OT: Who has the oldest computer?

On 19/04/2011 9:37 PM, Nancy Young wrote:

We had in the office an early Osborne 1. Now that was a heavy and bulky
beast. It was the size of a large sewing machine and looked like one
too. I was lucky never to be issued with one of them. In fact, the chap
to whom it was issued still has it. I wonder if it still works?


1400 baud would have been heaven. All I had in the early days was an
acoustic coupler at, I think, 300 baud.
There's a pic of it here;

http://www.hp-collection.org/hpil.html

Scroll down the list until you reach this one;
HP 92205M HP-IL Acoustic Coupler
It was quite a snazzy unit in its day which was, unfortunately, many
decades ago. I found it in my garage amongst the junk a few years back
and found that all the rubber bits were quite perished. I tossed it out
thinking no one would ever want it. Now I see many in these computer
museums...

Sometime down the track I was upgraded to a US Robotic Sportster Flash @
3.3k. I thought that was amazing. I could connect to the office or my
computer at home when I was interstate. I still have that one. We
traveled a lot of miles together and I can't quite bring myself to toss
it out. Needless to say, all the laptops we use these days have inbuilt
modems but I never use them as we have 3G Wifi dongles to connect back
to home base nowadays.

Indeed

Krypsis
 
On 4/19/2011 3:46 PM, notbob wrote:

Ha ha. This rant's ancient history. The future is not gonna be Windows,
WinPhone7 or Linux or Unix. Everything's gonna change in a few years so
who cares?

Linux ain't a real intuitive OS - sorry about that. The latest version
is pretty easy but it's all too little, too late. Her's another clue -
most of the dudes going on and on and on about Linux and Unix didn't
learn it themselves. They had on-the-job training. I could learn Linux
and Unix too if it was a part of my job. That shit is easy. You guys
ain't so special.

Let's face it, you need Windows so you can have a whipping boy. That's
fine, I can dig that. Enjoy it while it lasts. :-)
 
On 2011-04-17, Ed Pawlowski wrote:

Only for bloated pig Windows.

I can run three separate decktops simultaneously and still watch
youtube with a mere 379M RAM and an eleven yr old CPU.

nb
 
On 18 Apr 2011 02:02:41 GMT, Carbon wrote:


I'd bet dozens of us have handfuls of old memory. If you try and buy
it new or even used, you'll pay through the nose. Memory for old
machines typically costs more than memory for new machines.

Which is why it just makes sense to bite the bullet and spend a couple
hundred upgrading your components.

I can't stand using any of my friend's computers now they seem so slow
:-) They used to be screaming faster than mine.

-sw
 
Well, let's see. Nothing I see so far is even competitive. 8;)

I still have an original IBM PC luggable (with a 20MB HardCard in it),
a 1982 IBM XT, a Compaq luggable, a TRS-80 Model 100 with cassette
storage, and my original Imsai Series 2 8080. Plus a couple of Intel
SDK-80 and 85s, and a couple of Intel Multibus chassis with an
assortment of 8080 processor and supporting boards -- including two
16KB core memory boards. Oh, and a Heath-Zenith Z89 Z-80 based micro
with two hard-sectored floppy drives.

All bought or traded when new.

-- Larry
 
In article ,
[email protected] says...

Which is another way of saying "mainframe". If you grew up on the
things and the culture surrounding them it becomes easy to recognize
even if the details of the hardware change.


The IBM 370 could be and sometimes was operated exactly this way in the
'70s. It's big claim to fame was that it could virtualize itself and
run multiple instantiations of the OS protected from each other.

All that the blade servers change is that you can fit a lot more
machines into the data center and per machine it costs a lot less to run
them.


Remember that Microsoft's first strategic partnership was with IBM and
they learned many lessons, not all of them technological.


Typical PHB reasoning. Look at it, yes, but when one _must_ suggest a
particular type of solution even when it is not appropriate to the task
at hand disaster will soon follow.
 
On 2011-04-18, Krypsis wrote:


I got mine as a freebie for attending a timeshare come-on.



The biggest being neglecting the Amiga while trying to compete with
Taiwan in the PC clone wars. We might now have one of the greatest
computer platforms of all time if CBM had pulled their corporate head
outta their ass. So sad.

nb
 
On Tue, 19 Apr 2011 00:11:47 +1000, Krypsis wrote:



The computers are going to a museum, which will give me more room for my
antique CB radios, I've a Hallacrafter CB3a, CB7, CB9, and a Royce 5ch., and
they all work fine.
 
