BOFH takes a visit to retro computing land BOFH logo telephone with devil's horns So I'm digging around in the Pit of Despair - ie, the IT Storeroom, when the Boss wanders in, having no doubt been drawn in by the tractor-beam of obsolescence. "Look!" he says, pointing at a chunk of off-silver on a shelf. "Is that an M1330?" "An old laptop," I say. "Yes!" he gasps, …
Just repaired an old HP-42s, so my kid could have a calculator for school. Turned out to be a real PITA, but free42 somehow violates the school's no-phone policy :(.
I remember pretty much all of that kit. I even had a collection of Commodore PETs (with 3040 and 4040 dual floppy units).
And I do NOT avoid the stairs to save my knees, thank you very much.
I only avoid stairs if there is no supply of oxygen bottles at the top.
And I was wondering what caused that spate of flat types around Elephant & Castle......
If this manager gets all excited about a Soundblaster and CDROM then he has (had) much more clue than the typical manager.
Mid 90s is more into the EIDE era. You can still find new optical drives for a pittance if you go to the right places The days of the e.g. Matsushita interface were already past. In that era it would have been an SB16 and the Gravis Wavetable daughterboard everyone lusted after. The AWE32 was on the market but wasn't as well regarded.
"If this manager gets all excited about a Soundblaster and CDROM then he has (had) much more clue than the typical manager."
Why? What does this prove other than that the manager knows what good 1990s computer parts entail? It doesn't necessarily indicate that the manager is good at using them, even if we assume that the manager has an intended use for them because they're not so unique nowadays.
I am younger than most of the people telling stories in these threads, which means as a side-effect that I have much less interesting hardware in my storage. However, it doesn't sound like the stuff we're nostalgic for, no matter our age, was necessarily the best equipment but rather the stuff we were familiar with. If I had a ZX81 around, it sounds like people would want it because it's a computer well-beloved by those who started with it, but it's not exactly the apex of hardware from the era or any real use today.
"If this manager gets all excited about a Soundblaster and CDROM then he has (had) much more clue than the typical manager."Why? What does this prove other than that the manager knows what good 1990s computer parts entail? It doesn't necessarily indicate that the manager is good at using them, even if we assume that the manager has an intended use for them because they're not so unique nowadays.
When I made the comment I was thinking back to the days of mscdex.exe, autoexec.bat etc. In order to use a computer in those days for gaming you had to be more tech-savvy than just clicking buttons in Steam like you do today.
God I'm old -->
That doesn't necessarily indicate technical knowledge, though. I wasn't around for those, but I did use computers not long thereafter, and I learned to get the more complex setup working. However, I managed that by reading and memorizing instructions and guides, not by having a lot of knowledge of why the settings had to be configured the way they were. The better understanding of what the components were doing when I issued commands only came later when I started focusing on understanding what was happening and why, not what I had to do to make it work.
Throughout my childhood, I assumed that someone who was good at using a computer must be really knowledgeable about how it worked. I knew a couple people, for example, who were quite at home with DOS commands and thus the Windows command line, and I assumed they must be technical people. Eventually, though, I learned that they were just people who had done work on DOS machines and that, although I hadn't, I had a better understanding of what was happening when they ran commands which is why they were asking me to fix things. For context, one of these people was convinced that a Bash session running on Linux must be DOS, no matter how I tried to clarify that it wasn't and that it was 2010 so they should know that a modern laptop running DOS was unlikely.
Find an emulator....
Digging up old hardware starts with a "bargain", is briefly interrupted by some failed hardware, encouraged by buying a replacement card for a small fortune before entering the world of resoldering and buying dead cards and motherboards in the hope that you can find that elusive working component.
If the game you were hoping to play was "1990s hardware technician" then you're in luck, for other games you have emulators to get to the really fun task of configuration settings to try and make them them work properly...
Bakelite? I used to dream about bakelite...
Seriously though, I once many years ago had a valve radio where the "circuit board" was wire wrapped components mounted on a piece of cardboard. Not regular cardboard because everything became rather warm. Probably something awful like asbestos-impregrated cardboard.
Bloody iPad interface…
Anyhow, what I meant to say was:
I bought a 1981 Fender Twin Reverb guitar amp [1] about twenty years ago that had suffered a long and hard life in the rehearsal studios of Kuala Lumpur, and as a result had become somewhat less than Bullet proof.
