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What classic system will hold value better?


  

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  1. 1. Which system will hold and appreciate in value more?

    • Apple //e
    • Gateway 2000 486DX2-50

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PCs are a pile of shit and anything before Pentium 1 and PCI are doorstops only idiots with blinkers on bought instead of Commodore or Acorn SUPERIOR 32bit computers. Try playing Super Stardust 96 on a 486 vs a 14mhz 020 A1200 Amiga LOL

 

There is also the fact that a PC is a PC, nobody gives a shit apart from isolated PCs that were not the size of a beer cooler and the styling of a breeze block (like the Atari PC1 or Commodore PC-1) to be honest and they all run that piece of shit Microsoft OS even DOS will boot on an i7 *shudder*

 

Apple as shit as it was will hold it's value more as a retro machine IMO

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Probably the IIe, if I had to place a bet. Gateway made well-regarded clones in the 486-era, but it was a clone, and has to share the era with Compaq, Dell, HP, AST, and even IBM, among a host of others. And none of them have the Apple mystique.

 

Plenty of IIe games were available on other platforms, but there was enough distinct about them that you won't completely replicate the IIe experience on anything else of the era. Just like you won't replicate the C-64 or Atari 800 experience on anything else of the era. (I'm discounting emulation, because you either want the real hardware or you don't.) All my friends had different brands of 486s in the '90s, but there was minimal difference between them. Civilization and Railroad Tycoon played the same on my Compaq as it did on my friends' Dells and Gateways. If there was any difference, it was because you didn't have a Soundblaster.

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Definitely no love for dos here. I was told that 80486's are becoming more difficult to put together. And I'm being told that //e's are dirt cheap-ass common.

I still like DOS. I've always had a DOS machine of some sort, ever since I built my first one around 1990. It's about the only OS that you can set up just as you like and then use almost maintenance-free for years on end. There are games and other old apps that I still use which won't work properly with anything else, and I especially like using them for writing (I find text-mode word processors to be less distracting to use for certain types of writing).

 

I have been getting more into the Apple ][ recently, and the ][e is indeed a pretty common machine (finding one in good shape is more difficult, though). 486 systems can still be had for decent prices, especially if you buy a motherboard and build your own. Recyclers who are after gold scrap have been having a field day with them recently, though, so the Apple machines will probably be easier to find long-term.

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And I'm being told that //e's are dirt cheap-ass common.

 

I wish they were more common around my area. Apple //e's and //c's are almost non-existant locally on CL, and when someone does list one, the prices are laughably high.

 

486's and below are getting harder to find around here, but can still be found for a decent price sometimes. A local recycler has BOXES full of Slot 1 P2 and P3 CPU's he can't sell for next to nothing because of the almost non-existent gold content.

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I still like DOS. I've always had a DOS machine of some sort, ever since I built my first one around 1990. It's about the only OS that you can set up just as you like and then use almost maintenance-free for years on end.

 

Now that's a feature I miss... when is the last time you had to reinstall DOS on a system?

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when is the last time you had to reinstall DOS on a system?

Well, I haven't installed DOS in a while (except in DOSBox), but did I have to re-install DOS back in the day?

Yep...

Lotsa times..

Not for myself, but I got paid to do that lots for people that would get viruses, back when DOS viruses were in vogue...

 

Other than that, tho, it was pretty stable, but it's not really fair.

There's not much you could do with it, so there wasn't much you could mess up.. ;-)

 

desiv

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I owned a Colecovision, then a VIC20, then a C64, then an ST (no more typing) then an Amiga 1000 (bloody hell smooth multitasking) then an Amiga 1200 in 1992 (1280x580!!) and then a 33mhz 486 PC in 1992....What a pile of JUNK that was seeing a white cursor on a black screen like a 1981 Acorn BBC Computer! It reminded me of the Star Trek 4 movie when Scotty has to use the keyboard after attempting to talk to the computer and he has a pissed off look on his face and then cracks his knuckles. That's exactly how SHIT DOS PCs were compared to Amiga 1000-1200 period of 1985-1994. Sorry if you are a DOS lover but whilst the games were good the OS and general use of a machine was 20 years behind Amiga...and they crashed A LOT. Oh and then there was the purchase of 3rd Party software like QEMM386 so you could just get enough of the first 640kb to play a game....nice thanks for that cock memory map microcock software!

