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

[Math Geek]

in the early 200's cpu's were getting faster and better VERY quickly. so upgrades were needed often. today, advancements progress much slower and thus older stuff is needed much less often.

i still KNOW FOR A FACT that windows vista was designed specifically to make 90% of the pc's in the world obsolete overnight. at that time we all ran win xp and spend extra money on a shiny new printer or other new peripheral since what we already had for a pc was good enough for most everyone. can't have that so all the pc makers got together and "lobbied MS to help them out a bit". by lobbied i of course mean "provided a ton of monetary incentives to consider their needs" and of course by that i mean "paid MS a ton of money to force people to buy a new pc"

try to remember all the complaining and "vista capable" pc's that came out around that time. only reason you needed a new pc was simply to run vista, not the programs you actually needed to run.

 

[g-unit1111]

Wow, I had a 19" CTL flatscreen and I thought that thing was HUGE. Weighed about 30 lbs and was every bit of 23" long. It goes to show how advancements in technology have brought prices down. In 2007 or 2008, I remember an Extreme version of the Core 2 Duo was like $700. Now that chip is slower than a $60 Pentium chip that uses less than half the power. The i7-990X of 2011 was a $1000 chip, required a really expensive X58 motherboard, cooler, and RAM, but 2 years later was slower at some tasks than an i5-3570K that could run on a $70 motherboard 8)

I think the 21" I had weighed like 70 lbs, that thing was not easy to lift. :lol:

The first time I really built a PC was in 2007 for work purposes and I had spent $1300 on it, and it had a Core 2 Duo. Then my next build had a 920 in it, and I think that one was around $2K at the time. Now my current 6700K build is something like a $1600 build at current prices, and my Ryzen build is around the $1K mark.

 

[Inkiad]

Our uni has 20ish CRT monitors still in use in our laboratory.

 

[wogfor]

I had a friend drop by a while back and he had a box of "computer stuff" an ex-girlfrind had left behind when she moved out. He said he knew I was "into" computers and thought maybe I could use it. Looking in the box I saw an old recovery disc for a brand of computer I don't recall, some sort of barcode scanner which had a serial connector on the end of it and dozens of floppy disks.
I was like "uh. thanks!" since I have 3 computers and not one of them have either a serial port or a floppy drive!
I think when she moved, she was leaving behind useless things which included the box of parts.....

 

[Pentium4User]

So here are my 3 HP Veatra XM socket 7 system I retired these from my school 2 years ago. They are running windows 98, I think they had 95 before I'm not sure. The cpu are Pentium 1 I think running at 120mhz not sure and 32mb of ram. They been in used 24/7 for typing class since the day they bought it so the build quality is shown. They had all original peripherals the CRT,mouse,and keyboard I was only able to take the towers ehn I put them out of service. And the only reason they got put out of service is the school hired a company to check out the server in the computer lab because it was always going down and I had a feeling that he probably trying to sell pc's and was tell the staff of the school that all systems below with only windows 7 need to be put out of service and should't be online even though half of the windows xp system was only used for typing or small stuff and where perfectly fine. anyway here are some pics of the systems.

https://imgur.com/a/Gk1Ia

https://imgur.com/2Um6kQA

 

[665ae]

Old guy here... first PC I ever used was a TRS-80. First one I ever owned was a 286 IBM PS/2. The neat thing about that system was that it was fully modular design with no cables. All the components snapped together. It ran DOS... that's it, just DOS. I miss that computer.

First computer I built was a Pentium 75 with a 850mb hard drive (drive cost $280 at the time.) I remember being really excited because someone told me that the Pentium Chip was supposedly a 100mhz chip that couldn't maintain 100mhz , so it was marked as a 75. That meant I could overclock it by changing a jumper on the motherboard. Unfortunately, I plugged the power plugs into the board backwards and popped a circuit breaker and fried the board itself.(it was 2 plugs, either the red wires went together in the middle or the black ones did, they weren't one way only plugs.)

 

[christopher.john.sr]

41 year old here. Today, you can download awesome games in the course of a couple minutes and be playing something so advanced, you can see the acne on your character's face. But my first computer experience was with a Commodore 64. Having to go to the bookstore to buy books containing the code that YOU TYPED into the machine in order to have a game. The excitement of getting it right, and playing a game with a guy that looks like Hangman playing tennis with his twin.

And the awesome BEEP BOP soundtracks (that's literally the whole soundtrack, BEEP and BOP with maybe a BLIP thrown in).

My son can't understand why I use emulators on my PC, or the nostalgia of still playing coin-ops from the 80s in 2017. Hell, I'm still playing Joust and the original Mario Bros. (the one where you jump under the turtles to pop them upside down, and then go kick them off the screen).