The construction of these amps, even as late as 1981, was based on tag board. Discrete components soldered to metal tags mounted to fibreboard and hooked up with wires.
Anyhow, thirty-some years exposure to the tropical climate around these parts had lead to the fibreboard becoming a less than perfect insulator, and one of the many problems that the amp was suffering from was current leakage in the HT circuit. Valve amps have 300-400 VDC floating around inside them. Not for the unwary.
One major advantage of these older amps of this type is that they can be repaired by anyone with a soldering iron who knows how to safely discharge a power supply smoothing capacitor.
Speaking of repairs though, I used to work for ICL back in the day, and one of the things that came to light after the fall of the Iron Curtain was that an enterprising engineer in Poland had managed to keep a late ‘70’s 1900 series mainframe running by means of field expedient repairs, which included their building a whole new backplane from scratch with only a service manual to guide them. They had hand wired the whole thing using a wire wrap tool.
1) For those who aren’t partially deaf old guitar players, a Twin Reverb is a large valve amp of a type known as a combo, meaning that the speakers and amp are in the same box. This particular variant was rated to put our 130 Watts at 5% total harmonic distortion through two 12” speakers. Translation: Loud enough at full volume to curdle milk in the next county.
I believe most fans of retro hardware want just to relive the experience of bygone years. That being the case, this - the 1990s hardware technician "experience" - is just what most want. They WANT to fiddle with cards, WANT to "score" that rare card with unobtanium components, they WANT to dirty their hands, and then savour the result.
Others are like old cars enthusiasts, trying to preserve and maintain old hardware and software just for the sake of keeping it working as it was decades ago. Their pleasure also is derived from the challenge, or the exclusivity. "I own the only working $old_computer this side of the pond", etc.
Emulators please the archivists, that want to avoid any and all losses in software, sometimes from acknowledging that old hardware is limited and will more so every moment in the future, sometimes from an almost pathological "accumulator" side of their (ours?) personalities. Or just to make things easier? Most (of all) old software and games would fit in a few modern HDDs.
With a few exceptions, my opinion is that old games and software are usually crap. Nobody builds a retro PC to USE Lotus 1-2-3 in real scenarios or to play some obscure DOS game unless it has some special meaning to them. Again, in my opinion, the retro computing is much more than just that.
I keep punch cards (the ones I used at the university!), 8-inch floppy disks, and such in my office, in a small museum/shrine. Recently I got hold of some Jaz disks and some hard disks for 1980's computers. I'm still looking forward to buying a ZX-81-like model we had in Brazil in the 1980s...
Old fart icon because...
"Lucky you. I so regret not keeping a few of those, and mark-sense cards and paper tape - in those days digital data was actually visible and tangible."
Ah, I know exactly where I've stored my stack of punch cards (with a COBOL inventory control program) and my roll of paper tape (with something in BASIC approaching the level of a "hello world" program).
Unfortunately, it was on a shelf in my cupboard two houses ago.
Punched cards, we used to dream about being allowed punched cards… We were issued with OCR cards with the same format, that you used a 4B+ pencil to black out the marked oblongs. When the program didn’t work, you rubbed out the mistakes and tried again. Eventually, you might be allowed to make the cards permanent by punching out the graphited bits. If the program was thought useful, sometimes it was transferred to paper tape.
I remember mid '70s when VDUs were displacing teletype terminals ASR 33s(?) in the client room of the computer centre that some if the teletypes had paper tape readers attached. Because we were billed on connect time as well cpu x core x time I worked out you could use the teletype offline to write punch your text to paper tape and later when logged in could use PIP or somesuch to copy the paper tape to the disk (file.) It was Fortran IV or Snobol for a course but I remember an Algol 60 compiler (luxury) was also available.
I am dangerously veering towards the famous Monty Python sketch :)
I was for many years the Tape Centre Supervisor of the Tuesday Night Crew at Royal Observer Corps Headquarters in Coventry Group. As such I had under my purview several tape punches/readers and a fair few minions to operate them. Everything that came into or left our Ops Room went through that department (I nearly said "my department", but I couldn't honestly claim it as mine as I had to share it with the other two TCSs on the Monday and Wednesday crews). On one exercise, we were told to stand to attention at our posts because we were to be inspected by the "Scrambled Egg" and the Lord Lieutenant of Warwickshire. I was told off because I was seen holding my new wife's hand (she was on my team), but the Lord Lieutenant was highly amused.
