New? Member

[tcpf429]

I figured I should probably introduce myself because it's summer and I might have some time for once!

I am one of (very) few people who actually is interested in vintage computers who was born after the vintage computer era. I'm still a teenager in high school who lives in a small Alaskan town, which creates a rather cumbersome difficulty in the manner of actually finding "vintage" computers. Most of what I get is at least in the late 90's, although I have a few boxes from the early 90's. So, to put it straight-forwardly, I have very little clue to all the nitty-gritty details of actually vintage computers. I can tell you about, change, and diagnose all sorts of things in anything 97 or newer, but I have no idea how to use things like an oscilloscope or how to recalibrate 5-1/4" drive heads. However, I've got a good enough quantity of machines now that I could do something with them - if I could install that XT-BIOS thing that everyone talks about on here. I also have a friend with a great source of old computer parts, so that's not an issue. Buying vintage (boxes and monitors) is a pain, however, because shipping is so ridiculous. My summer plan is to set up a network of sorts with about 11 or so late-early 90's machines, with wacky things like a modem ISP, a NT 4 Windows server, and some nice desktops for testing and games. In sum, I am looking forward to learning more about 80's-era stuff on here, and maybe some day I'll luck out and get a Commodore 64. I will also probably have a lot of questions, but I'll cross that bridge when I come to it.

Can't wait to get out and start doing stuff with my 25(!) computers with some help from this awesome forum! My parents are not too pleased about the whole computer thing, however.

 

[luvit]

Hey, welcome to the forum!
You'll eventually will find a way to acquire the types of hardware you mention for less money, or free to offset the expensive shipping.
A weird habit that will help is to have a craigslist ad and keep renewing it or recreating it every two days. It's a hard habit to maintain.
I like your ideas and your pcs are perfect for mastering Linux. -- no GUI! Just CLI.
Build your own Linux kernel.. Always build your own kernel.. You'll mess it up a lot and do it over and over, but you'll learn a TON about designing lean and efficient practices.
Run 386 servers without the GUI, you'll be impressed with the 386 performance and your uncanny abilities.
You parents may become content if you keep things organized and not play games 24/7.
Linux and learning is fun to me.. But I'll only tell you that

 

[Rick Ethridge]

Something I've always told my kids: Never, ever grow up! I also recommend to you that you never lose your want to discover. Letting this HOBBY get to you will spoil your love of the adventure in vintage computing. Sadly, my son is impressed with only the latest and greatest. You'll find there's still a need for the old tech which the new tech morphed into. Fortran and Cobol are still being used. A lot of vintage parts (eight inch floppies?) are still used too. If you ever get bummed out come here and visit. We carry the banner proudly! Oh, and by the way, some of us even donate parts for people like you. Just ask. It doesn't hurt much to be turned down.

 

[Coatofplates]

Being in Alaska has to hurt you on shipping costs, I don't know the guy personally but http://http://www.ebay.com/usr/peonipetals is based in Alaska. I've bought from this guy several times before, mostly stuff that would fit in flat rate USPS boxes, but, based on the huge piles of vintage memory and CPUs he sometimes lists I suspect scraps a lot of PCs. He might be a good resource for heavier stuff for a local guy. Plus based on some of his prices, I bet he'd be reasonable on the larger stuff.

 

[tcpf429]

Thanks for the advice, luvit! I'm sure I'll get to Linux someday soon.

I also recommend to you that you never lose your want to discover. Letting this HOBBY get to you will spoil your love of the adventure in vintage computing.

Don't worry. One of my projects is putting every Windows OS on a single computer, and this is now the tenth time I've had to start all over! 98, 95, fixes, NT, 2K, XP - it can get really frustrating, but that's just part of the challenge!

Coatofplates, thanks a bunch! I can see that guy being potentially very helpful.

Thanks for a great (re)start to the forums!

 

[Caluser2000]

Don't forget dos and windows/wfw 3.x. Learning *nix through linux is a good thing. Main thing is to be willing to learn.

 

[barythrin]

Welcome (belated). Reminds me a lot of what I did also at your age If you want to save some time look at free emulator software like VirtualPC or VMWare Server (there are others also but they can be a little more difficult to set up). That made it a lot easier to build some toy/test OS installs. Then you can back them up or burn your good build to a dvd and restore off of it anytime you want to restore. I used VirtualPC primarily (before Microsoft bought it so version 6? I think) and found it supported most operating systems well. Everything from dos, netware, linux, OS/2 installed fine. At the time I had a pretty nice notebook computer with a 1Ghz processor and 512MB of RAM. If you are patient and just testing I had 4 VMs running at once (Netware, an NT4 workstation with netware client installed, a freebsd server for mail, dns, routing/firewalling for the workstation, and a trinix cd install for an attacker). Basically emulated my work environment to see what issues/risks were there and how to remediate. Most of them ran fine with 64 or 32MB of RAM allocated so it was pretty fine.