 

So yeah you can play all those games with a dual boot system or DOSBOX and were pretty horrible to use, oh and up until about 1990 the Amiga version was better than the PC version of action/arcade games anyway so pretty much a waste of space before Doom was released in 94 to be honest

 

People forget what junk PCs were, especially when Windows version 1/2 or 3 didn't load and you had this black screen with a little cursor flashing at you like a 1978 CP/M machine in 1994 sitting next to an Amiga 4000 ;)

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All my early stuff were the typical 8-bit things, Atari 400/800, Vic-20 & C-64, Coleco, Intellivision VCS and especially the Apple 2 series beginning with the II and II+. That sort of thing.

 

I used the 2 series and the VCS the most, practically on a daily basis.

 

When my needs started to outgrow the //e in the late 80's and early 90's I had shopped around extensively for a new system. I was sucked into the lure of the Amiga byt the promise of all these cool graphics and multitasking and games. I *actually* believed this would be a serious upgrade from using my 2 series workhorses. ESPECIALLY with all these custom chips! The futuristic sophisticatedness was spellbinding. Remeber, the 2 series never had custom chips except toward the later part of it's life; and that was to reduce chipcount by combining all the basic logic gates into fewer packages. So there wasn't really custom sound or graphics all that much.

 

Well.. I got into the 1000, and very quickly found out there was little or no software available. No games really, other than the shit smelly-ass demos and the oddball game I could get from Farnsworth computer store. I subscribed to AmigaWorld and was constantly wowed at the purported capability of this machine.

 

Eh, so games were suck-ass and non-existent. So I tried telecomunications and word processing and basic programming to help justify this $1,500 purchase (monitor, A1000, extra disk, extra memory) and there was simply nothing available!! I was spending more time trying to make things work and even more time trying to find those things. It took forever to make a disk copy and basic word processing was next to impossible. swapping disks constantly for Workbench and trying to run even the most basic of "dos-like" commands was just ridiculous! Spent more time doing that then anything else. A few months later I couldn't handle it and we chucked it and I went back to the Apple //e. Glad I didn't toss my //e stuff out.

 

Ahh.. nice.. And I continued further with the 2 series. I had a longing for the IIgs, but the amiga fiasco effective consumed close to $2,200 in funds, so I was relegated to beefing it up more with an accelerator card and more of that memory shit from Applied Engineering. A great design, it was now, what, 10 or 12 years old? And performing useful work. BBS'ing, trading warez, school papers, hardware projects.. It did it all. I even had a hard disk for that venerable //e. Loading and saving just, well, it just worked! I never really had to handle a floppy much unless I was transfering data to another machine or backing up.

 

But I still wanted something more than 3MHz and 6MB ram. Not that I actually needed it, but WANTED it. And I liked the promise of the Amiga, still, after what the first A1000 did to me. What with the custom chips and blitter and colors, and a newly redesigned case, the Amiga 500. I thought WTF, this has gotta be evolved and surely by now there was software out there that had been debugged and ready to roll. Well I went to Protecto Enterprises or some store in the area that had sold their stuff. It's all very vague, that era, but it was late-nite and I hauled home a spiffy new A500 with 1MB ram and a 2nd disk. A few games too, like flight simulator and Terrorpods and F/A-18 Interceptor.

 

I quickly set the system up and was soon enough jamming quite happily to the few games I picked up at time of purchase. You can only play these games for so long before you get tired of them. And so I went to the other local computer shop. Some hole in the wall called Software+. And ohh wow! They had seemingly tons of stuff! Then when I actually wanted to purchase the games, they were only boxes and "coming soon" types of pre-release press material for display only. Ughh.. I kinda gave up on Amiga gaming at that point.