That sounds like the ones we had to use, at school. I can't remember much about those days, half a century ago, but I'm pretty sure that we used a thick, soft pencil, sent our stack of cards off ( to Manchester Uni) and waited for them to come back with errors, then tried again. The fun was in trying to create a major loop in the programme that wouldn't get picked up. The intention was to try and bring the computer to a halt as the loop value grew too big.
Sadly I can't remember any details- I might not have even known some, like what language ( if any - since it was of course all in numeric code, because that's what eh cards were, not these high level wordy things they use nowadays) we were using. I guess it must have had a name, to us it was just code.
Fancy an Adaptec 2940UW SCSI control, Viking Quantum-II hard disk, and an iOmega ZIPdrive with SCSI port? I also have an Adaptec 1542 somewhere.
I also just found an original 8" floppy disk (128 kB storage) of Digital Research CP/M 2.0 in my Pit of Despair. Please enter bids now
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I have a load of ancient crap (that once upon a time you couldn't give away), but I really can't be doing with the hassle of putting it on eBay, even if the stuff fetches silly money these days. Stuck in a box, easy to ignore. Plus in another twenty years (if I live that long) I might be able to flog the stuff for WTFdude amounts... not that I'll be bothered to do so then, mind you.
Probably for some old games which don't play on newer Windows. I know Hogs of War is one which plain refuses to start on XP or newer; never managed to figure out a way to get it working, sadly. AWE32 and Voodoo3 were pretty much the gold standard in gaming specs back in the day, I think almost everyone used them.
The Tandy 1000 had a 3 channel AY-3-8910 sound chip in it and some games supported that. That would sound more like "8-bit tunes" than anything from the PC speaker. Maybe DOSBox needs setting to emulate the Tandy 1000 Sound device. Try setting machine=tandy in the config file.
On the other hand, I remember speech coming out of the basic PC speaker. Poorly, but understandable :-)
Good option for a lot of games from that era, but there are also a good few that only ran on top of Windows as well. A few I had that I can remember were Need for Speed (II SE and 3: Hot Pursuit), Wipeout 2097 I think. Quite a few were also rewritten from their original DOS versions to run on Windows, Doom and X-Wing are some I remember.
I've got a 286 processor, some ram and a massive 40mb hard drive knocking about somewhere. Pretty sure I've got a sound card as well but not a sound blaster and a Voodoo2. Recently put an FX8350 processor and some memory into storage. Don't ask why. I think it's just nice to be able to look back at them in the future at some point.
I once worked for a company where the FD had capitalised everything with 15% reducing balance depreciation, in effect it would never be written off and she refused to allow anything with a book value to be disposed of.
She got really upset when she needed a valuation on the sale of the company, equipment she'd got valued at a few £1,000s was only worth, in real terms, £90 and that was if we delivered it to the recycling company. Apparently that was my fault!
NB: Scapegoat is also a job description. ... applicable to Chief Security Officers in bad companies. Company's computer(s) are breached, CSO is fired, the standard "We take security very seriously ... an officer has been fired ... we will be making changes to address ... a small number of customers may be affected ..." announcement is made, and business continues as usual.
Disclaimer: I was not, am not, nor ever will be a CSO.
I 'inherited' an asset register where someone (i.e. the chairman) had done that, but negotiated with the auditors that once any item reached £50 it was removed from the register. After the few years everything settled down and only the worthwhile things remained, making everyone's lives far easier.
She was a pretty shit FD then. Everyone knows that kit has a selling cost, ie there is a cost to be factored in to the process of actually selling the item(s). If the deprecation is allowed to fall below the selling cost, then it costs more to dispose of it than it's sale price value. You get shot of it before that happens, unless it's being scrapped, in which case you price up the scrapping costs too. And annual depreciation of 15%? Sounds like she had no idea of lifecycles and was depreciating based on heavy machinery with a much longer expected lifetime. Even our company cars are depreciated at 25% to 33% annually.
