Vintage PC Appreciation Thread

[kane]

I'm a big fan of old PCs, DOS being my most favourite OS.

 

 

Here's is my 486 machine running DOS 6.22

 

IBM PC330 6571

486DX33

64MB RAM

256KB cache

1MB Cirrus Logic VGA built in to motherboard

 

In particular I'm keen on DOS era games and have been buying up original boxed games for the last couple of years and have about 300 or so, but unfortunately only have shelf space for about 100 at the moment, so most are boxed up. Below is a pic of a haul of games I picked up off of eBay last year ->

 

 

I also have a late 90's Pentium 2 PC set up, with two VooDoo2 12MB cards for the Win95 era games.

[zylon]

Got a small hoard of early Tandy 1000's- 1 EX, 1 SX, 2 TX. Love these because they still work on a TV.

 

Also assembled a Dell Dimension 3000 for later Dos uses and early Win games.

 

Dell 3000 with XP- $5

Kensington keyboard- free found at work

MS mouse- free found at work

1.2GB RAM- found 1GB card at work for free

Flatscreen LCD VGA monitor- free found at work

[bkrownd]

"Vintage PCs" for me are Sun 3/60, SparcStation IPX, SPARCclassic, etc, and the various "VT100" terms and XTerms we used to access them from our personal desks in the 1990's. About 1998 we dumped the XTerms and most of the Suns and switched our desktops to far cheaper Debian Linux on 150-333 MHz Pentiums. (My workstations were dual-CPU HP Vectra/Kayak XUs)

 

My Wintel experience jumped directly from a DOS on a 1988 8086 to Windows 7 on a 2010 Core i5. I'm very glad I mostly missed the weird and expensive Wintel PC years of the 1990's-2000's, though I do appreciate the oddball hardware of the era as historical artifacts.

[Nebulon]

"Vintage PCs" for me are Sun 3/60, SparcStation IPX, SPARCclassic, etc, and the various "VT100" terms and XTerms we used to access them from our personal desks in the 1990's. About 1998 we dumped the XTerms and most of the Suns and switched our desktops to far cheaper Debian Linux on 150-333 MHz Pentiums. (My workstations were dual-CPU HP Vectra/Kayak XUs)

 

My Wintel experience jumped directly from a DOS on a 1988 8086 to Windows 7 on a 2010 Core i5. I'm very glad I mostly missed the weird and expensive Wintel PC years of the 1990's-2000's, though I do appreciate the oddball hardware of the era as historical artifacts.

Looks like you essentially had the Rolls-Royce experience through the 90s with all those workstations.

 

I wanted to get my hands on machines like that, but had to wait until 1996 when I started working with SGI machines. By then though, the DEC Alpha was putting a dent into their market-share (soon followed by the Pentium Pro/II/III CPUs).

[bkrownd]

Looks like you essentially had the Rolls-Royce experience through the 90s with all those workstations.

 

I wanted to get my hands on machines like that, but had to wait until 1996 when I started working with SGI machines. By then though, the DEC Alpha was putting a dent into their market-share (soon followed by the Pentium Pro/II/III CPUs).

 

If you can call a VT100 or buggy old XTerm on your desktop a Rolls-Royce, but it did access USENET and GOPHER just as well as anything else could have.

 

As for the true Rolls-Royce experience I never got to touch any of our big SGI or Cray monoliths. Those Suns were fairly pedestrian machines in the academic world. The internet speeds were ALWAYS fabulous, though.

[Keatah]

I wish I could forget my wintel experiences between 1995 and 2008.

[7800]

1981 IBM 5150 Personal Computer:

 

Just got this from an estate sale. Powers on but the keyboard is not responsive. To be expected from a 33 year old computer I suppose.

 

 

[jaybird3rd]

Gorgeous machine! I have an original 5150, too, but I seem to have misplaced the keyboard. I hope to acquire a matching IBM monitor for it, but good ones are rare and expensive.

[The Usotsuki]

Be nice to toss an IBM monitor on my 5160 but there's nothing to hook it to because my 5160 has a VGA.

[7800]

I read that the 5150 is very collectible and can fetch a lot of money. Any truth to this?

[jmetal88]

I'm a big fan of old PCs, DOS being my most favourite OS.

 

 

Here's is my 486 machine running DOS 6.22

 

IBM PC330 6571

486DX33

64MB RAM

256KB cache

1MB Cirrus Logic VGA built in to motherboard

 

What size is that monitor? It looks huge, but I can't tell if it is or if it's just that the computer isn't as wide as I was expecting. It reminds me, though, I need to bring that 17" Samsung Syncmaster monitor I got at the flea market a few years ago up from my parents' house sometime (I actually meant to do that when I visited a few days ago but forgot about it). But then again, I'm running out of space for CRTs, so maybe I should just let it sit until I either move to a bigger place or can afford to rent a storage unit. Though I'd swap out the 16:10 LCD I'm currently using on my AMD K6 build for a 4:3 LCD without a second thought if I ever ran across one here in town.

[kane]

What size is that monitor? It looks huge, but I can't tell if it is or if it's just that the computer isn't as wide as I was expecting. It reminds me, though, I need to bring that 17" Samsung Syncmaster monitor I got at the flea market a few years ago up from my parents' house sometime (I actually meant to do that when I visited a few days ago but forgot about it). But then again, I'm running out of space for CRTs, so maybe I should just let it sit until I either move to a bigger place or can afford to rent a storage unit. Though I'd swap out the 16:10 LCD I'm currently using on my AMD K6 build for a 4:3 LCD without a second thought if I ever ran across one here in town.

 

It's a 17", the IBM box is quite compact, the downside being only one 5.25" bay, so can't have a CD and 5.25" floppy in the same machine.

 

Also forgot to mention the Sound Blaster 16 in there as well.

[jmetal88]

 

It's a 17", the IBM box is quite compact, the downside being only one 5.25" bay, so can't have a CD and 5.25" floppy in the same machine.

 

Also forgot to mention the Sound Blaster 16 in there as well.

 

Ah, cool. My AMD K6 build has a Diamond Multimedia Pro 16 card installed. It's an OPTI-929 chipset with (IIRC) an OPL-3 on board. Natively, it's a Windows Sound System card, but it has a Sound Blaster Pro compatibility mode.