 

Not wanting to throw out another computer. I found *some* use for it. It is worth noting that the Digi-View digitizer was cool, and that was one things that got me all hard-up for the Amiga in the first place. I couldn't ever imagine graphics like that being done on a 2 series! Except for the IIgs, which was no longer an option thanks to the wasted money on the A1000. So I got wrapped up in Digi-View and capturing all sorts of stuff. I couldn't afford a video camera back then, either, so I rented this monstrosity of a "portable" VHS VCR backpack-sized thing, along with a 3-kilo shoulder camera. You know what I'm talking about. I was so anal about it, I went out of my way to get a Newvicon or Saticon based camera. So I rented it for a hundred bucks for like a week. I felt like super sophisticated being able to take pics of things and put them on the screen. Then I discovered mouse-based painting that actually worked nicely like PhotonPaint and DeluxePaint-II.

 

Finally! Some genuine use for the Amiga! I learned all about graphic editing and loading and saving images as files as opposed to chunks of memory like on the 2 series. A lot of these techniques I still use today in some form or another.

 

And yet. There was still too much tediousness when using the Amiga. The disk swapping was terrible! And got even worse when I tried to "transfer" the "modem ecosphere" from the 2 series here. Terminal programs just plain sucked and didn't have the versatility like ProTerm or Ascii Express, or my custom BBS software. Nothing felt integrated or all-in-one, like on the //e.

 

It was after this second bad experience that I gave up on the Amiga, despite learning "digital darkroom" and "paint" programs and photoshop-like activities. My 500 sat side-by-side my //e for a while longer. And eventually I got into Windows 3.1 via a 486 DX2-50 rig.

 

A breath of fresh air! Ohhh wow! I had Notepad and Microsoft Word, and Procomm+ and there were real games like Doom and Raptor and Stellar 7 and NanoTank and countless numbers of terminal program things. I could print and be online at the same time, and while the graphics editing ability was quite lacking, I just knew it would evolve into something useful. And indeed as time went on, a few months later, I ran into Aldus PhotoStyler and Adobe PhotoShop and PaintShop Pro and Microsoft Picture It!

 

This DOS and Windows 3.1 based PC was growing up nicely. Software was coming out on a regular basis, every month I could find something new. And I quickly discovered I could upgrade the computer hardware completely and take all my programs with me, and all my data too. There was software available for just about every possible use. And disk swapping was completely minimized or non-existant. I had a real working hard disk, 200MB! I just knew I'd never EVER fill that. Never in a lifetime. And compared to the Amiga, things on the PC actually did useful stuff without me having to fight it every step of the way. Yep, the PC was tedious in the early days, and took a lot of careful set-up to make it work just so. But having come from the old-school even back then, it was pretty cool compared to the stuff available prior to the Apple 2 series bursting upon the market.

 

And there you have it. The Amiga promised too much and delivered too slowly. While not exactly a kludge hardware-wise, it seemed to become that with software, overly complex Intuition and CLI and Workbench environment. Yech.. And the Amiga wasn't getting any market penetration either. Whereas the 2 series was used in schools and the PC used in business. To use an Amiga was to really limit yourself. And once Doom and the early classic gaming emulators came out (Activision Action Packs) and Sparcade and DASarcade I just knew right then and there, the PC was the future! Here, today.

 

And eventually I threw out the 500 because I couldn't even GIVE it away. Tried for several months with no takers. Postage was too high! Blahh blahhh you pussies! Postage high? My ass..

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Well.. I got into the 1000, and very quickly found out there was little or no software available. No games really, other than the shit smelly-ass demos and the oddball game I could get from Farnsworth computer store. I subscribed to AmigaWorld and was constantly wowed at the purported capability of this machine.

There's wasn't much software when the Apple II was released either.

It was new????

