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Things you regret doing to vintage computers and parts

My PC Regret list:

1) Selling my Kaypro II in perfect condition with loads of original software, manuals and all the code I wrote as a child for $20.
2) Upgrading my first 486 to oblivion and then basically throwing it away, and not keeping the original cards such as the SB Pro v1, Trident VGA, upgraded Diamond Stealth, etc.
3) Giving away my Pentium II-450 (in retrospect I actually really liked that machine)
4) Turning down about 20 free Apple IIc's, IIe's and IIgs's
5) Throwing away two perfect IBM 5150s w/monitor and keyboard
6) Not taking what was a free very large box full of ISA cards, EISA cards, ISA-VLB cards and 286-486 motherboards last year.

I have since become a packrat, though I need to get rid of 4 Kaypro 10s to make space for more useful stuff. I also have way too many cables at the moment - big long serial cables and other thick cables that are worthless to me.
 
I have lots of regret over the past 12-13ish years of ditzing around with old PC's and old Macs....this is sort of like Vintage Computer Hail Mary's to me!

Regretted Let Gos
- Trashing the GEM's Case, I found out 2 months later that I could have saved it with custom case-modding pieces from a supplier on Amazon (DOH!!) I miss that computer case.
- Leaving my IBM PC-350 with Windows NT 4.0 in the leaky corner of the shed, stupidly 2 months later, my Compaq Presario CDS-520 that ran 95 was taken out by the SAME corner due to my forgetful idiocy
- Not keeping the flip-top-case XT Clone I sold on E-bay in 2005 to afford to move to Seattle - the whole machine was destroyed in shipping and had to refund the $30-50 I got for it, I miss that computer as well
- Selling my perfect IBM PS/2 Model 30 286 8530-E21 that survived the Tuskeegee University Fire, it had the original PS/2 non-ergo mouse, Model M, 8514 monitor, and everything.
- I really should have tried to find another chassis for the IBM ThinkPad 755 CD, I loved that laptop
- Not sticking a DX2/66 into the PC-330 when the voltage regulator for the 3.3v DX4-100 CPU went out. That IBM PC-330 6571-W5K was my FAVORITE 486 ever, I'd even trade my current 486 for one! I junked the PC330 :(
- Not keeping that BIOSTAR MB8433UUD 486 board, that was probably my 2nd favorite 486 board of all time, it had PCI (USB!!!! ATI RAGE II!!!!), instead I sold it to someone who wanted a good Linux box
- Throwing away my ALL ORIGINAL 1986 Tandy 1000 SX when I was 17, it had the CM5 monitor, a nice Lexmark printer, and I tossed it just because it kept showing "ERROR IO of 8253" on boot (facepalm)
- Selling my Mitsubishi EGA monitor.....oh god I'd love that on my Tandy 1000(a) now

A lot of what I have now is trying to make up for or learn from those mistakes.

Stuff I broke Stupidly
- Killed one AT PSU by causing a short on the Seagate ST=412 HDD I was trying to get to boot, don't remember why/how it happened, I just remember that being one of my dumbest moves
- Case modding the GEM and frying a brand new 128MB 100/133 MHz DIMM by an errant bolt laying on top of it's modified full-AT to ATX chassis falling between 2 memory modules
- Washing a HP Motherboard and not letting it dry for a few days, killed that one too
- I think I may have fried a perfectly good free roadside find IBM 5151 Mono monitor trying to run it from a CGA card on a Compaq Deskpro 286
- Buying a Dell 325SX for $8 with an "AS/IS" sticker on the front, thinking It would be a bad HDD or something, only to find out the CMOS battery shorted and burned out the PS/2 mouse and keyboard traces....it looked like a miniature roadway with little cars driving with their headlights on as the computer ran!!!
- All those times I caught a whiff of Ozone from a failing component, my smeller ain't so good, If I can smell it, it must be bad!

