# Old computing.



## Randy-Darkshade (Mar 30, 2013)

Just curious to know if anyone else on these forums have any working old computers, if so what have you got?

I have an IBM Think Pad 370c on windows 95. This one was not working when I picked it up. I got this one for free after someone replied to my add on freecycle. The problem was that it's hard drive had somehow become disconnected. The only fault with it is that it's battery no longer holds charge.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uwHwxwmUTMU

I also have a Compaq Presario 1246. It was on Windows 2000 when I made the video however since then I have put it on windows 98 as it ran better than windows 2000. This one also has a faulty battery, so faulty that the laptop will not power on with the battery connected. I paid 1 british pound for this one on ebay and it had windows XP on it. It barely ran XP.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cHnLocvjWtY

I also have a Compaq Armada E500 this one has windows 98. This was a non working laptop when I bought it on ebay but all I needed to do was install a hard drive and windows 98, Still has a windows 98 COA on the bottom. It's battery does still hold some charge.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WHspe-68OLQ

I have another Armada E500 that I put win XP on, but then decided to restore it and put windows 2000 back on it. This one works surprisingly well online. I managed to install the latest firefox on it but couldn't install adobe flash so no youtube or anything on it. But as for viewing websites it worked surprisingly well. I don't have a video of it yet. Oh and this one also works via a wireless adapter.

I also have a windows 98 desktop which I just managed to get an Ethernet PCI card working on, though loading websites is funny. The wireless adapter I have also works on this computer. Again no video of it but I might just because it's weird looking at things online through this machine.


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## AshleyAshes (Mar 30, 2013)

But this isn't interesting or retro at all, it's just unremarkable obsolete PC hardware.  You're not bringing life and use to Apple II's, Commodore 64's, Compaq Portable's (One of the few IBM compatibles that is remarkable) or anything like that.  This stuff you have here is just... Crap.  It's like showing up to a classic car show with an 1989 Geo Metro and being all 'Check it out guys.  Even still has the original motor! :3'.


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## Randy-Darkshade (Mar 30, 2013)

AshleyAshes said:


> But this isn't interesting or retro at all, it's just unremarkable obsolete PC hardware.  You're not bringing life and use to Apple II's, Commodore 64's, Compaq Portable's (One of the few IBM compatibles that is remarkable) or anything like that.  This stuff you have here is just... Crap.  It's like showing up to a classic car show with an 1989 Geo Metro and being all 'Check it out guys.  Even still has the original motor! :3'.



Well that's just you opinion. Not that you ever have anything nice to say to me anyway so I didn't expect anything else from you.


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## Runefox (Mar 30, 2013)

I've got an IBM PS/2 sitting in my closet waiting for a new floppy controller to be installed so it can be used again. Upgraded from a 486 33MHz SX to a DX4 100, from 8MB RAM to 32MB. Got a Sound Blaster 16, Crystal CS4232 and ESS ES1868 to shove into it, too. Should be a beast for DOS games when I actually get around to fixing it up... It actually runs Jetfighter 2, which is astonishing.


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## Kalmor (Mar 30, 2013)

I have an old acorn PC gathering dust in the attic somewhere. I can't remember the specs of it at all but I do know that it was one of the first computers I ever owned.


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## Randy-Darkshade (Mar 30, 2013)

Raptros said:


> I have an old acorn PC gathering dust in the attic somewhere. I can't remember the specs of it at all but I do know that it was one of the first computers I ever owned.



I'd love to get hold of something like that.


I just put a version of opera on my windows 98, doesn't work much better. I can't get it any bigger than 16 bit colors. Which is why the graphics look so shit on it. I tried a 64 bit graphics card but it did the same thing, only goes up to 16 colours.


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## kayfox (Apr 1, 2013)

Randy-Darkshade said:


> I can't get it any bigger than 16 bit colors. Which is why the graphics look so shit on it.



Once upon a time 16 bit colour was bold and beautiful, beating out the stellar graphics of the Amiga OCS, which only had 4,096 colours.

When you only have so many colours, you spend a bit more effort getting something out of them.


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## Randy-Darkshade (Apr 1, 2013)

kayfox said:


> Once upon a time 16 bit colour was bold and beautiful, beating out the stellar graphics of the Amiga OCS, which only had 4,096 colours.
> 
> When you only have so many colours, you spend a bit more effort getting something out of them.



It has webTV installed on it which was something that came ready with windows 98, however it requires 256 colors to run. So there must be a way to up the colors.


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## AshleyAshes (Apr 1, 2013)

Randy-Darkshade said:


> It has webTV installed on it which was something that came ready with windows 98, however it requires 256 colors to run. So there must be a way to up the colors.



But 16 bit color is already more than 256 colors...


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## Randy-Darkshade (Apr 1, 2013)

AshleyAshes said:


> But 16 bit color is already more than 256 colors...



It probably means 16 colours when I looked in the screen settings and not 16 bit, which is my own error.