Then when I actually wanted to purchase the games, they were only boxes and "coming soon" types of pre-release press material for display only. Ughh.. I kinda gave up on Amiga gaming at that point.

You had a really really really bad computer store..

There were lots of games released and able to be purchased by the time the A500 was out.

 

Now, I really like the Apple II series, but your bad experience with the Amiga is perplexing...

 

As for disk swapping, I loved my A500 because my roommate had a single drive Fat Mac.

THAT was disk swapping pain. :-)

With 1M RAM and Workbench 1.3 and the "resident" command, there wasn't that much disk swapping..

 

As for terminal software, again, you needed to go to the right places..

There were LOTS AND LOTS of great terminal programs..

I still use them today with my serial to ethernet adapter and Telnet BBSes...

And the scripting with those was really great...

Not saying any were better than Procomm.. That was a top notch app!!!!!! I loved that program! :-)

 

If you didn't like the Amiga, that's fine.. There are lots of choices and not every one is right for every person.

But by the time the A500 was getting going, the software (mostly games) was starting to come out pretty good.

More than I could buy.. ;-)

 

And the Amiga wasn't getting any market penetration either. Whereas the 2 series was used in schools and the PC used in business. To use an Amiga was to really limit yourself. And once Doom and the early classic gaming emulators came out (Activision Action Packs) and Sparcade and DASarcade I just knew right then and there, the PC was the future! Here, today.

 

No argument there.. ;-(

 

desiv

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In my case the bad experiences formed over time. Morphing from disappointment into frustration and then into downright hatered.

 

When I got into the Apple 2 stuff in 78-79, sure, there wasn't a whole lot going. In fact I got disappointed with that, too, since I had better games with faster action and better sound right in the VCS. But, with the Apple I saw progress and things didn't stay stagnant. New stuff was always coming out here and there. An example, I got wind of a 16K RamCard coming out soon, and 2 months later, there were multiple choices to pick from. I ended up with the Microsoft 16K RAMCARD. Back then, to me, it was a major gig to go pulling circuits out of a freshly bought $2,000 computer! But the thing worked! And it seemed smarter and faster. But really, the clock speed didn't change and the computer was still as stupid as the nut that holds a toilet bolted to the wall. heh.

 

 

Perhaps the computer stores in my area didn't have a good selection of Amiga stuff. I won't argue that. But with the Apple I knew of 4 distinct shops, 2 of which where Data Domain and CompuShop. Computerland was in there too I'm sure. But I trolled CompuShop the most. And then the warez scene from your highschool buddies. That was an endless source of games. So much we collected just to collect. Never played any of them all the way through. Just too much stuff!

 

I mean that the Amiga wasn't bad hardware or unreliable or that sort of thing. The O/S sucked ass (to me) and there just wasn't the marketing and support like for the Apple. Things that were scheduled to come out never did. And that's what pissed me off so much. Or they did come out, but were impossible to find. Whereas with the Apple, future announcements, both OEM and 3rd party alike, tended to come true. And there wasn't too much hype either.

 

By not having that much hype, I was never really "set-up" for a disappointing letdown. So the marketing style was a good thing. I could always look in BYTE or some other computer magazine, even Apple specific ones like inCider and A+ and Softalk and Hardcore and see an add, I could always find the product or Data Domain would order it for me. Or I could go to the warez scene if it was software.

 

And if I did warez. I'd typically get the original disk, and copy the warez version on the back. So I had the best of both worlds and the devs got some compensation. The original and a freely-backup-able copy. Cool! And that was awesome. Because when I got the Sider 10Meg drive we spent the evening loading the unprotected wares (especially the single BRUN files) onto it.

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I would say the Apple. Especially if its boxed. I think the main problem with the PC is its an 486. For gaming you want a slower 386 for the older speed dependence stuff and the P1 or P2 for the newer stuff. But your STB video card maybe worth some money one day if its ISA. ISA STB (Cirrus Based) videocards sell for $20+ on ebay right now.

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