Old computers

[Mashika]

Around 2004 or so, my mom got a new Mac Mini, and i was given a hand me down Power Mac, a Quick Silver 2002 mac, that was my first computer, it was so cool to have "my own", it lasted until around 2008 when i got a white macbook laptop. which died in a year or s later lol, the Power Mac i still have around and restored a few days ago. Reason was that a friend got a computer similar to what he had growing up in UK, in the 80's

I had to restore my old mac, just to get that same feeling of nostalgy xi xi

I find old computers extremely cool and fascinating, makes me wish i had been around to use them daily

My old mac can't access the current internet, most sites are saying "are you time traveling from the past? We dont support your SSL version anymore. Go away!" Lol




Anyways, here are a couple picks he sent me of his new/old computer






"Mashi moo" lmao sorry, that's a nick name very very few people use, like 2 persons lol

Do you have old computers around? Do you still use them?

I remember some guy saying on youtube video "old pcs can't be used today anymore" and a friend said "sure you can, they do the same stuff as 40 years ago, you mean you just can't go on the net or watch HD movies!"

Lol

[Journeyman]

I used to live in a lovely old house in what was becoming an affluent area of Sydney. The house was split into little flats and there was a very eclectic group of us living there, retired musicians, a natureopath, hairdresser, 'masseur', etc. There were also some geeky types, programmers, me I guess

Once a week the residents of the area left out their trash for collection. One of our residents went around and collected discarded pcs, they were old and outdated even then, perhaps three eight sixes, much happier with text than windows even. He stuck a Linux distro on each and gave them to his fellow residents then strung wires up and gave the whole house free internet, all with hardware that was being thrown out because it couldn't run the latest operating system, otherwise it was perfectly fine to connect people.

If you have older machines, consider putting a Linux distro on them and you may find it gives them a new lease of life. It's easy enough to do, lots of hep available online and without the bloat ware of modern operating systems that slow machine you despair of could be perfectly fine for years to come.

[gord]

I have an 8088 made by DTK buried in the basement somewhere. 20M hard drive, 5.25 floppy, 640K ram boosted from 512K with 18 single bit chips, amber mono monitor, hercules graphics card, 1200 baud modem. I really need to clean out some junk.

[TomKat]

Posted by gord (here)
I have an 8088 made by DTK buried in the basement somewhere. 20M hard drive, 5.25 floppy, 640K ram boosted from 512K with 18 single bit chips, amber mono monitor, hercules graphics card, 1200 baud modem. I really need to clean out some junk.

Wish I still had mine. But alas, I have no place to put it. My oldest computer is an old "netbook" that can run win7. I use it to record stuff from internet radio.

[Open Minded Dude]

I miss Windows 95.

[Sue (Ayt)]

My son still has our old Commodore 64 stashed.

[DeDukshyn]

My first computer was one of these old boys .... Radioshack version of a late model TRS-80. It didn't come with a monitor - you had to connect it to your TV. I gave it to my son a few years ago. It probably still works but its more of just a collectors item.





After that My parents bought a Sanyo 8086 - with high end graphics - 64 colours at 800x600 and up to 1024x768 at 16 colours. It featured a 40mb hard drive, 128k of RAM, and had a two speed processor 4.77khz and 8khz. I couldn't find any online images, but its actually out in the shed still. Maybe I should stuff some new guts into as a retro style case mod for a new computer ...

For comparison, my current computer has 2,000,000mb hard drive, 16,000,000k of RAM and a 4,000,000khz speed processor, lol.

[Michi]

I don't have any old machine lying around but I grew up amidst the computer evolution.
A few years ago I succeeded to install and run Windows 3.11 inside a virtual machine (Virtualbox) and it worked - and hell - how fast it loads on a modern hardware!

[Ernie Nemeth]

My first computer was the Apple IIC. 128k memory, 64K ram. No idea of the clock speed. Came in a suitcase with power cord, no screen, and applesoft program tutorial. There were no programs back then for it. Had to learn to program. It was fun.

Just remembered it came with a floppy disk drive and one game disk. A treasure hunting maze. We had so much fun playing that game. I took it everywhere and all were amazed.

It cost $2000!

[Nasu]

I've got a friend, a developer friend, who created his own online religion. It didn't get very far, his aims were vague and its purpose obscure, something about the tax right-offs. Anyway a funny part that your post reminded me of was his insistence that each member of his "cyber cult" only own computing tech created before the year 2000. They could borrow new tech but not own it. Similar to the Amish allowing technology up to 1880's but not after. Who knows, give a cult of developers enough old computers and time....x... N

[chrifri]

Posted by Open Minded Dude (here)
I miss Windows 95.

Because of the anti virus software that was not able to keep any virus away from Windows?