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## Randy-Darkshade (Apr 1, 2013)

Fixed the graphics problem.


Helps to download and install the actual driver for the video card I was using.


Shut up....before anyone says anything...shut up.


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## Runefox (Apr 1, 2013)

Pff, drivers. Honestly, I don't know why Windows 3.1 et al couldn't just use standard SVGA (for which they had support) to achieve high res/colour graphics. Hell, Duke Nukem 3D for DOS can be tweaked to run at 1280x960 at 256 colours, no special drivers required. Yes, a driver would be required for DirectDraw / Direct3D acceleration, but GDI itself didn't need that, especially since most early cards didn't support it anyway. As of 1994, VBE 2.0 enabled cards to run at 24-bit True Colour with full linear framebuffer access. It's obvious that many early display drivers only ever just activated those features despite being a VESA standard. Even without VBE 2.0, an SVGA-compliant graphics card since 1990 should at least be capable of 1024x768 at 256 colours by spec.

According to Ye Olde Wiki Paedia, it's ostensibly because VBE prior to 3.0 (1998) required real mode access rather than protected mode (Windows ran in protected mode, DOS in real mode), but in the same breath says that while doing so causes a major performance penalty, most vendors did it anyway instead of writing their own protected mode access. I'd have rathered the ability to at least increase the resolution and colour depth to 1024x768 @ 256 colours with a performance hit while searching for a driver than be stuck at 640x480 @ 16. Guess MSFT didn't see it that way.


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## BlueStreak98 (Apr 1, 2013)

My father has a tendency to never throw anything away, so my parents' basement is filled with old computers.

There's an unidentified Canon that runs Windows 3.1, along with an Epson laptop of similar vintage. A couple old computers that run Windows 95 (an unidentified brand and a Packard Bell), a Compaq Windows 98 machine with a dead hard drive, and a couple old XP units that are uniformly unremarkable. I personally think it's kind of fun to dig them up and get them running, just because learning how to use them actually makes your life easier on newer units.


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## ArielMT (Apr 1, 2013)

I have in the still-used-today department:

- a TRS-80 Model 100 laptop manufactured in May of 1985 with 24 KB RAM and WriteROM,
- an Apple Macintosh SE/30 with 17 MB RAM and an external color monitor,
- an SGI Octane with IRIX 6.5 and a few Nekoware packages installed,
- a Sun Microsystems SPARCStation 20 with 96 MB RAM and NetBSD replacing the SunOS it came with, and
- a Compaq Presario 1620 laptop with Windows 98 and the LCD removed,

all connected to the Internet.

Edit: The Model 100 is special because it's a hand-me-down from my grandfather that's still practical even today.  Also, while it's not directly connected to the Internet, it connects through a serial null-modem to any of my Unix and Linux systems, and I can put an Internet-connected shell on the port.

I also have an Amiga 500 with 1.0 MB RAM and a SCSI hard drive sidecar.  I want to replace it with an IDE hard drive and NIC, but they're pretty hard to find.


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## dietrc70 (Apr 2, 2013)

@ArielMT, I was able to connect a Tandy 1000 (7.16Mhz 8088 ) with an 8-bit SCSI adapter to an 10K enterprise Ultra2 SCSI hard drive (basically the equivalent of a RAM-disk!).  I couldn't get it to boot because it was far, far, too large for the BIOS.  The backwards compatibility of SCSI is amazing, and you can probably use any number of SCSI drives from ebay with your Amiga or the Mac, for that matter.

I try to use SCSI for vintage systems for this reason.  IDE drives have to be of the same "vintage" as the system and unlike the computers themselves, tend to wear out and become impossible to find.


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## ArielMT (Apr 2, 2013)

dietrc70 said:


> @ArielMT, I was able to connect a Tandy 1000 (7.16Mhz 8088 ) with an 8-bit SCSI adapter to an 10K enterprise Ultra2 SCSI hard drive (basically the equivalent of a RAM-disk!).  I couldn't get it to boot because it was far, far, too large for the BIOS.  The backwards compatibility of SCSI is amazing, and you can probably use any number of SCSI drives from ebay with your Amiga or the Mac, for that matter.
> 
> I try to use SCSI for vintage systems for this reason.  IDE drives have to be of the same "vintage" as the system and unlike the computers themselves, tend to wear out and become impossible to find.



I completely forgot about that.  The drawback of SCSI hard disks is they tend to be expensive, especially for use in spaces that don't have room for interface adapters.

Also, a Tandy 1000?  One of the originals that came with MS-DOS 2.11.22 and was more compatible with the IBM PCjr than the original PC?  I broke my DOS teeth and learned the intricacies of DOS commands, batch programming, and GW-BASIC programming on such a system, but mine never had anything for storage but a single floppy drive.


