I'm not much of a collector and usually don't hang on to computer hardware I don't use, hence I was somewhat pleasantly surprised to find some old hardware stuffed in a few boxes. Along with the games that were in there too I really found myself back in the late '90s, lovely!

Cheers,

Oh dear ; I'm still using my internal Omega 100MB Zip drive, and shift it to every new computer that I move onto. (Yep, you can still buy the disks)
But I remember my first scanner - a Logitech that rolled the document through like a fax machine, and you could take the head thingo off and let it roll itself across a flat piece of paper on the table. I was really hacked off when they didn't provide a driver for it for XP. I guess I had better throw it out soon perhaps ........
I also have a 5" floppy disk drive (the real floppy disks).
Funny how you hang onto all that obsolete stuff thinking they might come in handy some day.
And what about "Space Invaders" and "Cross Fire" (before mouses) I

Ha ha!!

Strangely enough, here is a thread going on a Guru3d about almostthe same thing!!

Have a few posts on it here, oh the memories!
http://forums.guru3d.com/showthread.php?t=260092

Somewhere laying around, I have a 5" floppy drive, and the 7 install diskettes for Windows 3.11. Amazingly the things still work, I had to use them a couple years ago to get a computer in my high school class running. It was kinda a challenge. "20 extra credit points to whoever can get this thing running a Windows OS. No Linux, no DOS." Modern IDE was nowhere to be found on the computer, but an earlier standard (help me out here, I don't know the designation) was present. I brought my drive in with the Windows 3.11 diskettes, and spent that entire class period setting it up. Good times.

The oldest piece of hardware I have that I'm still actually using is an HP DeskJet 882C. There's a date on the underside saying it's from 1998, but that seems too old. I dunno for sure, though.

Ha - beat you. My partner still insists on using a working HP 660C. But then he's a 'Greenie' and its extremely difficult to get him to throw anything out.

I recently gave two Panasonic, tracked printers to my grandparents and recycled an Oki tracked printer. They still run a Windows 95 computer and use a 1990's DOS application for accounting (People's Choice something or other). If they don't mind using those old ribbon/tracked paper printers, they'll get better use out of it than a junk yard. XD

The oldest computer I keep operational is around a 1997 P2 Gateway 2000 with Windows 95 on it.

The oldest device I still have is about a 1993 SCSI-1 or SCSI-2 tape backup drive. It has been collecting dust for the past decade. My dad won't let me pitch it yet.

Unreal, f**k yeah!

And, speaking of 2 things you mentioned ... Quake and Zip Drives ... I used to carry around an installed copy of Quake on a Zip100 disk (it fit even with all the custom downloaded QuakeWorld maps I had) so I could play Quake anywhere there was a zip drive (and where wasn't there a Zip drive?!)

Quake... what a good game, the sound track with nine inch nails, and swimming underwater, good times.

It would be cool to see that game with an updated engine, would be fun

Anyone out there remember Lands of Lore Throne of Chaos??

Who didn't play Quake an jam tunes! Unreal too. I best enjoy shooters with game music off, an the tunes turned up.

I have a Parallel zip100 drive somewhere..... used it to backup data on PCs back in the day before I'd wipe it clean.

Oldest PC I have running in my house is a P2 450, not antique, but its showing its age.

I can still remember the first time I setup a small network with 2 friends of mine. It was a milestone when we all had internet access, and were able to game locally. mmm good old days...

Oldest PC I've got is a 486DX Win 3.1 Packard Bell PC, I am sure I posted specs where else in the forum, but here again:
- 25 MHz 486 DX Intel processor
- 4 MB of system memory
- 150 MB Hard disk
- unknown onboard vga graphics, 256 colors (very colorful indeed)
- 2.4 k dialup modem
- some very old sound blaster pro sound card I added, which needed to add lines of DOS commands in autoexec to start the driver.
- 125 W PSU, which is mechanically turns on/off via a shaft connected to the front power button. (No momentary on/off connection to PSU on mobo)
- 3.5" floppy drive, made of cast iron
- 5.25" floppy drive, made of cast iron and weights a ton
- And yeah I am too cheap for the math processor, so its socket is open to plain view.

The 486 PC still work as it is before. The oldest printer I've got is a Panasonic dot matrix printer, yup, ones that use ribbons, and makes loud noise while printing. The oldest game I have is the grand father of all FPS games -- the Wolfenstein 3D! And I also have its sequel, The Spear of Destiny. As well as, Doom 1 and 2. Still have quite a few games / data in 5.25 floppies, as well as blank ones (kind of useless now, got only 720k storage each LOL).

I remember the Zip / Jaz drive era. Everyone seemed to be so hip and cool to carry one around. They (Iomega) kept changing the storage size of zip disks, and each time they changed that, you need to buy a better drive to read the newer disks. I remember troubleshooted zip drives with SCSI interface at work before. But for some reason, I never, ever own a zip drive or its media of any kind myself. It's really killed now by CD-R/W, flash drives, and external hard drives that cost lesser everyday.

S**t man, my router has better specs than that lol ... 250MHz, 16MB of memory and a 2GB SD card.