On 19/04/2011 10:02 PM, dsi1 wrote:

Windows NT was designed from the ground up with NO backward
compatibility in mind. It was designed for the Enterprise market had had
no need of backward compatibility per se. The "home" versions of Windows
were saddled with the underlying DOS but that was gone by XP I believe
as it uses the NT underpinnings.


No, they always have a little bit of legacy stuff in them somewhere or
they emulate it. After all, Apple quite successfully did this when they
went through a great leap foreward. Eventually the legacy stuff
disappears entirely.

Microsoft will always look after number 1.
Krypsis
 
On 4/19/2011 10:05 PM, dsi1 wrote:

I think I interjected this into the wrong place. I'm not even talking
about home computers anymore, and anyone who's worked with Windows
server 2008 64 bit knows how tight it is locked down. Our newest
contract had a pen test and only 3 vulnerabilities were discovered
across 20 servers. And the pen testers couldn't exploit the
vulnerabilities they found.
 
On Mon, 18 Apr 2011 02:02:41 +0000, Carbon wrote:


Currently I'm on the old 3.16ghz Core2Duo that I built a couple of years
ago. It's got 1.5TB of hard drives, 4GB of DDR3 and a pretty sweet ATI
video card in it. Basically a gaming machine, but now I don't have time
to play games :(

At one time (about 4 years ago), I had about 15 computers in my house.
Most were mine, a few were my girlfriend-at-the-time's. All of them were
under Pentium I or II class machines. I used them for various
development tasks and network experimentation. I burned out on the whole
IT thing and recycled all of them but one.
The one I kept was my 300mhz K6-II that was the first PC I built back in
1998 or so. I still use this machine for development, but now I run
FreeBSD 8-point-something on it in text-mode only.

I think it was around 2003 or so that I heard all kinds of emerging n00b
developers crying something like "hard disk space, memory and cpu power
is cheap these days. Why should we optimize programs? We should
optimize for the human developer!". Shortly after, pretty much every
piece of open source software exploded exponentially in size again and
again.

I know I won't be able to cling to a yellowing remnant of the Dot-Com
Boom forever, but I think it's been killed too early.


Oh well... the prior machine was a Commodore Plus/4, if you believe that.

-J
 
Cheryl wrote:

Cloud computing hasn't quite had its
Hindenburg disaster yet, but it's coming.
After the fact, everybody will say they
were always skeptical of the whole concept.
The smart ones are saying that now.
 
In article ,
[email protected] says...

My working machines are a two year old Gateway quad core, a 6 year old
Gateway laptop and two '90s vintage servers, one for mail, backup, etc,
and the other as firewall. However the collection includes an H-89,
which is a Z-80 based CP/M machine (also can run UCSD P-System), a 400
MHz dual-Xeon machine that eventually I am going to build into another
vintage server with all the trimmings, a 200 MHz Thinkpad, an AS/400,
and assorted other oddments. One of these days I need to build a proper
display case for them.
 
On 2011-04-19, Krypsis wrote:


Plenty of those. My old HP48GX calculator probably has the computing
power of an early 286. They even had IR connectivity. I could dwnld
a program from one 48 to another 48 by just putting them next to each
other and pressing a button.

nb
 
Roy wrote:



Roy,

Heh heh heh heh heh!

Company have marveled that I actually own one. An Asian guest saw it and
couldn't take her hands off it. I should've gifted it to her. DOH!

I never got good at operating it.

I once had a beautiful pocket abacus but don't know what happened to it.

BTW, to those of you who may think otherwise, the abacus was invented by
the Greeks, not the Chinese.

Best,

Andy
 
On Apr 20, 6:03?pm, Andy wrote:

==
No, I've not been to the site cited as I am a furriner although my
parents were both Americans.

I imagine school bus drivers lead really exciting lives but if its the
only action in town...ya gotta do what ya gotta do. I used to follow
the police bands but that is not too interesting either.
==
 
On 2011-04-19, Krypsis wrote:


My roomy brought one home. Heavy is an understatement. All DOS, but
I learned a lot on it. The first thing I learned, all .dat, .com, and
..exe files were executables. Bwahahahaha.....

nb
 
"Portland" wrote in message
news:[email protected]...


I have a Commodore 64 I bought in 1984 with 1741 monitor and 1541 disk
drive. I also have my Compaq Deskpro, bought in 1986 with 640K of RAM, 2
5.24 inch floppies and a 20 MB Seagate hard drive.

Paul
 
Back
Top