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Vintage Computer Usage

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Frozen001

Experienced Member
Joined
May 31, 2009
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So does anyone here truely put ther vingage computer to use other than it being something to play with?

Sometime I have considered setting up an old MS-DOS machine ans see how much real use I can get out of it daily. I have though that if I can get it connected to the internet I caould probably use it for just about everything I do on a computer at home with the one exception being browsing the web. I know there are text only browsers, but the web in plain text just does not feel right to me.
 
Well, in next month I'm going to travel my country to fix a machine that is controlled by a XT clone. Last month I sent a motherboard to a guy, He uses a machine that was also controlled by a old computer.
 
I've been working on getting my Amiga set up as an animation and music workstation and development platform for a couple of my game projects. Still not quite there yet, though.
 
Frozen001 said:
So does anyone here truely put ther vingage computer to use other than it being something to play with?
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I do, every day. But with the caveat that I like a fast machine and use a Pentium board which is borderline vintage. A 386 would do the same, just not with the snap. Of course it also makes a good "tweener". We've had this discussion here recently and it was a long thread. :)

if I can get it connected to the internet I caould probably use it for just about everything I do on a computer at home with the one exception being browsing the web.
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Connecting to the net is easy on most machines if you can put in a network card, add a parallel port ethernet device, or have a machine with a serial port which is already connected to the net. With a regular network card (most work) the process is as easy as loading a single file driver from the command line or autoexec.bat. Yes, browsing is the only thing you will be missing, though Lynx works fine for some things.

It depends what you consider useful. In my case the text usage works, but many people do more things which require some serious power - such as image or audio processing as well as viewing pdfs. I use a couple of batch files to FTP stuff back and forth to my "big rig" so it is actually quite convenient. Web pages can be written just fine on a DOS box, but one still has to view them on a modern browser in most cases, and modern documents also need more than WP5.1 (RIP). Pure text is where DOS excels - perhaps some scientific stuff is OK as well, but I don't do that.
 
I don't know if I'd quite call it 'vintage' yet, but I've been getting a fair amount of use from one of my 1997-ish Mac clones doing photo editing, primarily scanning and retouching photos off of old slides and negatives. The scanner I have is an old Nikon SCSI unit, which only has drivers for Win9x, NT4, or pre-OSX Macs... I went the Mac route since I have old Mac versions of all sorts of different graphics software, as well as some nice ADB peripherals like a Wacom drawing tablet.
 
Frozen001 said:
So does anyone here truely put ther vingage computer to use other than it being something to play with?
Click to expand...

I use mine daily, but in the service of the hobby. I will occasionally write text on my vintage machine, and I program *for* my vintage machine for the challenge.

Sometime I have considered setting up an old MS-DOS machine ans see how much real use I can get out of it daily.
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There is a magazine columnist who decided to do just this; he attempted to use his vintage machine for everything for five days. I had a few issues with the article/effort; his machine of choice was a C64, yet he never tried to load GEOS. Also, he claimed he "connected it to the internet" but all he did was serial terminal login to a linux machine, and I don't consider that directly connected to the internet (it wasn't SL/IP). Article is over at PC World if you want to read it.
 
Well I don't think I could totally use my old dos machine, but for about 75% of what I use my home computer for I don't see why I could not. Like I said assuming I could get tcp/ip working I could do e-mail, word processing (very rare that I have to do this at home), and track my bank accounts (currently using old dos software for this now). I of course would still need my laptop for storing and downloading digital camera photos, but for everything else, a vintage computer would work totally fine.
 
Some people assumes that vintage computers can't do much things, that's not true. Take a look into this video, courtesy of Trixter :D.

If it's possible to do this with a PC, imagine what you could do using a 386 class machine. I think that there's a lot of good software around the net, that we don't know. Take a look into this article, it's very good.
 
Do you count terminals? I use my terminals daily. They're hooked up to my Linux box, and I just enjoy using them. You could use an old computer as a terminal too, if you wanted. Just sayin'.
 
Xezlec said:
Do you count terminals? I use my terminals daily. They're hooked up to my Linux box, and I just enjoy using them. You could use an old computer as a terminal too, if you wanted. Just sayin'.
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That's a great way to use a DOS box! The OP could also SSH or telnet into any of his modern computers and administer or operate them from there. I always have a stack of terminals open on my Linux machine which connect to other machines so I don't have to get out of my chair to administer them. DOS works just as well when I'm there. Mike B's mTCP includes a telnet client which is really good now. One can even use that effectively on a machine with only a single 360K floppy.
 
Xezlec said:
Do you count terminals? I use my terminals daily. They're hooked up to my Linux box, and I just enjoy using them. You could use an old computer as a terminal too, if you wanted. Just sayin'.
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It's not quite the same thing, in my opinion - you're still backed by modern computing power. Still, if you're gonna use a command line, I don't see why you wouldn't do it from a vintage terminal ;)
 
commodorejohn said:
It's not quite the same thing, in my opinion - you're still backed by modern computing power. Still, if you're gonna use a command line, I don't see why you wouldn't do it from a vintage terminal ;)
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I totally agree, why wouldn't you.