 

[g-unit1111]

41 year old here. Today, you can download awesome games in the course of a couple minutes and be playing something so advanced, you can see the acne on your character's face. But my first computer experience was with a Commodore 64. Having to go to the bookstore to buy books containing the code that YOU TYPED into the machine in order to have a game. The excitement of getting it right, and playing a game with a guy that looks like Hangman playing tennis with his twin.

And the awesome BEEP BOP soundtracks (that's literally the whole soundtrack, BEEP and BOP with maybe a BLIP thrown in).

My son can't understand why I use emulators on my PC, or the nostalgia of still playing coin-ops from the 80s in 2017. Hell, I'm still playing Joust and the original Mario Bros. (the one where you jump under the turtles to pop them upside down, and then go kick them off the screen).

Yup I remember those days! I was learning how to use dual floppy drive Apple IIe systems when I was a kid. And I'll play modern games like Wolfenstein II and GTA V, but I will always go back to the old school games! I still have my old video game consoles (NES, SNES, N64 and even a Wii). I do not have an Apple IIe though. Wish I did. :lol:

 

[imrazor]

Does anyone know if the Raspberry Pi can emulate an Amiga? I miss my old A500, but it fell apart years ago. Lately I've been messing around with a couple of old Amiga games on Linux, but it'd be neat if I could get a Gameboy sized Amiga emulator.

 

[shrapnel_indie]

Yup I remember those days! I was learning how to use dual floppy drive Apple IIe systems when I was a kid. And I'll play modern games like Wolfenstein II and GTA V, but I will always go back to the old school games! I still have my old video game consoles (NES, SNES, N64 and even a Wii). I do not have an Apple IIe though. Wish I did. :lol:

I realise this is a litle old now... your statements... but....

I have several Apple IIe units (including a couple of platinum models,) floppy drives, and even a couple of extra monitors I may be willing to depart with... that is if you're interested having the real hardware again.

PM me if interested so we don't clutter the thread with it.

 

[g-unit1111]

I realise this is a litle old now... your statements... but....

I have several Apple IIe units (including a couple of platinum models,) floppy drives, and even a couple of extra monitors I may be willing to depart with... that is if you're interested having the real hardware again.

PM me if interested so we don't clutter the thread with it.

Ha I totally forgot about that post. I'm not sure what I would do with one if I had it right now. Maybe some time in the future.

 

[shrapnel_indie]

I realise this is a litle old now... your statements... but....

I have several Apple IIe units (including a couple of platinum models,) floppy drives, and even a couple of extra monitors I may be willing to depart with... that is if you're interested having the real hardware again.

PM me if interested so we don't clutter the thread with it.

Ha I totally forgot about that post. I'm not sure what I would do with one if I had it right now. Maybe some time in the future.

fair enough.

 

[phaelax]

I never owned an Apple IIe, but we had them in school. Either played Oregon trail or math blaster. First computer I actually had was an Amiga 500, best machine ever! I did have a 486, the DX4. By the time I got a P133 at home, my highschool was using Cyrix 133 in the computer lab, which we used mostly for C and Pascal programming.

I remember the 3DFX Voodoo cards, I had the 3500. That was the one with the big freaking A/V pod hanging off the back and I think (can't remember for sure) that it had a separate power connection, which is common now but not back then. I was totally on the Glide kick and thought that would be the future of graphics. Then I played Unreal, which was built for Glide. When my friend got a TNT2 Ultra and the game looked better on his hacked OGL driver than my native Glide, I was a bit upset. I think I bought the card when the Athlon 500 first came out.

After that, I had a 700MHz thunderbird athlon then had dual Athlon MPs. 1GHz or somewhere around there I think. Since then, I've been Intel. Had a Pentium 4 (prescott), Core 2 Duo, and now the i-series of chips. Those thunderbirds ran hot. Really hot. My buddy actually melted one trying to overclock it. When you hear people talk about how hot AMDs run, that's probably where it started from, those early gen athlons.

Have you ever used a 1.44MB floppy drive?

Enough to still remember they format down to 1.38MB. Even remember when I made floppy bombs. (match stick powder and clear nail polish) If I recall, there was even double density floppy that held more, but they weren't very common. Then came about Zip drives, 100mb at first I think, and notoriously unreliable.

I always use to go overboard with my sound. Had the sound blaster live platinum (front bay controls), then the audigy platinum and the audigy 2 zs platinum. Dedicated sound was always the way to go, especially when games had mediocre support for anything other than sound blaster cards (or gravis). Now, the integrated sound on motherboards have gotten much better and there's no more need for the sound cards unless you do something specific beyond the average user.