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## LizardKing (Apr 2, 2013)

ArielMT said:


> I have in the still-used-today department:
> 
> - a TRS-80 Model 100 laptop manufactured in May of 1985 with 24 KB RAM and WriteROM,
> - an Apple Macintosh SE/30 with 17 MB RAM and an external color monitor,
> ...



So what do you use these old things for?

Also I have a BBC Micro that I've mentioned on here before, but now I have a proper camera I might try and get some better pictures of it.


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## ArielMT (Apr 2, 2013)

LizardKing said:


> So what do you use these old things for?



The Model T is for offline writing, mainly.  I just dump text files from it to my main system when I get home.

The Mac is a toy.  I want eventually to get some serious programming on it, porting some nice programs or writing programs from scratch.

I'm using the Octane to learn IRIX (especially how it differs from Linux and modern Unix systems) and Blender.

I'm not sure yet what I want the Sun to do.  It's a classic pizza box, but both it and its monitor are heavy beasts.  The first thing I need to do is get a new desk for it.

The Compaq is mainly used as a VNC terminal.


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## iconmaster (Apr 3, 2013)

I have a Tandy PT-210 that I can't get to work, mainly bacuase of all the teletypewriter parts I can't properly service. Other than that, I have a HP 95LX palmtop that I use with somewhat regularity.


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## dietrc70 (Apr 3, 2013)

@ArielMT

It was actually a Tandy 1000SX, which was similar to the original except for slightly higher clockrate, onboard DMA, MS-DOS 3.2, and easy upgrade to 640KB.  It had the same PC jr. compatibility, which was a great feature for the many games (like King's Quest III) that would use the 16 color 320x200 mode.  You might remember the hideous four-color (puce, magenta, red) CGA graphics that most other PC users had at the time.

Old parallel SCSI drives are very cheap used and are usually very well made, especially ones made after ~2000.  If you have the necessary adapters and terminators, you can connect almost any SCSI device to another.  You're right that they take can take up a lot of space.  I needed a mess of adapters to connect the 5Mhz 8-bit SCSI card to my 80Mhz-capable 16-bit SCSI Seagate drive.  I was afraid to mount it internally because it might have overloaded the 1000SX's power supply.  The main problem is that the drives that still work, or are affordable, are so huge that the BIOS of early computers may not be able to boot from them, or they may just have too many blocks for the OS to address.

@LizardKing
I think of them as historical artifacts.  Many early computers, like the IBM PC/XT/AT, were built at a time when a "computer" was a serious capital investment that was expected to run for decades and be easily repaired.  They often weighed a ton, were built like tanks, and said "MADE IN USA" on the back.  The fact that these devices were so historically important, and that nothing like them will be made again makes it pretty amazing to see one boot up and respond to commands just as it did twenty or thirty years ago.


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## Clancy (Apr 30, 2013)

cvbncvb ncvbncv bncvbn


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## Seekrit (Apr 30, 2013)

Damn, you guys got some old stuff. When does something become old enough that it's no longer shit, but retro?

I got a single core AMD beast in the attic. Until a few weeks ago I still used it without too many problems. Must've got 10 years out of it, now it's just a backup should my new laptop break.


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## Runefox (Apr 30, 2013)

I'd say it crosses the threshold when a significant shift in technology occurs and makes it so that the older hardware can no longer adequately perform modern tasks. For example, running Windows 8 on a Pentium 166 is probably not going to work out very well (though it WOULD be rather amusing to try...). Though by that definition, all 32-bit hardware will soon be obsolete, not that it makes them all that interesting on the whole. I doubt anyone is going to consider a Pentium IV a retro CPU, more or less because it does almost exactly the same job as a Pentium III or Core Solo.

I guess it's a combination between the generation of the hardware and the range of software that runs properly on it for the time, however broad or narrow that scope may be.


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## CynicalCirno (Apr 30, 2013)

A friend of mine found a working ZX spectrum a few months ago, with a Hebrew instruction manual.
My father used to have an Atari but I don't remember which.
I am interested in getting an Amiga for tracking modules, but I doubt I'll find one in a working condition. I went to the market once or twice and found some very old consoles, but they didn't work.


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## ToeClaws (May 3, 2013)

I used to have a lot of stuff, but thinned it out.  There used to be a working Commodore 64, IBM XT 8088, Nabu terminal, Intellivision, Atari Ultra Pong system (with colour... oooo), and a Collecovision.  Oh, and a TRS-80 with monitor and expansion bay (still have that one).

At work, I have the "CPU Museum" at my cubicle, which has CPUs dating from 1978 until about 2005.  I'd get a picture of it to attach, but I don't have a camera at work today.

The rest of the old stuff I have is just... meh - kinda just crappy stuff like Ashley said.  The most interesting of that would be the 486 - it has a 5x86 CPU overclocked to 160MHz and has a unique motherboard that took EDO RAM and had both PCI and VESA local bus slots on it.  I'd never seen one like it before, which is the only reason I kept it around.


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