers. Okay a solar/tide/geothermal/etc. - powered Beowulf cluster for scientific use would be pretty cool. :)
Just this weekend I ran into the problem of computer waste. I was at Best Buy considering a new 128MB PC100 DIMM to replace my 64MB, non-PC100 one. But then I got to thinking, shouldn't I ditch Netscape and thereby free up system memory, rather than just buy more? Isn't upgrading hardware the stupid, bloatware/Microsoft way? Do I really need this memory?
Then I considered the sweatshop laborers who make $~1/MB DIMMs possible. (I fear the fantastic memory price drops have more to do with decreasing standards of living for the laborers than with some miraculous advance in manufacturing technology. But I could be wrong.) And the toxins that go into making ICs. And the lax environmental regulations in Malaysia, China, and other tech-exporting countries. You get the idea.
So I left Best Buy with all my money and no new chips. Instead, I'll speed up my Linux system by erasing Netscape and working on Gzilla to replace it. I'm happier having less junk.
Where to old computers go?
Silicon heaven. Duh.