Sorry for the comment, but all the Bill G. stuff is some kind of red flag to me. In the very early 90ies there was an Internet program called "Netscape" (if I remember correctly). Netscape was considerably superior to the Bill G. solution, but unfortunately the Bill G. group had more financial power and, as usual, with that power they were able to get rid of a competitor that was considerably superior to the Bill G. solution. In my humble opinion, a pity without doubt

[TomKat]

Posted by Open Minded Dude (here)
I miss Windows 95.

I was not a fan of Win95. Much preferred Win98se, which was the stable release everyone used until WinXP took over. I probably still have a copy of win98se somewhere, on floppy. I lost interest in Windows finally when 8.0 came out, switched to Linux.

[Open Minded Dude]

My comment was meant a little sarcastic. Yes it sucked mostly and Microsoft/Gates in general does and did too. Although still there is some degree of nostalgia feeling expressed for Win95 indeed because it was my first computer that had this OS. Just like you remember your first kiss, first bike, first car, first beer, first bought music album, well, first ... anything.

[Open Minded Dude]

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=hqi2Jy0UMiA

[Journeyman]

Posted by TomKat (here)

Posted by Open Minded Dude (here)
I miss Windows 95.

I was not a fan of Win95. Much preferred Win98se, which was the stable release everyone used until WinXP took over. I probably still have a copy of win98se somewhere, on floppy. I lost interest in Windows finally when 8.0 came out, switched to Linux.

You'll be unsurprised to learn that Microsods continued the controversial 'Manichean' approach to operating system releases:

Win 3.1 Good!
Win 95 Bad
Win 98 Good!
Win ME Very Bad!
Win XP Good!
Win Vista Yikes
Win 7 Good
Win 8 Bad
Win 10 Tolerable

[TomKat]

Posted by Journeyman (here)

Posted by TomKat (here)

Posted by Open Minded Dude (here)
I miss Windows 95.

I was not a fan of Win95. Much preferred Win98se, which was the stable release everyone used until WinXP took over. I probably still have a copy of win98se somewhere, on floppy. I lost interest in Windows finally when 8.0 came out, switched to Linux.

You'll be unsurprised to learn that Microsods continued the controversial 'Manichean' approach to operating system releases:

Win 3.1 Good!
Win 95 Bad
Win 98 Good!
Win ME Very Bad!
Win XP Good!
Win Vista Yikes
Win 7 Good
Win 8 Bad
Win 10 Tolerable

I once heard there were 2 teams at Mickeysoft. One made the "bad" OSes, and the other made the bad OSes "good."
You forgot WinNT and Win2000. I think they were both kind of OK, as they were specifically targetting Corporate computers.

[Mark (Star Mariner)]

Posted by Journeyman (here)
Win 3.1 Good!
Win 95 Bad
Win 98 Good!
Win ME Very Bad!
Win XP Good!
Win Vista Yikes
Win 7 Good
Win 8 Bad
Win 10 Tolerable

You missed one (or two technically), and that was Windows 2000 (very different from ME), which was based on Windows NT. Ran a couple of boxes on Win2k at the time and they were very solid. Win3.1 was indeed good, but a pain to load - all those damn floppies. I liked 95 though, it was pretty stable and compact - certainly compared to today's operating systems. The first iteration of 98 was very buggy, constantly prone to hanging, crashing, and those dreaded blue screens. SE was much better. Ran that until XP came along.

My favourite windows edition is/was 7. Simply the coup de grace version of windows. By contrast, Windows 10 is far from tolerable. To be blunt, it is hideous, but that's just me.

My first computer was the Sinclair ZX Spectrum. A contemporary of the Amstrad, and Commodore 64. It was an 8-bit machine that came with a whopping 48K of memory. Oh the nostalgia... Somewhat of a cult item today if you're lucky enough to still own one.

[Ernie Nemeth]

I still run windows 7. No longer run updates, if they even exist.

[Operator]

Believe it or not I've built my own first computer creating my own circuit boards soldering all the separate components on it etc.
I still have it somewhere ... it's a Z80 8-bit system with 64K ram. It starts from a 3.5 inch bootfloppy (if I still have it).

There are 2 of these computers, I've built one together with a friend. We called them HOMAC (Home Made Computer).
I've written my own BIOS so that we could run CP/M eventually ...

Can you imagine having the BIOS, Operating system and application programs all in 64K of RAM ?
And it worked ! It was wonderfull to see e.g. a calculator program work on my unique computer
without having written the application program.

That's how we had to do it to own a computer 40 years ago ...

[TomKat]

Posted by Ernie Nemeth (here)
I still run windows 7. No longer run updates, if they even exist.

Yes, my win7 netbook just updated on me yesterday. Even though it's officially a dead OS.