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Is a 1994 Compaq computer with 16mb of harddrive space running MS-DOS worthless?

C

ChorniyVolk

Senior member
Found one, some company closed down and they set it out. It's big and not very powerful, does it have any practical use? Is it worth anything or are they not rare?
 
. . . Model number? For practical use, its worthless. Might be useful as a museum piece.

I'd say a Linux based firewall type system, but I think you can do better and have a much lower electrical cost.
 
Any tech related musium woul dalready have one or some other computer representing that era. Its only worth something if you still have DOS programs you use on a regular basis.
 
I'm pretty sure no useful modern distro fits in a 16MB hard drive. Let alone works well on hardware that old.
 
I work for a company that sells old tech, and anything older than a P4 era machine is typically worthless.
 
Throw It Away....... OMG if its not at least a P4 - Or you have some specific use like "coffee table" or "museum" - it is completely stupid to keep around and any ladies in your life will hate you for it.
 
not worth the electricity it consumes.

use?
giant paper weight.

or you can be charitable and deal with tech waste recycling.... save that company some money! 😉
 
Sure it's a 16(20) MB hard drive? Hard drives of that era were considerably bigger. More like 100-700 MB. Maybe 16 MB of memory?
 
16MB of RAM would make more sense.

I was wondering how much memory a system with a 16MB hard drive would have.. Like 4KB? 😛
 
Ayah said:
I was wondering how much memory a system with a 16MB hard drive would have.. Like 4KB?
Click to expand...
Just in case you are actually asking the question, 10 to 20 MB hard disks were common around 1985-1987, when CPUs were Intel 8088 4.77 MHz (PC) or 80286 6-12 MHz (AT). They had from 64 KB to 1 MB of memory installed.
 
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nismotigerwvu said:
16 megs of ram sounds about right. I'd imagine either a 386 or 486, no less than an 80 meg hard drive. Still mostly useless
Click to expand...

That's after the 486's time. It's probably a Pentium of some sort. I'd keep it just to play around with. It could be fun for old games or something like that, but there isn't much in the way of practical use.
 
RebateMonger said:
Just in case you are actually asking the question, 10 to 20 MB hard disks were common around 1985-1987, when CPUs were Intel 8088 4.77 MHz (PC) or 80286 6-12 MHz (AT). They had from 64 KB to 1 MB of memory installed.
Click to expand...

yup full height monsters...you could murder someone with one, like a bowling ball. i got one as a hand me down pc which was not good for anything more than word processing.

486's had 400+mb hd's.
 
Case might be fun to retrofit. I still smart over throwing away my original IBM XT case. :/
 
Ayah said:
16MB of RAM would make more sense.

I was wondering how much memory a system with a 16MB hard drive would have.. Like 4KB? 😛
Click to expand...

The original Macintosh 128k had a 20mb HDD available for it. That was 1984.

This thing is pretty much useless today. Recycle it or mod the case. Not much else you can do.
 
It is a 15 year old computer. In human years that is like 90. Might make a nice brick or take it outside and use it for target practice. Fill it with rocks and use it for a door stop. Get some spray paint out and use it for an art project.
 
You can run Windows 3.1, play solitaire, minesweeper, DOS games, edit the config.sys and autoexec.bat, and all sorts of wonderful things! Keep it. Get an external serial or internal ISA modem and run IE 5.0 on it.
 
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They have places that recycle old computers like that. Here's one in Broward Florida.
http://www.arcbroward.com/electronics_recycling.html
They take apart everything saving the copper. Look at the pictures, they have trucks pull up with pallets of outdated monitors and Dell desktop computers. I've been there. It's mind boggling to see a truck full of desk tops pull up, but that's exactly what happens.
 
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AdamK47 said:
You can run Windows 3.1, play solitaire, minesweeper, DOS games, edit the config.sys and autoexec.bat, and all sorts of wonderful things! Keep it. Get an external serial or internal ISA modem and run IE 5.0 on it.
Click to expand...

railroad tycoon, bitches.
 
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