Old Computers, and other Memorabilia ... Walk Down Memory Lane

Question

I've been in the computer industry for a long time ... and one of the ways I minimize my mid-life crisis is to collect old computers and software! I cut my programming and gaming teeth on these vintage computers.

I've managed to acquire some of the following computers: Commodore Pet, Commodore VIC 20, Commodore 64, Atari 800, Compaq Portable (weighs about as much as 20 laptops), IBM, as well as some old gaming systems from Atari, Intel and Coleco. I've also managed to get my hands on some old software like Windows 1.0, early versions of DOS, and some games I used to play, like Wasteland and Bard's Tale.

As developments teams get younger and younger, I sometimes think to myself, how good they have it! Now days there are only a handful of computer brands, and even then you really only have a couple of real OS environments, Windows, OSX, and Linux!

That aside, my company is moving to new offices next month, and I want to setup some of these old computers so my team can see some history in action.

I realize this is off-topic, and not really a programming question, but I could not think of a better place to solicit some feedback.

I'm interested in knowing if anyone else has this same quirk when it comes to collecting old computers, how you might display them in your office or work enviroment, and any other comments you may have!

Additional Comments

I usually have the most luck on ebay ... but would be interested in hearing where others have managed to locate old hardware and software.

Answer 1

Nerd Alert!

Haha sorry couldn't help it :)

Answer 2

If any of them work, I'd try to actually connect them. Playing DonkeyKong or PacMan is better than just watching the boxes, and some games are fun even in low-res 40x24 character resoluion.

Answer 3

I am only 23... but I have started already :P

Currently, I have an atar portfolio, a sgi octane, an apple II, alpha ds10.

I really missed out on all the late 80s fun, as I wasn't exposed to computers until my early teens, so I am trying to make up for lost time :-)

Have a personally love for MIPS SGI machines - great heaters in winter :-D

Don't really display them... no one in the house shares my interest :P When I move out there will quite possibly be a Rack of Awesome Machines.

Answer 4

Well, I started programming in 1964, and here are still places where you can get close to the metal and suffer the frustrations of beating the machine. Android might provide a buzz for some, or indeed working with a cell phone OS (Symbian, Microsoft) is equally as challenging as working with personal computers in the 80s.

Yes, I've got an old Acorn System One and a heavily modified Sinclair ZX 81, but the guys at the office already have Texas Instruments development boards for the next generation of cell phones, so they're not that interested, which is a shame.

For larger equipment, the various computer museums are struggling with limited finance to keep the old machines running. There's one at Bletchley in the UK which is worth a visit - you get to see the World War 2 code cracking machines as well; the earliest electronic computers in the world.

Answer 5

Ha, yup! I was struck by some sentimentality around when I turned 30. As I had an OK economy then I started to collect some old computers. It basically started when I managed to get my hands on an old Sinclair ZX80. Collection

Answer 6

Although I haven't acquired much of a collection (yet!), occasionally I buy up some old processors.

I guess I started collecting back in middle school (this is back in the late 90s), buying the Pentium 60s and 486s. Of course, this was when Pentium 133 was the uberfast processor on the market, so I guess I wasn't really buying old processors.

When the conditions are right (read: the school was dumping old computer equipment), I would go out with some screwdrivers (which the teacher let me borrow) to pry out 286s, 386s, or whatever I could get my hands on. I do remember I picked up a working PC/AT with a 6 MHz 286 back then. This was back in 1996.

Recently, I just added a Xeon and Celeron (Coppermine core?) a few months ago. Akihabara is a great place to not only for shopping new electronics goodies, but is also a goldmine for old junk as well.

Answer 7

I have and old PC, that had a 386 Texas Instruments processor. It has 32 MB of RAM, and 300 MB for the HD. A fantastic, still working PC. :)

Answer 8

If you're into retrocomputing, a really good score would be an early workstation - something like a Sun 3/160 or even earlier. Really exotic ones like the early Xerox machines or a Tektronix 440x would be a bonus but they're rare enough to be collectors items now and are worth quite a bit of money for the rarity.

Slightly more prosaic would be a VAX 11/750. These are relatively common and have the advantage of not needing 3-phase power to run (unlike the 11/780). The CPU is a bit faster than the 68K chips early macs and Amigas. Bonus points if you can bring up an early BSD on it and play roguelikes.

As a trade-off between nostalgia and practicality you can get VaxStations off ebay quite readily. I've even seen someone selling refurbished VaxStation 4000's quite cheaply. These are about as fast as a 486 or Pentium and can run VMS or BSD unix. There are also quite a lot of people who wheel and deal in secondhand SGI gear.

If you've got a load of old 8-bit machines, organize an after work drinkies and retro gaming session with some of the classic games for these machines (if you can score them). That should actually be quite a lot of fun and might make an impression.

Answer 9

I certainly remember the Sinclair ZX80 and ZX81 more paricularly as it had a touch membrane keyboard with 1K of memory. When I added the 16K ram pack and the bog roll printer (full of electrostatic charges); and having spent many hours typing basic prgrams in; I was more than happy to get to know the sinclair 16k "dead flesh" unit. I had tried the Vic 20 and the Dragon 32. My memories of the Commodore Pet was a dull screen which needed fortran and/or cobol to do very little with a lot of code. In the UK, the BBC Micro was fantastic, as it came with ram plugins (A basic OS and WP chipware plus a serial link) which I could attach to very serious and large commercial printer. In my days, a commercial "stand alone" printer was wide enough to block a double door fire exit, and was so heavy it needed 3 individuals to move it.

In those days, the company I was working for, was using IBMs latest and top of the range mainframes; MiniComputers had their use, but were very expensive. and were placed in our areas of research. When I first got my own PC, through the persuasive qualilities of my Boss; it was a PC XT with a twin 5 1/4 inch floppy drives, (and a whole 10 Mb of HD storage). As technology improved rapidly, Sir Alan Sugar, (Now the leading figure of Dragons Den BBC 2 UK), came up with his Amstrad breakthrough. Commodore was going toe to toe with Apples home desktop - whose name escapes me - at this time. The CBM 64 and Commodore A500 are now of legend. Apple kept up with its strengths sound and video, whilst the Commodore A500 captured the games market. As a Game player (Analogue Joysticks + Mouse) convinced me to remain loyal to the Commodore brand.

The rest is History ...

I now have 3 Amiga 1200s (1 in a Tower) with over 150 Original boxed games, 1000+ legal backups of disks from magazines; and over 700 3 1/2 diskettes, gained from other purchases of older kit (Including 250+ reformatted blank disks). I also have many UK Amiga based magazines, the major ones - first editions with some. I purchased my tower from Eyetech Ltd, a company which I understand has now gone. Eyetech Ltd have always been top of the pops with regard to the Amiga support products and servicing in the UK. It was one of the few companies, where you were treated like one of the family.

Answer 10

Some of the machines that we share our house with:

Spectravideo SV-328. Compaq Portable III (MSDOS 6.22 / Windows 1.1), Toshiba T3300 (pre TCPIP Linux), Digital Alphaserver 1000 (Windows NT 3.5), Sparcstation IPC (SunOS), Sparcstation 5 (SunOS), two SGI Origin 200 (IRIX), HP Omnibook 800 (Win 98), HP 620LX, HP iPAQ, NeoNode N1 phone.

All these machines have their stories, most of them I have worked with and gotten them for nothing. Some were just to interesting to rescue from the dump.

I'd like to get my hands on a VIC-20, for sentimental reasons. But with the availability of emulators, it seems a bit pointless.