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What's the oldest PC you've got up and running?

S

SaltyNuts

Platinum Member
Anyone got any 80-88s (I think they were called, before the 286) up and running? What's the best (worst) you got?
 
I have a very old thinkpad I picked up on eBay for under $100. X300, it is like the last old school thinkpad. It has the classic thinkpad keyboard and is 16/10 screen ratio.
 
2008?!?! That was just a few years ago. I'm looking for someone with something from the 90s at least, was hoping 80s, maybe 70s!

Brianmanahan, I might still have my C64 at my parent's house, need to go try and find it. When you boot it up for kicks, are the games still as fun as you remembered them? Or is it really a bunch of naustalagia?
 
Pentium 3 933mhz, 1/2 gig of ram, 80 gig intel gen 2 ssd with a pci sata card. Turtle beach Santa Cruz Win 2k ... sata DVD drive .USB 2.0 pci card
 
I have some AT 60mhz computers, a mobo with an AMD DX4 120mhz, lots of old edo, fp, 32 pin simms and such as well.

But I have 2 or so computers that should still work which has low-end/possible Pentium/sub-Pentium cpu's in them.
 
SaltyNuts said:
2008?!?! That was just a few years ago. I'm looking for someone with something from the 90s at least, was hoping 80s, maybe 70s!
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You're always here asking questions, never volunteering information. Why don't YOU tell us what's the oldest PC you've got up and running.

I'm starting to suspect you're just an AI here to suck us dry of our information in order to replace us with more efficient worker drones. :expressionless: 😛

For me I think it's probably 2001 or thereabouts. I've never tried to get an old computer working just for the fun of it. I'm sure there are people here that might have had to resuscitate a very old computer in order to retrieve data off it, though.
 
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SaltyNuts said:
Brianmanahan, I might still have my C64 at my parent's house, need to go try and find it. When you boot it up for kicks, are the games still as fun as you remembered them? Or is it really a bunch of naustalagia?
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some of them are still fun, though usually for a short playtime - games like blue max, pitfall, pole position, H.E.R.O.

though many of them take a long time to load (had one take 45 minutes from load "*",8,1 to title screen!) so i don't do it very often
 
My dad fired up the Apple II so my son could play Depth Charge like I used to. And number munchers. And oregon trail.

The oldest PC I personally have is a Via C3 500mhz system that has been my router for about 5 years now. Still have never rebooted it.

Acutal workable system that you can sit down on and use with a desktop environment? Some sort of Alienware with an i7 and a 17" screen, NVidia something or other. My wife uses it to browse pintrest, facebook, etc. "it looks pretty".
 
My T420i laptop with a Sandy Bridge i3, mSATA SSD, and 8GB of RAM from mid-2011. It's pretty dog-slow these days and it's soon to be retired.
 
I still have my first IBM compatible. I don't use it, but it still works. It's a 486DX50. I think my Atari800 is in my mother's attic, but I'm not sure.
 
Crono said:
You're always here asking questions, never volunteering information. Why don't YOU tell us what's the oldest PC you've got up and running.

I'm starting to suspect you're just an AI here to suck us dry of our information in order to replace us with more efficient worker drones. :expressionless: 😛

For me I think it's probably 2001 or thereabouts. I've never tried to get an old computer working just for the fun of it. I'm sure there are people here that might have had to resuscitate a very old computer in order to retrieve data off it, though.
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Huh?!?! I've literally shown to this form (or on this forum at least, since my writing is so much above their head) significant insights and improvements on how we understand physics and other sciences, including showing when alleged science is pseudo-science. But I ask something simple about old computers and now I'm an information suck?!?

But to answer your complaint, I was at my parent's house recently, and I saw our old Leading Edge computer. It was literally an 8088 or whatever they were called. This was from the 80s. I remember my dad got it, with the idea that we would trade it in later for a 286, but we never did. I didn't turn it on, but I would bet big bucks it would boot right into DOS. I think I've got most (maybe all) on this forum beat!
 
SaltyNuts said:
Huh?!?! I've literally shown to this form (or on this forum at least, since my writing is so much above their head) significant insights and improvements on how we understand physics and other sciences, including showing when alleged science is pseudo-science. But I ask something simple about old computers and now I'm an information suck?!?

But to answer your complaint, I was at my parent's house recently, and I saw our old Leading Edge computer. It was literally an 8088 or whatever they were called. This was from the 80s. I remember my dad got it, with the idea that we would trade it in later for a 286, but we never did. I didn't turn it on, but I would bet big bucks it would boot right into DOS. I think I've got most (maybe all) on this forum beat!
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I forgot I have an Altair 8800 with MS Basic in the attic
 
Isn't an Atari a video game system, not a true computer per se?

Going to have to look up the Altair 8800! If it has MS Basic, it must be a computer, and definitely in the running!
 
I've heard of a school still running commodore 64 because it still fills the job and replacing their controls with all new equipment is significantly greater in cost than simply replacing parts when they fail.
 
I don't have anything that would qualify as vintage but my oldest machine still in operation is a custom built Core2Quad machine with 8GB of ram. It was more or less my main server. File, Web, development, DNS, email, later on VMs.

Would have been around 2008 when I built it, based on the OS file dates. (I may have reinstalled at one point, I don't recall). I was still living with my parents then so it sat in the basement with their computer as that's where the internet comes in and where the router is. When I moved to my house it was still mostly the main server for quite a while, it even got converted to rack mount. Then I slowly started to split stuff off. File storage went to a dedicated 24 bay server, so all the drives got moved, VMs eventually went to a dedicated ESXi box, started to move stuff like DNS and development to VMs. Right now that server is only doing email. I want to move from user based mailboxes to virtual users, but I can't seem to be able to do the type of procmail rules I want with virtual users, so I started to write a program that works like procmail then I just got sidetracked with other projects. I do plan to retire it at some point though as I want to play with different open source VM solutions and that machine as VT-D. None of my other unused machines have it. It's still a pretty decent machine too so I'd probably keep it as a test machine, or even repurpose it for something that I want physical hardware for, like a secondary VM server.

The sad part is, that server has more ram than our new work PCs and it is practically 10 years old. We got new PCs at work and they have 4GB of ram. WTF! 8GB should be the bare minimum these days.
 
My "old" computer has some newer components but the oldest piece is probably 15 years or so.

I upgrade and change a lot. Anything I dont need anymore gets sent to the Salvation Army or Goodwill. Somebody else always needs a part.
 
A year or two ago I found and booted up our old Zenith laptop. It's an 8088-8MHz, 512 or 640KB RAM (can't remember exactly), no HD, dual 720K 3.5" floppy drives, monochrome screen. It still mostly worked, except for one floppy drive and the battery. I've also got our old Amstrad desktop. It's was a 286-12MHz, 1MB RAM, 40MB RLL HD, 1.44MB Floppy, with a 14" VGA monitor. Just for fun, I upgraded it to 4MB of RAM and threw in a 287. Now it can actually run the clock program in Windows 3.1.
 
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