What a pile of sorry code. They say that it's the last computer BillG was in on the programming of the OS on.
I believe it. If you start any of the built-in programs fresh out of the box you'll get an error.
Also, unlike what the Americans think, it wasn't the first 'laptop'
the Epson HX-20 came first.
And is a much more capable machine, too.
Yes, I have them. I also have the TRS 80 Model 102. Mostly a slightly slimmer 100.
I have the Osborne.(First portable. No, I don't count that movable IBM), the Commodore SX-64, and a few others.
The Epson PX-8 is extra nice...
I have the Amstrad NC-100 and 200. Anyone got a 150 for sale?
I have Apples, I have Newtons, I have the eMate...
Even a non-toasted PowerBook 5300.(Popularly known as the Hindenbook because of its tendency to catch fire... But only the model with Li-Ion batteries, supplied by Sony, did that. Mine's a Ni-mh model)
I have Psions, a cratefull even, and a Geofox among them. I have Palms, I have REXes.
I could use a BBC Model B, though. Is it export limited or something?
If you are going on the Epson heritage, then what about the EHT-10?
This was a hand-held, touch screen portable.
It could have a printer attached to the top and was used in this configuration by Traffic Wardens in many London boroughs.
Just to put the age in context (released in 1982), they were used by the Concord load handlers to distribute the weight evenly in its hold. (That was my first exposure to 'C' code.)
https://randoc.wordpress.com/2020/10/26/epson-eht-10
Icon, because Epson UK used to come to me to get their technical questions answered.
I had a TRS 80 Model 100 back in the late 1980’s - great m/c. Even had a disk drive for it. I remember a trip to the USA in 1989 to visit several key suppliers; I took it to type up reports that I was then able to transfer onto my office PC (a DEC Rainbow) on my return to Aberdeen. The Tandy ran for a month on 4 AA cells, had a decent keyboard and, whilst the screen was limited, it was very usable (for the time); it even has a built-in modem - slow but, again, usable for transferring text files.
I sold the Tandy a couple years later and got a Toshiba laptop (I needed to run WordPerfect 5.1). Regretted the move now.
I regularly pass a road sign to Cortins and get pangs of nostalgia (the Tandy had a core program called CORTNS that always appeared on its home display). I passed on the opportunity to buy one a few years ago (enough old hardware and program disks in my attic already) :(.
Taking the kids round the National Museum of Computing (yes, you really must go) it was "Dad, haven't you got one of those at home?" on an endless loop.
I remember they suddenly 'got' logarithms by playing with a wall mounted slide rule...
But the real revelation for them was seeing a 3.5" disk: "Oh that is why the save icon is that funny shape!"
This was so hilarious I relayed it at work. Whereupon the reaction of almost all those I told was, you guessed it: "Oh that is why the save icon is that funny shape!"
I told my kids that joke when I found an old 3.5” floppy in the attic - my daughter’s reaction was ‘what’s a save icon?’ Growing up in an age of Google Docs and the like she had never seen or used a save icon. That means to some kids even knowing what a save icon is makes you ‘old’. So actual floppy disks are 2 ‘generations’ back I guess….
And for those on the continent, especially the Netherlands and neighbouring parts of Belgium and Germany:
And for those in/near Switzerland, Musée Bolo. It includes some rather tasty bits of old supercomputers.
Dug out my old Psion 5mx just this week to show a whipper snapper. Powered up, but memory backup battery flat, so blank. Did install the PsiWin software, was some warning about 16 bit software on Windows 64 bit - it does seem to run.
Just need to find a RS-232 adapter / card /cable now....
ebay is probably overpriced, but you'll pay more there than slipping several notes to Simon. Prices were going up, and the pandemic just made it even worse.
You can still get Pentium 4 systems and Core through relatively recent PCs for absolute buttons however.
I spent more time fine tuning dos boot sequences to free the 600 kilobytes of base memory to make those DOS games run properly, than actually playing them.
Then their original media got destroyed before I could setup a dosbox for them, eons later. Never bothered with them again, chasing a bootleg copy, whatever.
Now they are so cumbersome to play, they belong in the past, behind several layers of rosy, laser-etched colored glasses.
A drink to those memories.
