***Vintage PC Technology Mega Discussion Thread***

[g-unit1111]

Hello and welcome to the nostalgia tech mega thread!

Have you ever been the owner of a 486? Or a Macintosh running System 7? Or know what the various cages that hold CD-ROM discs are for? Have you ever used a 1.44MB floppy drive? Or a punchcard? Or a 3DFX Voodoo 2? Well this is the place to discuss all things vintage PC technology! Reminder - keep things civil and avoid the GRAPES. As usual, all Tom's Hardware rules apply. This thread will be moderated.

 

[turkey3_scratch]

Oldest computer we have is some Dell or HP from like 2000. Wish I had more vintage stuff. I had a teacher who had some Mac from the 70s or 80s whatever (whatever the oldest one or second oldest was) and says he still boots it once in a while and it works; he can play a maze game on it.

 

[smorizio]

1978 take your kids to work day at star market. dad was working in it. used punch cards and old teletype machine....was thusday afternoon trying to do the time cards on old tape and punch cards for the whole star market chain. the teletype was dead..full on fault ligjts...would not do anything. 4 techs and manager sitting around at 2:00 pm trying to get it to run. here go 10 year old boy pulls out end of a pencile and the system reboots and works. there 5 guys staring at me wanting to kill me....other times they had kids days i used to reshuffle the punch cards on them

 

[smorizio]

1987 worked gte in needham mass in wire prep area. server at that time were sold old if you hit replay to all you used to crash the server as used to send your email to 18,000 people.

 

[USAFRet]

Dell laptop from 1997 or so. Use it once or twice a year to connect to the truck and check the OBDII data.
Running W2k.
hmmmm....that reminds me.

In original box but still working (last time I checked) VIC-20 and C64. I should crank them up and try to connect to the 60" Sony...:lol:

Anyone remember the 4 CD changers? Fit inside a standard 5.25" drive mount?

 

[g-unit1111]

Dell laptop from 1997 or so. Use it once or twice a year to connect to the truck and check the OBDII data.
Running W2k.
hmmmm....that reminds me.

In original box but still working (last time I checked) VIC-20 and C64. I should crank them up and try to connect to the 60" Sony...:lol:

Anyone remember the 4 CD changers? Fit inside a standard 5.25" drive mount?

Or how about these?

:lol:

 

[USAFRet]

Cleaning my garage today, I came across a box of 1.44 floppies. They will probably find their way to the trash tomorrow.

 

[galeener]

i have an IBM 5150 originally it had 2 5.25 360 floppys woooo This was the first computer I ever had. Upgraded the video to ega. Added a 20 meg rll hdd thought wow I will never fill this baby up.

 

[Math Geek]

i actually have one of these titan 2 m64 cards lying around i use for agp slot testing http://www.anandtech.com/show/393

and yes sadly i still get pc's with agp cards come into my shop way too often. they like to wonder what card they can change to so they can play GTA V.

 

[Reynod]

Back in 86/87 My Sperry XT weighed as much as a first Gen Thermaltake V1000 case ... 1.6mm steel. Putting 48 (54 actually) 6164 DIL RAM chips on the riser card to make it 640K took a while. I replaced one of the dual 36ok floppies with a 20MB HDD. Had to program the interface card ...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D-EtrC32wrU

The guy's next video shows him booting up a couple of old drives ...

 

[turkey3_scratch]

i actually have one of these titan 2 m64 cards lying around i use for agp slot testing http://www.anandtech.com/show/393

and yes sadly i still get pc's with agp cards come into my shop way too often. they like to wonder what card they can change to so they can play GTA V.

*facepalm*

 

[Math Geek]

my first pc at home was one of the old tandy 2000 units from radio shack (honk if you remember those pc's!!). was back when they were still called ibm clones and not pc's. think it was a 8086 chip if i recall right. was quite a long time ago so might be mixing it up. first one i bought myself was a packard bell 386 running at a blazing 18 mhz with a 20 mhz turbo button you could activate!!! put my first copy of windows onto that machine, v 2 if i recall right. i liked DOS better at that point. but by win 3.1 i was happy with it.

few years later i got my first mouse and remember all the fun of getting that working. chasing down port conflicts and all that jazz dealing with manually setting what went with what port.

 

[USAFRet]

Found in my desk drawer yesterday

 

[CountMike]

My Atari 512 ST still runs. Otherwise, my first real computer at home was Heathkit H89, There's also a Vic 20 sitting somewhere in the attic.

 

[g-unit1111]

Cleaning my garage today, I came across a box of 1.44 floppies. They will probably find their way to the trash tomorrow.

I still have a box of Zip discs.

 

[Math Geek]

believe it or not i sold a 100 mb and 250 mb zip drive with a bunch of disks last year. my dad was using them and then lost them at the bottom of a box a long time ago. he found them again and i had them ut to play with a bit. a client saw the drives and actually wanted them for some reason.

i got $50 for the 2 drives and a good 20 disks between them. feel like i won the lottery on that one as they should be totally worthless overall.