In the house, right now, I guess my oldest computer is a first generation Commodore Amiga 2000 with MFM, RLL and SCSI HDD support with a removable 44MB cartridge drive, a processor upgrade, and fatter Agnus and other upgrades...and all the software for it on 3.5" disk. I just can't bring myself to toss it out.
I finally tossed out all of my 8" and 5.25" media and systems when I moved in 2001.
BTW, MFM, RLL, EDSI, and SCSI were the old standards prior to ATA/IDE. The first HDD that I purchased was a MFM drive, the Seagate ST506 with a formatted capacity of 5MB.....yes 5MB (no typo), and USED it cost me about $600 out of the old Computer Shopper back when it was published by Patch Communications before ZD took it over.
When I got the ST506 I had to cobble together a MFM controller and after blowing out several wire-wrapped circuits was able to get around the impedence miss-match that was causing so many headaches...total cost for 5MB of storage...160 man hours and about $1200 in 1978 or 1979.

Insofar as being a "pack rat", I think I still have a Zilog/Timex/Sinclar Z81 in the garage somewhere......

Gerritt

Strange thing since I never pictured myself as a collector... but after reading this and looking my stuff at home, guess what I found and couldn't help but to turn on:

1) A 1983 TRS-80 color series computer (CP-400 Color II) with fully functioning versions of Pooyan and Zaxxon.Cassete player rules and the joystick still works.. Specs: CPU 6809E Motorola,8 bits / Clock: 0,895 MHz / RAM: 16 Kbytes / ROM: 16 Kbytes / Screen size in text mode: 16 lines x 32 colunms

2) A 1986 MSX 1.1 series computer (MSX Expert) with two 5" drives (A/B) with an astonishing 3.58 MHz Z80 CPU / RAM: 64 Kbytes / ROM: 16 Kbytes / Video RAM: 16 Kbytes , and a cassete player.. tapes still work, unbelievable... Konamy's Arkanoid, Yie-ar Kung-fu, King' Valley and Nemesis are stil as good as always. Oh, and yes, it´s plugged on a TV!

3) A PC XT with an 8088 CPU, two 5" drives (A/B), 640 of RAM, and, of course, it's green phosphorus CGA monitor. The old DOS works as it did and I found, amongst other games, Alley Cat and Double Dragon. It's odd to listen to Alley Cat's soundtrack on that hideous PC speaker.

In technical respects, my cellphone is way better than any of these!

However, it's interesting to note that even today, as I played them, those old games are still fun and captivating, something that many of today's games miserably lack.

Well,

I can't quite beat the two above but...

I've spent some time rebuilding on old Compaq with original SLI from 3DFX! I found to Voodoo 2's with custom heatsinks, with the original ribbon cable & dongle for SLIing. Ah, the days when SLI stood for Scan-Line Interleave! I also have an Aureal 3D card; remember them? I'm running 256mb of RAM and a 20 Gb HDD plus one CD-RW and a DVD ROM. Unfortunately I'm having a having time getting it up & running with win 98.

Cool thread.

McFly said:


pwn'd lmao

My oldest computer than I have is a 486 DX2 66Mhz it has 4 megs ram a 28.8 modem HELLS YEAH!! I got Win98 to run on that thing lol and I got the first Age of Empire to run; it did not run great, but it did run.

OH! it was Packard Bell ha ha

I installed XP one time a P1 90MHz with 64MB of memory ... shutdown took about 20 minutes.

Sander,

MDK was one of my favorites games. I have both the original and MDK 2 which was awesome as well.

I repair a lot of PCs and some are very obsolete. With the parallel zip drive there is a neat little trick that you can do. Remember those old laptops that don't have CD drives or USB ports??? Well, you can use the zip drive and load the DOS drivers, copy the Windows installation files from a few Zip disks and walla! Now you can install Windows from the hard drive. I still have mine just in case, although the parallel transfer rate is very low

I must also say that one of the best obsolete processors that I still use a lot is the Pentium III Socket 370 flip chip, 866 MHz - 1Ghz. These run Windows XP extremely fast and at very low temperatures, with low power usage. They are very good for office barebones or secretary computers. On top of that, they are very cheap.

LMAO! That was a good one!

Isn't it strange how old things work better than new ones. At least in my case that's how it's been. For instance the Microwave we had was bought when my mom and dad got married and it lasted ( I kid you not) 19 years, it was a Panasonic Dimension 4, when it broke down my mom went to get it fixed because it was a sentimental object to her as opposed to my dad, it then lasted I think 2 or 3 years more then we bought a new Panasonic Dimension 4 as a request from my mother, it's a pearly white Microwave with stainless steel and all the goodies modern ones bring. ITo my surprise it only lasted 3 years and then we had to wait a lot to get it fixed because the part needed takes a lot of time to get shipped to Puerto Rico. So that serves as an example of how old things were made better than today, I think that some companies use cheaper parts to diminish manufacturing costs and not giving a good quality product like they were 20 years ago.

I'm a pack rat when it comes to hardware. I still have a working Zenith Supersport 8088 based portable computer as well as an early Gateway Handbook 286-based unit that is smaller than the Asus EeePC. I also have a 486DX-66 desktop running OS/2. A friend of mine had a Packard Bell 486SX-25 complete system that he installed Linux on. At last check it had been running for more than a year without a restart.

I have a habit of picking up old computers and laptops that are being tossed in the trash, just to see if I can get them working again.