Apart from fiddling with the boot sequences I used to run EMM286.exe to get paged access to the whole 4Mb RAM in my 286 IBM. Had to fit a huge stack of individual chips to the motherboard to get that much RAM. Allowed me to run Wolfenstein 3D and a few other games that were spec'd for 386 and higher. Also made a 1024x768 Raytrace possible in under 48 hours. The amount of time I spent on various BBS's trawling for performance upgrades and patches was ridiculous, but then that was before the WWW existed when social media was confined to chat-rooms on BBS's, so I guess it kept me out of trouble and gaol. I ditched all my old kit years ago, like most did, but I still have my Dad's AVO Model 8 that he bought new in the 60's.
Some retro games are still excellent, easiest option is to buy them again for not much from GOG.com, where they've done the work to let you single click install your way to gaming.
Otherwise it's around a long evening of effort to set up all the boot menus and find modern memory efficient drivers. IBM PC DOS 2000 is very capable at freeing up a lot of memory. It's generally easier than it was originally as people have had years to develop new drivers.
Like the contents of my garage with loads of bits and bobs, DIY tools and so on.
Esteemed spouse - Why don't you throw all that rubbish out, you've never used it in 10 years
Me - You never know today what you might need tomorrow
I've not got too much in the way of old computer stuff that I don't use really.
AMD Athlon something with Windows Vista in a clear perspex case
2009 Mac Pro with single Xeon and 16GB RAM
2010 or 2011 Mac Pro with Dual Xeons and 64GB RAM
2x Libretto 100CT with docks
Oh, and 2 HP MicroServers, 1 of which is BNIB
And a Celeron something or other
And several spare 24" monitors that I got from Asda for £50 each brand new because I might need them at some point
And several boxes of cables and bits and bobs
i.e. Nothing at all
Oh, and a Mac Classic that I bought about 20 years ago and has sat in cardboard box in the loft thereafter. Have no idea what I thought I was going to do with it and is probably suffering from capacitor rot by now.
I don't have a problem letting go of things, not really.
"Oh, and 2 HP MicroServers, 1 of which is BNIB"
There's an ancient HP MicroServer in my loft too. It's got a 250GB boot drive in the CD-ROM bay and 4x4TB HDDs[*] in the main drive bay and has been running for quite some years now.
* upgraded a couple of times, running ZFS filesystem in RAIDZ, so 12TB of space, mostly filled and thinking about another upgrade :-)
good idea from the BoFH
I can foresee getting a pretty penny for the 23 inch CRT moniter I know of
Just need to call my brother in law and retrieve it from being a boat anchor for the past 5 yrs.
Hopefully 5 yrs will be enough to have washed the blood and DNA off it where it fell on that beancounter from the trolly I was using to move it to the skip.......
"Hopefully 5 yrs will be enough to have washed the blood and DNA off it where it fell on that beancounter from the trolly I was using to move it to the skip......."
The way I read this was that someone (hmm) dropped a Sony CRT monitor on top of a beancounter trussed or otherwise incapacitated in a (shopping?) trolley with all three - monitor, beancounter and trolley - en-Thamed. Waterways being the natural habitat of feral shopping trollies. DNA is inconveniently persistent so the wisest course might be to let the three rest in peace. While the absence of one beancounter provoked little interest, the sudden reappearance of the residual of said beancounter is very likely to entail a great deal of unwelcome interest and equally intense inconvenient scrutiny.
Well the PFY did warn me beforehand that the trolly had a broken wheel axle and I had no right to be loading it so heavily above a 20 foot drop into the carpark access way right at the moment when someone could be walking below.....
But the trolly is still in storage (if it should be needed again) and the PFY is long gone* and replaced by another PFY
*Dont worry.. he is still alive and learned from the best about what to do when the beancounters cut your overtime and expenses payments......
Blocky! It's surprisingly sad how poor old games look on modern LCD/OLED screens. The imperfections and foibles of CRT displays where used to advantage by games programmers and they can look shite on a modern screen unless you use "shaders" to simulate scanlines etc to attempt to recreate the old look and feel. I recall some NTSC games that simply never looked as expected on PAL systems because of the different foibles of the two system. Probably vice versa too.