 

[Rogue Leader]

My first "computer job" we had a ZIP drive with the 100mb disks we had a lot of our group licensed software for our clients on it, so I would schlep that thing to their offices to install stuff. Or I would bring blank disks to back up data on a machine I was re-installing Windows on. It was faster than burning a CD, but running it through the computers parallel port was still slow as heck. I carried a PalmPilot back then for work notes and stuff it was funny, people looked at me and how that thing worked and you would think they saw a space alien.

I copied anything useful off all my old 1.44mb floppies onto 1 CD years ago probably a bit before the time I moved out of my parents house (2006?) and tossed them all.

 

[g-unit1111]

believe it or not i sold a 100 mb and 250 mb zip drive with a bunch of disks last year. my dad was using them and then lost them at the bottom of a box a long time ago. he found them again and i had them ut to play with a bit. a client saw the drives and actually wanted them for some reason.

i got $50 for the 2 drives and a good 20 disks between them. feel like i won the lottery on that one as they should be totally worthless overall.

That's amazing. The funny thing is I remember when those things were state of the art. Now compared to the 200GB micro SD card I have in my phone those 100MB discs seem like nothing now. :lol:

 

[Aeacus]

My 1st PC was an IBM XT in back of 1992. It had 2Mhz CPU and 10MB HDD. OS MS DOS, no mouse, no speakers, black & white monitor and 5¼-inch floppy drive. Had 1 or 2 games on it that i loved to play.

Next upgrade was IMB AT since it was faster than XT.

3rd PC i owned was 286 with CGA monitor.

Big upgrade came with 386. It had turbo button for instant CPU Mhz boost, EGA monitor, speakers, 2 button mechanical mouse (no scroll wheel), 3½-inch floppy drive and OS in form of Norton Commander. My gaming era began with 386. One game that i still casually play while emulating DOS is Supaplex.

Next PC was 486 with VGA monitor and faster CPU with more HDD space. OS Windows 3.1.

After that i went on to the Pentium series. Pentium 1 133Mhz that got upgraded to Pentium 1 166Mhz. OS Windows 95.

Next upgrade was Pentium 2 266Mhz with Windows 98SE. I still have it in running conditions with 2 PATA HHDs: 4.2GB for system and 6.1GB for data.

Years passed until Pentium 2 got too old and i bought my current AMD build in 2011 (specs in this topic) that i'm constantly upgrading to keep up with time.

Nowdays, PC building is very easy. Everything gets auto dedected and it doesn't matter witch way you connect your SATA drive.
Back then there was no such luxury. You had to manually read from HDD label the values of Size, Cyls, Head, Precomp, Landz, Sector and insert them into BIOS in hopes for the PC dedects the drive. Also the orientation of PATA cable was importnant. Not to mention the Master and Slave drives. You couldn't install two Master drives on a single PATA cable in hopes that both of them will work.

 

[Rogue Leader]

PC XT, that was OLD in 1992!

That said my friend had one and we still played games on it even then.

 

[Aeacus]

PC XT, that was OLD in 1992!

I know that it was old but it was the best my family could afford at that time.
Better that than nothing at all.

 

[Rogue Leader]

PC XT, that was OLD in 1992!

I know that it was old but it was the best my family could afford at that time.
Better that than nothing at all.

100% agree. We lived with my 386 far longer than we should have because we could not afford an upgrade. Then I got a job, and spent all my money on it lol.

 

[g-unit1111]

My 1st PC was an IBM XT in back of 1992. It had 2Mhz CPU and 10MB HDD. OS MS DOS, no mouse, no speakers, black & white monitor and 5¼-inch floppy drive. Had 1 or 2 games on it that i loved to play.

Yeah I remember learning how to play Doom on those machines. And of course my parents hated it at the time because they bought into all the anti-violent video game propaganda that was being spread. So no Doom, no Mortal Kombat, but you know what? I played the hell out of those games anyways! But you gotta love the days of the floppy drive.

 

[Math Geek]

think us older folks have a bit more appreciation for the new tech having dealt with the old stuff. i hated using a mouse early on as i was very good at navigating windows with the keyboard. most of those old commands are still there and i use them all the time. younger folks are usually amazed at how quickly i can move through windows without touching the mouse.

that and being able to work with dos command prompt. that's all we had for a long time before windows. funny to see younger folks bash linux as "command line nerd stuff" when that's what we started with and learned on. i can still man handle a pc with command line stuff rather easily despite it falling out of favor.

odd was that my dad actually got into games on the pc before i did. he fell in love with catacomb abyss and spent many hours playing it. i preferred to do other things such as spend time on those new fangled bbs dial in boards. that was quality time well spent

 

[Faux_Grey]

Still have a working AMD K6 system with 24Mb of RAM..
Came preinstalled with windows 95 and I upgraded it to windows 98. 😀
Newest thing I ran on it was probably age of empires 2.