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Anyone here collects old computers?

Found a pic of my Compaq Portable running Geoworks. This is the one that I installed an Intel I-386 card. I sold it on eBay around 5 years ago.
 

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What about old workstations?

I used to collect NeXT Stations and NeXT Cubes, as well as Silicon Graphic workstations like the Indigo, Indigo 2, Indy, and O2.

All from the 90's.

Man they were cool looking gear. Had the pedigree too, being discards from our country's national labs and three letter intelligence communities.

Do a wiki search on these guys to learn more about their use.

Of course Hollywood used SGIs, and the NeXT machines evolved into Macs running OS X.
 
dont collect old computers, however I do have a shoebox filled with all kinds of CPUs.

there is a neat old TRS-80 sitting at one of the recycling center stores in my neighborhood.
 
You should get it. They were sold in droves and there is a lot of associated hardware and software available on the used market for almost every model.
 
I have a Commodore 64 and a bunch of 386s. I also have a processor sitting on top of my quad-core box that's labelled "ATHLON 386," and seems to be manufactured out of ceramic.
 
It's an "Olvietti" M290S. There is an "on-board" sound, but on a loud speaker. I have V.G.A. output ob-board.

Can I get Netscape on Windows 3.1?
 
I remember the turbo button. I don't think that I ever had at my home a P.C. with the turbo button. One intresting facts about my first P.C. was that with all that was a P1 it had AT, not PS/2 connectors (9 pin connector for mouse and D.I.N. connector for the keyboard).
 
garww said:
Those are 16-bit AT ISA slots and can take 8-bit XT cards, too. I'm not sure the memory slots are period (AT vintage)? I had some xt clone and skipped the AT for the 386 with SIP chip memory.

Was it the clones that gave us the TURBO button ?
Click to expand...

The original IBM PC ran a fast 4.77 Mhz. The IBM PC XT, if I remember correctly, used the same processor but clone manufacturers pushed it to 10 Mhz. The AT followed and it was basically the 286. The IBM AT ran at 8 Mhz (got that from Wikipedia) but clone manufacturers pushed it to 12 Mhz.

The 386 came in two variations 386sx and 386dx. The sx didn't have a math co-processor. A vague memory says it ran at different speeds and was typically labelled as 386sx-16, or 386sx-20 for 16 Mhz to 20 Mhz. The 486 went from 33 to 66 Mhz.

This is mostly from memory which is spotty at best.
 
quneur said:
You may have to get an older version perhaps 4.0 or .9.
Click to expand...

And then you'd face the problem that many modern web pages won't work with it. It just won't do as a general-purpose web browser now. You'd have to be picky about where you go with it.
 
VFib said:
I used to collect NeXT Stations and NeXT Cubes, as well as Silicon Graphic workstations like the Indigo, Indigo 2, Indy, and O2.

All from the 90's.

Man they were cool looking gear. Had the pedigree too, being discards from our country's national labs and three letter intelligence communities.

Do a wiki search on these guys to learn more about their use.

Of course Hollywood used SGIs, and the NeXT machines evolved into Macs running OS X.
Click to expand...

I picked up a pair of working HP Visualize graphics workstations at a company auction for $50 or $60, the ones in the bigger, server-looking cases. Took parts from one and converted the other into a dual processor (2x PIII 1GHz Slot 1) machine. With the SCSI Ultra 160 drives it was a pretty hot machine for a while. Noisy beast though.... The graphics cards in these things are about as big as some motherboards I've seen.
 
whoaru99 said:
I picked up a pair of working HP Visualize graphics workstations at a company auction..........

The graphics cards in these things are about as big as some motherboards I've seen.
Click to expand...

It's amazing how big things used to be. This is a hard drive platter from the way back years :)

bigPlatter.jpg
 
KLH9 said:
It's amazing how big things used to be. This is a hard drive platter from the way back years :)

bigPlatter.jpg
Click to expand...

Wow! That's huge...the HPs are not that scale of huge. Roughly 2x or maybe 3x the total size of the typical "tower" computer. Mostly in width and depth...sort of like a double wide, long version.

What did a platter like that hold? A couple megabytes...for the whole stack?
 
whoaru99 said:
Wow! That's huge...the HPs are not that scale of huge. Roughly 2x or maybe 3x the total size of the typical "tower" computer. Mostly in width and depth...sort of like a double wide, long version.

What did a platter like that hold? A couple megabytes...for the whole stack?
Click to expand...

That is a platter out of a Bryant 4000 hard drive. It is 39" across.

There were 24 platters that held a total of 196 mb of storage.

It was a "floor standing" hard drive :)

The drive stood about 5' tall, 6' across, and 7' deep. It weighed about 4000 lbs.

From what I understand, the hard drive "leased" for about $3500.00 a month (in 1960 dollars)
 
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