If the boss ever visits the States, I'm sure I could arrange a tour of the old storage rooms on campus. Entire computer labs stashed away as new models came in, no time for overworked staff/faculty to do the paperwork to de-acquisition (state uni system). Bottom layers may go back to the mid-80s. Gotta buy 'em all though, guv, just to make sure you have enough spare parts.
I found a couple disused NeXT boxes in the basement old-stuff storage area at work. My officemate and I each hauled one up and set 'em up on our side desks. Monochrome displays, keyboard and mouse, no manuals, no bootable media, and no root password. Both successfully booted from hard disc. Disassembly and connection of the hard drives to a *BSD system for external hacking was next on our list till our boss came in, saw them, and said, "I don't know where you got those from, but put 'em back."
I had a sales brochure for a NeXT cube that I'd picked up in the mid 90s. Lovely life-size color photos of the motherboard, and lots of Jobs-esque marketspeak about the optical drive and whatnot.
Back around 2010 I was doing some cleaning and ran across it. Rather than toss it in the recycling, I listed it on eBay on a whim. It sold and I mailed it to a German address for $50. For a brochure I was going to throw away.
Is that an X1 Carbon? What is the depreciation on that. I wrote my first project plan on one of those. Would you be able to dispose of it responsibly?
Ooh look an M1 Mac. They were soo cool with their combined CPU/GPU.
10TB nas box. I had one of that to stash all my pr0n.
and so on
Heh. While my cubicle at work nominally has a 'trophy wall' with bezels from selected servers and storage appliances we've gotten rid of, I might have an active item to add to it in the form of a JACE2 building automation controller (and it's expansion box) and an "L-Vis" display that was programmed to control it. I'll need to get a power brick for it and some temperature sensors to wire into it, but it might be something amusing to have a blinkenlight display...
(said controller was replaced this week with something newer, supported by the manufacturer, and can be tied into the software that monitors our data centers...)
There's one retro computer I'd love to get my hands on again.
Early '70s IBM gave my school a red box.
It was their attempt to introduce a computer for education, pre-empting the BBC Micro by a good few years. It closely resembled the digital tills they had in one of the supermarket chains. None of that graphic stuff. Or even high level language. Coding was all alphanumeric.
Half a century on and it's still fondly in my memory. And it's that which lead me to my life long interest in all things computery, and made doing school IT training and support my side area when I became a teacher.
Clearly it never caught on.
What's better than an unobtanium and much advertised " Overdrive " CPU ?
Two of the little buggerz ..
They were provided to our team in case a customer called, and wanted to purchase one.
With all the hype and angst over that marketing feature, no one ever asked to purchase any. None, zed, ziltch..
( they make awesome paperweights )
Went to a computer shop close-out sale with a friend who was looking for a certain old model computer. He found it ... but the proprietor said to get this great low price, we had to take 10 CRT monitors along with it. For my friend, the price, it was a deal even with the need to dispose of the monitors later.
I took them off his hands, however.
I lined our back deck railing with the monitors ... you see, my wife had been begging for a screened in porch!
"IS THAT A COMMODORE CBM?!" he gasps once more. "WITH THE DUAL FLOPPY DRIVE!!!"
*opens wallet with a heavy sigh*
Ackshually, I a number of years back I picked up a B128 with 8050 floppy. Need to get that all running for exhibit at some point.
You can try to float any Apple or Atari stuff. It will not float, but I have no problem with you trying, anyway. Makes great coral reef material. For the environment, of course.
Buying it from the company for a nominal fee allows the company to write down the value and recognize the true value as a sold asset.
A firm I briefly worked for had exactly that issue, but it was a problem. The company made a bunch of robots that were licensed copies of the American made ones they were selling. Unfortunately corners were cut on the material specification and they were rubbish. They looked like their American cousins but had the accuracy of something driven by rubber bands. The couldn't be sold, but a lot of money had been spent and on the companies books they were "valued" the same as the good ones. Unfortunately that made them the companies main assets and without them the firm would be insolvent. They couldn't even sell any of them as scrap as that write down would recognize their true value as assets. There was no room for them in the companies premises so they ended up renting an old chicken shed to store them, forever. About a year later the shit (chicken?) finally hit the fan and they went bust.
I have fond memories of several 286 computers with orange display only CRT monitors. Never owned one myself but I both learned BASIC using one and also played several games on them.
