Filling up the computer room!

[sirwiggum]

I have a couple of systems that may fall into the remit of Vintage Computers.

- Toshiba T2130 CT. 486 DX/4 100mhz, upgraded RAM to 16MB, upgraded HDD to 1GB. Colour monitor 640x480. Used this for typing up essays at university, simple games etc.
-- As a parts source for this I have a T2130 CS. Mostly broken for bits like the plastic PCMCIA cover, though the motherboard is still there if anyone needed it?

- Mac Classic 2, has Clarisworks and a few games (Bill Elliot Nascar, Tetris, Shufflepuck etc).

- Mac Plus, I bought this years ago for a £5 at a car boot sale. It didn't work, it went into the attic. Few months ago I got it down, dusted it off. It just needed a bit of solder on the analogue board and it was right as rain. Got a mouse for it so fully functional. Not sure whether to keep it or not, in usage the constant disk swappage is an annoyance. Might keep an eye open for a SCSI ZIP drive.

- IBM 380Z, when I worked as a porter years ago this was in Lost Property for a while. It didn't get claimed for a few years and as I was the Computer Science student, ended up with me. Pentium 2, so maybe a bit too young for Vintage Computer forums, but it is a nice machine nonetheless from when Thinkpads were properly built (I don't rate my work T410 at all!). Upgraded to 192mb RAM.

In terms of peripherals, the most interesting is

- HP HEDS-3000 Digital Wand barcode reader. Brand new in box, instructions, QA stamp from 1981. Again, as the "computer guy" growing up, it ended up with me. I had no use for it, kept it as a curiousity. Nice beige early 80s HP packaging

 

[EverythingIBM]

It has begun.

Pretty soon you'll start growing those things. People will magically start "donating" computers to you as they find out your interests, and multiple purchases on ebay will excel this

Growing computers... without water. Brilliant.

 

[Crypticalcode0]

It has begun.

Pretty soon you'll start growing those things. People will magically start "donating" computers to you as they find out your interests, and multiple purchases on ebay will excel this

Growing computers... without water. Brilliant.

I actually fished some of the computers i have out of the pouring rain.

 

[sirwiggum]

It was getting to that point about 7 or 8 years ago, people would just donate broken / working / old computers. I used to go on ebay after a night down the students union drinking cheap beer, then a couple of days later a parcel with a broken laptop would arrive that I didn't remember buyng!

I had an LC 475 and a G3 that were given to me by people. I used to offer a couple of pounds in return, but usually got them for the price of a beer or a donation to a donkey sanctuary.

Seems to have slowed in recent years. Moving into a small apartment a few years ago I had to sell a lot (inc. that LC475 and G3, a few broken 386/486 laptops that I never got round to looking at to fix, and a BBC Micro Compact) and people have stopped giving me old machines, think they are using sites such as gumtree to try and get good money from their old computers. I also changed my ebay password to be so obscure that I need to be sober to remember / type it

I might also need to sell off one of the compact macs to make room for my C64x project. The plus is the oldest, and has sentiment to me as I fixed it up myself. However the classic 2 is the one I use most as the floppy drive is x86PC compatible, and the hard drive means I can store games / applications / documents without a lot of swapping of disks. I don't want to just store the unused one and find out later that the caps have leaked.

 

[sirwiggum]

Sold the Plus to a collector who was building up an Apple collection for his son. Was worried that it would sit unused, taking space and the caps would start leaking. Still have the Classic 2 for old games on the mac.
Made room / funds for the C64x barebones too...