Retro / Vintage PC computers

[jeremyc]

Somewhere in the loft is my Tandy TRS80 Model II from about 1979.



I'm pretty sure I've no longer got a cassette player to load software any more.

[eltawater]

I don't understand the current phase of people discovering 486 / early pentium era PCs and the joys of Dos games and windows 95, complete with irq conflicts and fragile soundcards.

It was a right royal ballache the first time around and I don't really want to spend my middle age reliving autoexec.bat and config.sys nightmares.

[Clockwork Cupcake]

eltawater said:

I don't understand the current phase of people discovering 486 / early pentium era PCs and the joys of Dos games and windows 95, complete with irq conflicts and fragile soundcards.

It was a right royal ballache the first time around and I don't really want to spend my middle age reliving autoexec.bat and config.sys nightmares.

Yeah it was indeed a ballache. I was there, man.

But don't underestimate nostalgia.

Seriously, it's no different to classic cars. It really isn't.

[Doofus]

Clockwork Cupcake said:

Seriously, it's no different to classic cars. It really isn't.

If you took your old computer to a country pub on a sunny Sunday afternoon, I bet you wouldn't get as much appreciation.

Edited by Doofus on Saturday 19th October 19:36

[Mr E]

williamp said:

Years ago I had a hard which I was able to "split" and run win98 on one pat, and Win 2000 (the then current version) on the other part.

Can this be done with a modern hard drivre? Then you can do old games with good memory and processing power.

You can build as many boot partitions as you want.
Frankly, I wouldn’t bother. I’d just spin a virtual machine up.

[Mr E]

eltawater said:

The trapdoor expansion can easily be swapped for a pistorm32-lite which opens up a whole new world of performance.

That’s really bloody cool.

[Clockwork Cupcake]

Doofus said:

If you took your old computer to a country pub on a sunny Sunday afternoon, I bet you wouldn't get as much appreciation.

And if you took your MGB to a vintage computer meet then likewise.

I think my comparison is valid. There is no accounting for nostalgia.

Anyway, I'm saying that retro computing is a thing and have cited several YouTube vids to support it. It's a thing and whether or not it is a thing is not up for debate.

[eltawater]

Mr E said:

williamp said:

Years ago I had a hard which I was able to "split" and run win98 on one pat, and Win 2000 (the then current version) on the other part.

Can this be done with a modern hard drivre? Then you can do old games with good memory and processing power.

You can build as many boot partitions as you want.
Frankly, I wouldn’t bother. I’d just spin a virtual machine up.

The biggest blocker is likely to be the complete lack of drivers for the modern hardware for use with Windows 98/2000. As suggested above, use a VM instead and the abstracted hardware of the VM will be fully supported.

Or there's a few websites where you can play old DOS games in a browser using dosbox.

[Doofus]

Clockwork Cupcake said:

Doofus said:

If you took your old computer to a country pub on a sunny Sunday afternoon, I bet you wouldn't get as much appreciation.

And if you took your MGB to a vintage computer meet then likewise.

I think my comparison is valid. There is no accounting for nostalgia.

Anyway, I'm saying that retro computing is a thing and have cited several YouTube vids to support it. It's a thing and whether or not it is a thing is not up for debate.

I was just poking fun.

I think you know I was involved in coding and gaming companies for a while, and as a result I know plenty of people who are into retro tech. As well as lots of other 'niche' hobbies.

But I agree with you, that nostalgia works differently for everyone, and that's a good thing, IMO.

Otherwise, there wouldn't enough MGBs to go around.

[BlueMR2]

Still got most of my old computers downstairs.

Pentium 90 iirc, celeron 333 the cartridge type, a core 2 duo system as well.

Not got the 286 anymore, not quite sure where it went.

[eltawater]

Clockwork Cupcake said:

eltawater said:

I don't understand the current phase of people discovering 486 / early pentium era PCs and the joys of Dos games and windows 95, complete with irq conflicts and fragile soundcards.

It was a right royal ballache the first time around and I don't really want to spend my middle age reliving autoexec.bat and config.sys nightmares.

Yeah it was indeed a ballache. I was there, man.

But don't underestimate nostalgia.

Seriously, it's no different to classic cars. It really isn't.