Go to the Web Archive and you can play most of those old games online for free, although they don't have an "orange filter" option yet.
Please stop. Please
I lost my dual drive TRS-80 Model 1 Level 2, my Video Genie with 32K expansion box and disk drive, my beloved 3032 CBM (with v4 ROM and SYSMON ROM) in a house move, my C128
I foolishly sold my B2000 40MHz 68030, my A4000 with Warp Engine and Picasso IV, my A4000T PPC 603/060 and Cybervision 64, my A1200T/060
Not that I ever did anything on the old 8bit stuff after about 1999, nor used the Amigas in anger after 1996 (the AGA models cam later 90s) but they were all such a joy to just OWN.
The piles of PC stuff, including various "God" boards from the last 20 years (my god, are Opterons really 20 years old!), just dont have that same retro appeal.
I foolishly sold my B2000 40MHz 68030, my A4000 with Warp Engine and Picasso IV, my A4000T PPC 603/060 and Cybervision 64, my A1200T/060
I had a WarpEngine 4040 and traded up to a CyberStorm MK-III, and I have the Picasso IV. Great stuff. I envy your former A4000T. Having gotten rid of things I later needed or wanted, I feel your pain. Really sad how much it would cost to replace those these days. But, I have, through thick and thin, held onto my C64, C128, and Amiga stuff, knowing that the relief selling it would bring would only be temporary, the pain would be long-lasting, and a better way was to be found.
My ....
Sinclair Cambridge Calculator.
Texas TI-59 programmable calculator with the small magnetic card reader - ahead of its time.
My Sinclair MK14 including all the manual "adjustments" to make the thing fly (sort of).
My paper tapes for the ICL 1902.
My Commodore Pet.
My Apple 2 (a couple of them, the second had twin floppies and a Pascal compiler).
My Ferranti Advance 86.
The IBM 3279 graphics terminal I used.
The IBM PC convertible they gave me, and the second one with an orange gas plasma display.
The Silicon Graphics Series 2000 I used.
...and a veritable cacophony of PCs/craptops after that - all with interesting peripherals and operating systems. More recently, I still have a stack of 100 unburned CD-ROMs and DVDs.
I could have opened a freakin' museum!
In around 1982 I had a Sinclair programmable device. It ran simple algorithms for more complicated/lengthy/repetitive calculations.I left it locked in my desk in Tottenham School- in a locked classroom, at lunch time Some little toe rag still managed to get in to there and nick it .
I used to work for a company that had long term (30 year) contracts in the Aerospace industry.
The sort of place where if there was an accident the FAA could ask you to reproduce the binaries (software, firmware), or the customer could ask for a replacement board.
Some of the early CPLD/FPGA design and programming software had hardware dongles and no amount of work arounds could get these to run on commercial emulators.
So, there was a nitrogen filled room with DOS and early Windows PC's, dongles, software and "golden sample" boards for the purposes of support.
Then we had new manglement who decided that these rooms would make excellent new offices, and employed a secure disposal (i.e. chipping the computers, dongles and "golden sample" boards into 2cm squares) company over a May Bank Holiday. The engineers were agast, whilst manglement congratulated themselves on the quality of the new offices. No heads rolled, but many engineers (me included) left as we didn't want to be around when the FAA or Prime contractor came calling with the 30 year LTA in hand.
In the 6 months before my leaving, no-one had used the new offices, but luckily nobody had to use the disposed of kit either.
Manglement!
""There's a guy I know who has a simh VAX-11/780 purely to finish playing the game of dungeon he started 25 years ago."
"I WILL NOT BE BEATEN!" I snap back."
I love it! Nice callback to a fun old episode, bravo. Though how Simon _still_ hasn't finished that game after all this time baffles me.
In a kind of related way an old friend of mine left school at 14 to work at porting arcade games to Amstrads, Spectrums, C64s, AtariSTs, Amigas etc.
He found a lot of the games he had written for long dead companies on various sites, downloaded them and released them for free on his own site. His line of thinking was that if anyone still had claim over the copyright it was him.
I once asked him how to complete some game or another as 12 year old me could never manage to beat the final boss. His response was "its impossible.". 12 year old me could have strangled him.
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