However, I don't get what you mean by "backed by modern computing power". A terminal is a terminal - it's not backed by anything. When I connect either a modern or a vintage computer to the internet, I don't say it's "backed by" the internet servers to which I connect.
 
I use my Power Macintosh 5260 for browsing of "older" web pages, and playing Snood and Spin Doctor. Also I use it to watch some TV shows since it has a TV-tuner card. (Macs do have great speakers.) I've been using my 5170 more lately to test out various function ISA cards; I did get the sound card working on it.

Once I get my Leading Edge Model D working, I could use it to type my papers using LEWP. But I couldn't send the report via email attachment. ;)
 
DOS lives on!! said:
I use my Power Macintosh 5260 for browsing of "older" web pages, and playing Snood and Spin Doctor. Also I use it to watch some TV shows since it has a TV-tuner card. (Macs do have great speakers.) I've been using my 5170 more lately to test out various function ISA cards; I did get the sound card working on it.

Once I get my Leading Edge Model D working, I could use it to type my papers using LEWP. But I couldn't send the report via email attachment. ;)
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Watching TV shows is definitely advanced for vintage computing - at least from my DOS dinosaurical point of view. :)

As for sending an e-mail attachment. That can be done in the DOS environment quite easily, due to the existence of a number of utilities which can pack/unpack MIME files. MPACK, MUNPACK, MIME64, were several that I noticed off the bat (on my DOS box) but there are lots more that I've seen elsewhere. Perhaps there are some utilities in the Mac world as well.
 
Ole Juul said:
However, I don't get what you mean by "backed by modern computing power". A terminal is a terminal - it's not backed by anything. When I connect either a modern or a vintage computer to the internet, I don't say it's "backed by" the internet servers to which I connect.
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A terminal is just a display device. (Well, unless it's one of those ones that doubles as a CP/M machine, or DEC's line of LSI-11 terminal/computer combos.) If you're just using it to display a Linux shell, then whatever you're doing through it is actually being done on the host machine. (As for your analogy, when you connect a computer - vintage or otherwise - to the Internet, unless you're using it as a glorified terminal to another machine, the actual networking and browser/mail/FTP software is being run on the computer in question.) Again, I have no bad words for the idea of running one's command shell through a classic terminal, but I don't think it's the same thing as doing actual computing tasks on, say, an Amiga or a 386 or what-have-you.
 
commodorejohn said:
A terminal is just a display device. (Well, unless it's one of those ones that doubles as a CP/M machine, or DEC's line of LSI-11 terminal/computer combos.) If you're just using it to display a Linux shell, then whatever you're doing through it is actually being done on the host machine. (As for your analogy, when you connect a computer - vintage or otherwise - to the Internet, unless you're using it as a glorified terminal to another machine, the actual networking and browser/mail/FTP software is being run on the computer in question.) Again, I have no bad words for the idea of running one's command shell through a classic terminal, but I don't think it's the same thing as doing actual computing tasks on, say, an Amiga or a 386 or what-have-you.
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I see what you mean. I guess this could get to be a bit semantic though - so forgive me if I sound a bit argumentative, I'm not, and perhaps I can learn something. :) The work is always going to be split between the server and the client in some way. I tend to use text and command line as much as possible in any OS, vintage or otherwise, so my view is somewhat coloured by that. Nevertheless, even a text browser will need the server to do the work of interpreting a php file for the client. Obviously programs will be running on the client computer when you use "browser/mail/FTP", but just how much importance one gives to the division of labour is probably a matter of personal taste. A terminal will be running a display server of some kind - even if it is hardwired and analogue. To me, a client is just the tool on the user end which allows the user to get work done. I don't see a big difference between using a terminal or running telnet/SSH - which is where I get my kicks on modern machines as well.
 
My 486 sees frequent use as an IRC machine, being as it's dead silent and works great.

I also love to generate Fractals on my PC-6300 when I'm bored, fun to watch them actually be generated rather than just be generated in less time than you can think like on anything modern.
 
Ole Juul said:
As for sending an e-mail attachment. That can be done in the DOS environment quite easily, due to the existence of a number of utilities which can pack/unpack MIME files. MPACK, MUNPACK, MIME64, were several that I noticed off the bat (on my DOS box) but there are lots more that I've seen elsewhere. Perhaps there are some utilities in the Mac world as well.
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I meant in the sense that if I sent the LEWP document via email, the recipient couldn't open it, since only LEWP can read it's outputted documents.

At the moment, my Dell System 310 is being used to transfer data off of some MFM hard drives laying around. I use my 5160 mainly to show off my old computer collection to intrigued people.
 
I don't really use any of my vintage computers for any productive use, but I do play some of the games that I have on them periodically. The main reason for this is a lack of software.

Speaking of internet applications on vintage computers I would like to try to connect my PDP-11/44 to the net once I get working. I do think that it would be neat to do some basic e-mail stuff from it.
 
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