Ctrl-Alt-Rees has published a series of videos recently on his youtube channel where he goes through the joys of installing Red Hat 6 on his vintage Tiny Computers PC. Going through the pain of trying to work out what monitor you have and clockchip configuration just to achieve the basic standard of SVGA resolutions!
It really brings home how far we've come with Linux installations and how spoilt we've been for a long time with USB bootable live installs and the convenience of yum and apt.

[S6PNJ]

Still got my first PC - a 386DX40 which I upgraded with a 387 maths co-processor!! Also have a lot of other old machines, Pentium 2 (from memory - that's the one with the CPU on a daughterboard) and various other AMD and Intel machines, ISA cards, network cards with BNC connectors, Soundblaster audio cards... the list goes on.... My first laptop (Pentium 3 900Mhz - upgraded to 1.3Ghz (I think - or was it 1.2Ghz?)) also still in use for one or two small tasks. In the cupboard is my old rubber keyboard 48k speccy and an old ZX81 with 16k RAM pack!

If they are worth thousands, I should really list them on eBay but I fear their true value is less than a few quid...

[51mes]

Had to downsize when I moved up & in with Ms Simes. Out went my. IBM series 1 (64kb on Baird with 384kb expansion and a cassette port), my ABIT bp6 system, and boxes on old isa and PCI cards. Scisi tape, matrix VGA cards you name it all handed on to anyone who wanted it.

Fun times...

[Drive Blind]

I work for a large IT asset management company.

Barely a day goes by where my eye catches something retro coming through our doors. We do everything from phones to super computers.
Unfortunately theres no mechanism where i can keep any of it or squirrel it away just to have a play with. Everything is tracked, tested,securely wiped, etc.

I do still have an HP Elitebook 6930p in everyday use. It was preowned when I got it over 13 years ago. Battery life is pretty much zero though.

[Clockwork Cupcake]

I am still monumentally pissed off that I threw out all my ISA, AGP, and PCI cards. I own a house with a large loft. I could have literally bunged them all up in the loft. And cases, PSUs, drives, and all sorts.

I thought I was being Feng Shui or some st.

Had I not I would have original SoundBlaster cards and WaveTable addons and all sorts of esoteric stuff. Like early Voodoo cards and Matrox Millennium II and my whole history.

I don't regret selling stuff where I got coin. I regret landfilling stuff.

[Clockwork Cupcake]

Drive Blind said:

I do still have an HP Elitebook 6930p in everyday use. It was preowned when I got it over 13 years ago. Battery life is pretty much zero though.

Solid laptop. I own one. Have recently replaced the battery. They are still available.

[mike9009]

Clockwork Cupcake said:

mike9009 said:

Is that actually worth something....I think it was retired rather than broken.....with a 486 something or other......

Definitely. Decent original 486 systems are like £200-odd now.

Not a vast sum but not zero either

The 486 was binned, I meant the 8086. 20mb hard drive and all....

[speedyman]

I payed £250 for a 20MB hard drive new in 1983. It was an add on to my Amstrad 1512. Which only had two 360k floppy drives. All long gone, along with various Apricot computers etc.

[stevensdrs]

I have always built my own computers and still have a lot of them still in daily use. They have all been maximised during their near 30 years of use. Although I still have a 386 unit, that is retired now but 2 Athlon powered pc's continue on, running windows 10. I have a media pc which started with XP but now runs on win 7, and a Pentium 2 "gaming pc" which can run windows 10 but is usually on win 7. I have boxes of add on cards and video cards in all formats. I still have somes scsi cards and drives along with parallel port scanners and zip drives. I have a load of processors ranging from a 386sx through all the pentium series and core 2 duos. I wish I had kept all of my old motherboards as these seem to fetch a fair price thesse days.
The latest machine, I built this year is a beast running an i7 on an Aurus elite board with 32gb of memory and a 2tb nvme with water cooling and all the trick lighting. It's state of the art and fast, very fast, running win 11. When you look at the evolution that has taken place, it's night and day, but I stilll like using the old stuff.

[Digger]

Surprisingly no mention of a Commodore PET . . . yet!

Appear on Ebay at bonkers prices it seems.