This will take those of us old enough to remember back in time

[tunneldiode]

Thanks for that.
That chap's got a great website, my favourite page is this one:-
www.gifford.co.uk/~coredump/oldsad.htm

[DODGERN]

Some nice items there. I wonder if any of today's throw-away electronic items will be cherished in years to come?

Roger.

[Paula A]

It's really sad.. I couldn't find a taker for a beautiful all original 486dx-2 with it's original windows 95 still working, or a packard-bell 8088. When you look at the stupid prices some people will pay for a zx81 you do have to wonder if the early 90's era computers will all just go to landfill instead of finding new purposes. Until I moved a pentium 133 did service as my router/firewall.. ran 24/7 for 6 years until going to the scrapyard in the sky.. I'm not going to say anything about my 64 node cluster of cyrix 333's .. except it could outstrip anything you can buy off the shelf when it came to sheer number crunching jobs like video conversion runs. All these kids constantly whining about how xxxx new game won't run unless they spend another £200 on new hardware every 6 months.. that beast ran everything in whatever hardware environment was required, the joys of emulation on a supercomputer.. half the time the problem wasn't "it won't run" so much as "how do you slow the damn thing down!!" .. I guess having a virtual ramdisk (no drives except the 8 gig boot drive on the "master splitter") of 31.5 gb's helps.

Anybody who gets offered a job lot of old p3/4 machines from a school/business or whatever (they do get offered.. I was offered 280 p3-800's a few weeks ago) to take off their hands.. If you have the room I would say grab them and make a few big heaps.. Businesses have to pay to have them taken away, you should be able to undercut the scrapman... which reminds me.. the council are giving us a heap of them soon.. I'll have to grab a nice matched set of 17.. p4's should do the same on 16 as the 333's did on 64.. economies of scale.

I have some photos somewhere of the "spare room" with 64 computers in blocks of 8.. it was a very impressive sight. When I find them they should be posted for posterity I reckon.

[Mark Hennessy]

I too have a fair collection of P3 and P4 hardware, and can't bring myself to part with any of it. Indeed, I still have my old motherboards going back to my 386 days. A decent P3 is still a viable machine; my experience is that it will run XP very well indeed, although most mainstream Linux distros are too resource-heavy if you plan to use the GUI (funny, because I remember a time - a long time ago - when Linux was touted as an ideal use for older hardware).

At the moment, I'm playing with an industrial single-board computer. I rescued it from a skip, and surmised that the 11 bulging capacitors might be a factor in its current location. Normally I wouldn't risk changing them on a multi-layer board because an attempt some 10 years back failed (inner layers breaking their connection to the via - luckily fixed with a short jumper wire). However, I had nothing to lose, and many of the capacitor pads were surrounded with vias to "beef up" the connection, so why not... An hour later, it worked perfectly

The board runs a P3, and has been maxed out with a 1GHz CPU and 1GB RAM (the latter for ~£5 from eBay). All the interfaces are on the board, but unfortunately the drive interface is IDE rather than SATA, and USB is only 1.1 - neither is surprising given the age. However, there are ways around these minor issues. Most importantly, though, this only takes about 40 watts from the mains when busy - less when idle, so is ideal for a server. So the thinking is to build this into a 1U case, along with a 1U PSU from a Dell server in a skip - should be good fun.

This board uses the PICMG form factor - I hadn't really investigated this in the past, but it's pretty standard so I'm not about to back myself into a blind alley. P4 boards are available for reasonable money second hand, but do require more power and cooling, of course. The board works perfectly without a backplane, but one of these will allow me to add a PCI expansion card, which sorts the USB 1.1 problem - it just so happens that a suitable backplane is in a queue at work, pending a trip to a skip. Patience is one of my virtues

All of this is getting off the point (one day I'll start a separate thread about it with pictures, etc), but is meant to illustrate that there is definitely life in old computer junk. I really resent paying £hundreds for a CPU, knowing that it will be a fraction of that price in a few months time, so am happy to bide my time. This machine is a Compaq P4 that was free. The CPU is now 3.06GHz and the RAM is 2GB, both the highest supported, and both thanks to eBay - I don't think I paid more than £20 for both, but could have paid a lot lot more if I'd bought the first items I saw. This machine can be a bit slow for Ubuntu, but I'm thinking of switching to Lubuntu, having tried it on my P3...

I've no idea what to use my P2 and older machine for - if nothing else, they are just so bulky. That said, I run Window 98 on a P2 333MHz, and that runs a lot of electronics-specific stuff - that machine hasn't been a moments trouble since building it, and it's amazingly stable too. I've boxes full of CPUs and RAM and expansion cards for machines of that era - if anyone wants anything, just ask! But, to return to the point of the previous posts, I suspect that these machines won't be especially collectable precisely because of their main virtue: their backward compatibly. Which I've always found amazing, BTW. The reason I still have BBC micros here is because the experience just isn't the same on an emulator - good though they are. No need to keep old Intel machines unless you need to run 1980s DOS games...

