Do you like to play with old computers ?

[asifnaz]

I love to collect thrown/abandonend or gifted computers . More they are older more i like them . It was fun installing debian on 386 with 4mb ram

[cecilpierce]

Yea like mine, one came out of a dumpster (Dell), had bird dodo all over it but it works

[Jakin]

I recently took my old Performa 450 (system 7.6) from the attic, still works fine. I cloned its drive; It will live on in spirit- via Sheepshaver on Ubuntu 12.04

(By the way, has someone figured out how to get qemu to run on 12.04? It crashes if i choose anything other than x86 emulation )

[|{urse]

No. I am finally sick of old computers (after decades of loving nothing else), I like to play with newer ones all day tho! I must admit it was a little difficult to give my Sinclair ZX81 and
Tandy 1000ex (256k ram) away but the kid who asked "Do you have any old computers for nostalgic geekery?" will undoubtedly have just as much fun with them as I did. Even if he heads straight to Ebay with them I'm sure someone will end up re-soldering old joints, try to get linux (I'd be shocked!) to run etc etc

[Lucradia]

I had an IBM T41 for a long time. I managed to record 1080p video via VGA on its ATI Radeon graphics card via a monitor. It was quite trippy that the video ended up less laggy processed and encoded than it did while recording.

[electrosquirrel]

I had an IBM T41 for a long time. I managed to record 1080p video via VGA on its ATI Radeon graphics card via a monitor. It was quite trippy that the video ended up less laggy processed and encoded than it did while recording.

Really, you call that old? I used to have an Osborne 1 some thirteen years ago. Actually it was my mothers, but since it was already thrown aside, I was allowed to play on it. We had a copy of Zork for it, you know those text based adventures? It was fun for a while, but the machine had no real use anymore.

Back in 2000 a local science rag had this article about the "future mobile phone". They were talking about mobile internet and streaming video in full colour over the mobile network in that article. I laughed at it. Back then, mobiles hardly ever had colour screens, and thinking that the mobile network could stream video didn't only seem far stretched - but rather hilariously optimistic. 48 kilobits per second was the barrier just broken in mobile, and wired internet wasn't that much faster back then either. And that's quite recent, actually!

I'd love to have an old minicomputer, PDP 11, System/34 or something similar. In fact, I envy those who were there to work with machines like the IBM System/360; back in the days when IT was something magickal and mythickal. You had to attend a certain priesthood to ever even see these machines in action! Punched cards, magnetic tapes, machines filling up a room bigger than my apartment!

Even knowing of the machines we had to live with just 20 years ago gives a certain perspective. I think my first PC had like 40 megabytes of hard drive space. On two drives! Nowadays I have 64 gigabytes at hand in my pocket! My cell phone has more storage, more processor speed and a higher screen resolution than even my third PC had. Actually, even in the year 2000 I didn't have this much speed and storage in my PC as I have now available anywhere anytime!

Only looking back do we realize the distance we've travelled.

[Lucradia]

it was also running 3D Effects too so yes, I do say it was old.

I did have a Zenith 386 laptop though once, no Ethernet, no network connection ports. It was originally loaded with Windows 98 when I bought it, but that wouldn't boot. Tried Windows 3.1, but it often maxed out the RAM too quickly, so I used it mainly for note taking in DOS. No USB Ports, no nothing, couldn't even hook up to a printer, so I had to transfer data to another computer via Floppy. Have since removed that computer from my life.

[lykwydchykyn]

I can't say no to a donated old computer. My most recent acquisition is a powermac 6500.

I have a pile of Pentium2 machines in the corner of my home office, waiting for me to figure out something useful to do with them.

[Lucradia]

I can't say no to a donated old computer. My most recent acquisition is a powermac 6500.

I have a pile of Pentium2 machines in the corner of my home office, waiting for me to figure out something useful to do with them.

I had an old Apple that my mother bought in a package with a Laser Printer from Apple. It had a motorola processor, and had integrated RAM up to 2 GB. It was the most expensive computer at the time, and could run up to MacOS 8 (if not 9.) It came with a tube monitor as well. it was a thin, long and heavy machine with a floppy disk and parallel port and S-Video out and PS/2. The machine's height was about 5~7 inches thick. It lasted 10~15 years before we upgraded to a G4 cube.

[OrangeCrate]

It's not that old I guess, but, I'm currently using a 2005 IBM Thinkpad (T43). I cleaned her up, bumped the memory from 512mb to 2gb, and installed Xubuntu 12.04. Works great.