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Computer Antiques

Tex Long

By Tex Long
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Hagbard Celine

Hagbard Celine 10923

Posted
Posted

macintosh serial #232 purchased in the moore-hill apple store, september 1984.  my brother has it, turns it on once a month, it still runs, clock is still good.

have a Texas Instruments laptop ca. 1992 with win 3.1 on it, but haven't tried to power it up in 15 years.

my yamaha amp purchased in 1986 just died, does that count?

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El Diablo

El Diablo 4232

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3 hours ago, dingleberryswitzer said:

Im prerty sure my dad has a old ti scientific calculator from the 70s

One of my brothers has his HP scientific calculator from the mid 70's. He's an engineer and bought it while he was in college. Came with a wooden case for storage and a power cord. I think it cost him upwards of $300 back then. 

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Hellraiser97

Hellraiser97 183

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On 4/11/2018 at 10:43 PM, blacklab said:

I still have my vic-20 and Apple IIc.

I should fire them up and see if they still work

I pulled a Pong machine from my Dad's house over Christmas.  Damn thing still works!

Been thinking about buying a dead C64 and putting a RaspberryPi in there for fun.

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RamjetFDO

RamjetFDO 10577

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Still have my Atari 400 that I "upgraded" to have the same memory as the Atari 800... I even swapped out the crappy membrane keyboard for a real tactile one.  Hell - still in the original box, with the cassette drive and 5 1/4" floppy drive ... and BOXES of "acquired" software/games on those (at the time) expensive floppies.  My guess is they've all deteriorated/derezzed/otherwise gone bad.  

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utee94

utee94 15862

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38 minutes ago, RamjetFDO said:

Still have my Atari 400 that I "upgraded" to have the same memory as the Atari 800... I even swapped out the crappy membrane keyboard for a real tactile one.  Hell - still in the original box, with the cassette drive and 5 1/4" floppy drive ... and BOXES of "acquired" software/games on those (at the time) expensive floppies.  My guess is they've all deteriorated/derezzed/otherwise gone bad.  

Ha!  I do, too.  Exact same upgrades on memory and keyboard.  I have the cassette tape drive but never got a floppy drive because I'd moved on to my Apple IIc at that point.

My first computer ever was the Timex Sinclair 1000, bought it with lawn-mowing money, and I still have it, too.  

Also still have the Apple IIc, and a Mac512K that I "inherited" from a computer lab at UT.

The Timex, Atari 400, and Apple IIc all still worked last I checked them maybe 2-3 years ago?  I have an old 20" Zenith CRT TV that I use as a monitor for that, and for my collection of VHS and Betamax VCRs...

 

 

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utee94

utee94 15862

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Thinking about 5  1/4 floppies and how "expensive" they were, anyone else remember saving money buying 1S2D disks, and using a hole punch to make them double sided?  I mean, I'm not quite punch card ancient, but thinking about hacks like that definitely reminds me I'm old AF.  :)

 

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TexasEd

TexasEd 8077

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Posted (edited)

I had a Commodore 64 and a 128 back in the day.

My wife still has one of those all-in-one iMacs  I think it is purple,  I cant get her to let it go.

 

I have an old Motorola Star-Tac cell phone.  It doesn't take any space though. 

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Francisco 2.0

Francisco 2.0 32428

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I'm (relatively) new to the computer game.  Got my first in late '95...from a vendor in Computer Shopper.  Still have that computer, and most every one I've built since.  Even have my dual Celeron 300@450 desktop in the attic.  

In 2010 I got out of the building my own computer thing and became an Apple whore, and started collecting them.  Right now, I have around 30 iMacs, MacBooks, MacBook Pros, and Mac Pros of varying vintage.  My oldest iMac is a 2003, my oldest Mac Pro is 2004, and my oldest MacBook is 2005. 

Thinkpads.  My oldest is a 2001 T23, and my newest is a T430.  In between I have A31p, T30, T40, T42, X60, and an X301.  I've not fired up some of them in years.

One thing I've done to show the kids how things used to be is create VM's of old OS's.  I have every version of Windows in a VM from 3.1 to present day, and Dos 5/6.2 as well.  

 

 

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The University

The University 851

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you may be surprised how durable many of those old systems are. in fact, a thick layer of dust may have helped preserve the components while the system was in storage. however, rust and corrosion (usually from batteries or capacitors) can make it hard to repair.

one of the biggest hurdles for new collectors is figuring out how to get old software images and how to put those images in media that can be read by the machine.

there's a niche market out there for creating peipherals based on modern technology that can be used in vintage systems. for example, I have a card that i can put in any apple ii with slots that lets me use usb flash drives to load software images that can be exposed to the system as either a floppy drive or a scsi hard drive by the apple ii. there are also various video adapters that will let you plug your old system into a vga/dvi/hdmi display port.

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Hellraiser97

Hellraiser97 183

Posted
Posted
I had a Commodore 64 and a 128 back in the day.
My wife still has one of those all-in-one iMacs  I think it is purple,  I cant get her to let it go.
 
I have an old Motorola Star-Tac cell phone.  It doesn't take any space though. 
Star-tac had the best sound quality of any mobile phone I've ever had.

I do not like OU

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atomheartbevo

atomheartbevo 89799

Posted
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On 9/30/2018 at 3:37 PM, Francisco 2.0 said:

One thing I've done to show the kids how things used to be is create VM's of old OS's.  I have every version of Windows in a VM from 3.1 to present day, and Dos 5/6.2 as well.  

Yep, I have a wide collection of VMs from DOS (well I normally use DOSBox) to Windows 3.x to present day, plus OS/2 (2.x, 3.0, 4.0, 4.52), plus I've got a bunch of Mac VMs (OS 9, some earlier stuff, etc.) and a few Linux.

The reason why I was bumping this thread, I actually had to make a VM on the fly and that was interesting - we were at a friend's house earlier today, and she and her sister were going through their dad's stuff, and had come across a bunch of floppies with data files on them, and they wanted to know if the data was important or anything because he stored his work (writing and other stuff) on floppies well into the 2010s. A few of them were marked "family tree" which is why they asked me to help because they know I know genealogy and software.

They happened to have an old IBM USB floppy drive for a ThinkPad from probably the T40 era (I need to get one for my ThinkPad X1C6 as it kind of matches), so I got on her laptop, looked at some of the files, grabbed VirtualBox, grabbed a Windows 98SE ISO, and within 20 minutes, had a VM.  They were kind of watching and noticed that I rattled off a product key as I was typing it in, and I'm like "every IT guy in the late 90s had the same product key memorized".  Grabbed a close-enough version of an app that could read what I thought it was off and was able to view the data.

I have went years without needing to do something like that, but I kind of impressed myself.  I could have just taken them home and pulled a VM off of my NAS and pulled the data.  Well, I'm still going to have to do that since some of the floppies had data files I wasn't familiar with and I was going to have to research them, but kind of cool to just do it on the fly.

I really need to teach my 10 year-old a bunch of this stuff.  And need to teach him about all of the stuff on our NAS and on my cloud accounts, as if something happened to me, I don't know if anybody would look at what I've written down.  I have drilled it into a friend's head that there are a few USB drives he needs to destroy.

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