Does anyone know if the Raspberry Pi can emulate an Amiga? I miss my old A500,

Yes, there is an emulator that will run. I haven't tested it fully on mine yet but I have gotten it to work on my pi2, not tested it on the 3 yet. My brother has our Amiga right now, I need to go take it back before he destroys it. Up until a few years ago, I still had many of the original boxes and manuals for the games. Then his kids destroyed many of them, even the Psygnosis ones


Who remembers all the choices we used to have with processors? Yea Intel was pretty much the only real consideration if you were serious. But AMD was around back then, though considered a joke. But worse than that was the winchip, the evergreen, the cyrix.

Shortly after highschool, I had a friend buy a solaris machine (sparc processors) and another bought an Irix, both 64-bit systems long before Intel had anything on the market.

I'll talk all day about 90s tech, I think that was the best era to get into it all. Nothing released today has ever brought me the same joy as new tech did back in the 90s.

 

[g-unit1111]

Have you ever used a 1.44MB floppy drive?

Enough to still remember they format down to 1.38MB. Even remember when I made floppy bombs. (match stick powder and clear nail polish) If I recall, there was even double density floppy that held more, but they weren't very common. Then came about Zip drives, 100mb at first I think, and notoriously unreliable.

I was wondering what I should do with that stack of Zip discs I have in my garage! :lol:

 

[phaelax]

I think I dumped all my zip stuff off at the goodwill. I might have even had a jazz drive in the mix. Remember all the free floppies AOL used to send out?

 

[dualboot87]

My first was a Vic-20 in '83, bought it at Toys R Us! Scared myself the first time I saw "ILLEGAL FUNCTION CALL" and i quickly turned it off!!! I made it talk with the Raddio Shack SP0256-AL2 chip , ive done so much to that computer, i never put the screws back ok.. I was always doing something to it.. Before the internet we bought everything through magazine ads, like from Radio Electronics, or Computer Shopper, etc.. And of course had tons of games like Radar Rat Race, Gorf, Avenger... a Gorilla Banana printer from DAK.. Though i did have my eye on the Adam computer, but what teen had $300 for that?!

 

[phaelax]

I used to get the Amiga magazines, always had a floppy with a bunch of random games with them. Computer Shopper isn't like it used to be. First time I bought that it was as thick as a phone book! I still have a dot matrix printer

 

[arajigar]

I remember my Vintage PC. I selled it though. Gigabyte GA-7IXE, Athlon 811 mHz (underclock from 1200 mHz), 640 MB of RAM, a 3dfx VooDoo 3 2000 working like the first day (1998 If I am not wrong...). I did mount it on an Unikach Armor white Case, blue led fans, clear side window...beautiful. I painted the MOBO in black and did a cooling mod for the 3dfx that keeps it under 20ºC even gaming. Modded the Heatsink (60 mm fan), with a SP Fan of 80 mm, making the CPU run 100% at only 42-45ºC. The soundcard was a SB 128. I also have a 15 inch Flatron screen.It boots up in 20 seconds!!, running W98 SE (can´t remember if it has a version or not). Ahhh... the feeling and satisfaction of playing DOS games without having to learn to hack the pentagon´s intranet.

 

[g-unit1111]

I think I dumped all my zip stuff off at the goodwill. I might have even had a jazz drive in the mix. Remember all the free floppies AOL used to send out?

Oh yeah, I had a giant pile of those! Made great drink coasters. :lol:

 

[RememberThe5th]

How rare is the Legend QDI P6I440LX/DP Legend IV Dual Slot 1

 

[g-unit1111]

How rare is the Legend QDI P6I440LX/DP Legend IV Dual Slot 1

I had to Google that but it's a Pentium II motherboard, I wouldn't think they're too rare but you could look up Pentium II motherboards and see if there are any still out there. There might be.

 

[RememberThe5th]

Well from far what I see its an dual slot Pentium slot 1, guy for less than 50$ offers 2x P2 333MHz 4x128MB's,
http://baber.com/baber/411/qdip6i440lxdp.htm
I have not seen them actually, 1 on ebay and 1 here on my local site.
Nothing i can find about it...

 

[Rogue Leader]

I'd say its probably rare for the fact its dual slot and on top of that most are probably in a landfill somewhere at this point.

 

[RememberThe5th]

Im gonna buy it and test, probably install windows xp xD or 98 or get voodoo 2 for it.

 

[jeremita]

My first PC was 486 DX2-66Mhz, 4MB RAB, HDD 428MB (producer: Optimus)

Systems: DOS 6.22 + Windows 3.11

That was year 1994 in Poland We were lucky that our father bought us this computer, heavily influenced (business positively) my life!

--

Before that: Commodere 64 with magnet tapes. Don't remember the year we bough.