Thanks Paula for awakening this old thread which I hadn't seen before - very interesting :D

Mark

[Paula A]

It's funny when I think of the tings scrapped.. they were either "workhorse" stacks or specific "nice examples" in showroom condition all original.

Mark will remember coming to the house and seeing the pile of 80's and 90's computer books all piled up. It's strange now only having 5 towers instead of 100 or so, and losing my stockpile of spares has been a little annoying. People don't seem to throw out scrap electronics round here and the back street gates have been the death knell for finding vintage electronics put out.

I guess I was one of the lucky ones never owning a BBC (lucky?) as father in one of his mad moments arrived home one Saturday lunchtime with a complete PDP-8 on the back of a flatbed which we spent the afternoon dragging down to the cellar and setting up. That would have been 78/79 and after a lot of messing around we finally got it going. If that had survived the relocation at the end of 80 no doubt my future would have been very different from the music business career and then politics which kept me employed from 81 right through to my last "proper" job in 1999

[ed731pdh]

380z, god that was a long time ago for me. I remember playing the Algol based luner lander on this box (arung lem) along with basic CP/M programming. At the same time was playing with ZX81's, Spectrums, Atari computers, then moved into the PC world in the late 80s.

I have tucked away by my side a Compaq professional workstation 5000, fitted with a pair of Pentium Pro 200s, running under NT4 (the Godzilla of operating systems). It runs quite well and along with the SCSI interface is quite a nice bit of kit. My oldest PC in the house.

[DrStrangelove]

The first computer I got my hands on was a Modular One computer in the Electrical Engineering dept at Loughborough University in 1972.

IIRC it had a whole 4k of ram, a paper tape reader, a paper tape punch, an ASR33 teletype and a bistable screen vdu: not the read the text type but an XY plot it type.

First punch your FORTRAN source on the ASR33, then load the compiler from paper tape, read the source, correct the errors, read the source, punch the object, load the linker, link the object and finally run the exe.

Oh what fun. Not. I think I managed to get one program to draw a sinewave on the vdu.

Next was a PET, the one with a calculator keyboard, whilst at 3M in ?1977?. Ah the joys of saving programs to cassette. Well at least we had plenty of those, they assembled them in the basement.

The pet also had an ASR33 that was connected via some magic box that generated current loop and cost £100.

The computer dept wanted to confiscate said PET but they weren't allowed to.

Following that it was 7 years of FORTRAN IV and CAP 16 assembler at Siliconix until the poor old General Automation 16-220 was scrapped: a whole 48k of ram, and 20Mb of HD running MTS.

The first computer I bought with my own cash was a Jupiter ACE which resides upstairs somewhere.

Then a Dragon 32 and a Tatung Einstein before the inevitable 286 appeared.

[DrStrangelove]

I'd forgotten the HP 9816 (aka HP216) which was 68000 based.

It cost an arm & a leg back in 1984 and was used to control a HP 4150 semiconductor analyser via GPIB.

Floppy diskettes were £4 each and were the first 3.5" examples I'd encountered.

It was a lovely little computer, software loaded via the GPIB from a  dual floppy drive.

It ran Rocky Mountain basic but Fortran and Pascal were available.

https://www.hpmuseum.net/display_item.php?hw=4

[BusyBee]

I have a Vic 20 which I came across on the way somewhere. It was interesting as it had direct access to the 6522 VIA chip which I learnt most of my low level interfacing with. It was a useful comparison with a simple microprocessor system employing the same as relative levels of noise interference created could be compared. Over the years I have come across a few different systems but it's only more recently that I have fiddled with the internals to any extent. Mainly swopping out faulty hard drives to keep an old system going. In comparison to Windows it's amazing just how readily Linux can be made to work on a comparatively tiny disk.

I never had anything to do with Fortran or Cobol. A bit before my time. I liked Pascal though although went on to C and C++. I have played about with quite a few languages but I get a bit confused at times as they are predominantly designed toward abstraction whereas I push more toward lower level access. I much prefer low level microcontrollers perhaps.

Tracy

[DrStrangelove]

And then there was the Intel "Blue Box" MDS II, 8080 based running ISIS II.

Blessed with one SSSD 8" flppy disk drive next to the vdu, with an expansion chassis containing two SSDD 8" floppy drives, the format of the latter being unknown to anything later.

The MDS III wan't blue but white and had 5.25" floppy drives, which were of a format such that Track 0 was SD & the rest of the diskette was DD.

At least that's how I remember it, after 35 years it may all be complete b*ll*x.

https://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/...nt-System/

It came with an "elephant's truck" emulator option that replaced the 8080/8085 chip in the embedded system allowing debugging.

Ah, the joys of 8080 assembler and PL/M.