None of these have happened in the last 5-7 years. All three of my vintage PC's are sort of a collection of the lessons learned by breaking all this stuff, sort of like all the guitars Edward Van-Halen destroyed that lead to the original Frankenstrat. There's only once incident in the last five years, but I won't mention it because who is at fault is still in debate and probably will be till I die. Let's just say that one was not a full casualty either - I still have the ASUS Socket 3 board that was involved and plan to fix it some day if possible.

Still do want to find another PC-330 486 and GEM/Deskpro 8086 style chassis someday though. Maybe with that IBM PC 5150 (very nice and all original and clean as new) at the local PC Recycle shop, there's still hope.
 
My only regret is giving my first system, an AT&T PC 6300, to a family member for use in their book shop (bookkeeping, point-of-sale, whatever). I later found it was never used and thrown away when the owner stopped the business; I would have preferred it sold or given to someone, or given the opportunity to get it back...

I do not, however, regret what I did to that system when I originally owned it: Installed a 3.5mm "headphone" jack by clipping the speaker off of the motherboard and attaching leads with electrical tape, installed a PAL backwards and watched it turn the white label to brown in 3 seconds, wrote random data to the video ports in an attempt to figure out how 160x100x16 mode was done... I beat the crap out of that system, and it had bruises, but it taught me so much.

Another 6300 was one of the first 5 systems I obtained to (re-)start my vintage collection. (The other four were a Tandy 1000, an Apple IIe, a Mac 512k, and an IBM PC 5150, all of which I still own.)
 
I regret taking off the write-protect tabs that cover the hole on the 5.25" Cordata system/boot floppies and then formatting them with another program that won't boot up the Cordata. I was in my early teens when this happened. I did learn a lesson and that's to always make backup system floppies and to leave the original floppies alone.
 
In my early days of dumpsterdiving I at one point decided to clear out my inventory of "not so useful" parts and ended up trashing all of my 486 boards which didn't have a ZIF socket (one of the boards was a 386/486 combo board (had sockets for both these CPU's) and it also had cache modules which I still have). They should've been perfectly fine or at least there was nothing visually wrong with them.
 
one thing i've observered recently was an older lady using her nice new BD-RE drive, in her nice shiny new computer, as a cup holder. And this was one of the english instructors at my college. I pointed it out to her and she said, and i quote; "It's fine, the light blinks when i turn it on which means it still works."

Inside i was doing this....

triple-STO-facepalm.jpg
 
k2x4b524[ said:
one thing i've observered recently was an older lady using her nice new BD-RE drive, in her nice shiny new computer, as a cup holder. And this was one of the english instructors at my college. I pointed it out to her and she said, and i quote; "It's fine, the light blinks when i turn it on which means it still works."

Inside i was doing this....

View attachment 17878
Click to expand...

The old lady has no real use for a blue-ray drive that came standard in the machine she ordered but made some use out of it, call her a hacker.

We have all heard those stories about people cutting up 5.25" disks so they would fit into 3.5" drives but I never seen anybody do anything that stupid.
 
Unknown_K said:
The old lady has no real use for a blue-ray drive that came standard in the machine she ordered but made some use out of it, call her a hacker.

We have all heard those stories about people cutting up 5.25" disks so they would fit into 3.5" drives but I never seen anybody do anything that stupid.
Click to expand...

Actual if I recall that same situation is a famous Dell support call that got included in a listing of unbelievable computer support issues list that got passed around. If memory serves correct, the customer called up dell to complain the cup holder broke off.

Cheers,
Corey
 
Unknown_K said:
The old lady has no real use for a blue-ray drive that came standard in the machine she ordered but made some use out of it, call her a hacker.
Click to expand...

Someone should make an actual cup holder like this. Make it the exact same form factor as a real optical drive so it'll fit in the same bays, but with significantly sturdier construction and I bet it'd sell.
 
Never under estimate the stupidity of users.

I recall once getting ready to upgrade a user's computer and told them to "back up their files and folders" at which time they cut me off with "stop right there, you are talking Japanese!". This was an office worker who should know damn well what a "file" and "folder" is, and this was on Windows 95 at the time so it wasn't like they had to type in 1000 lines of obscure commands, just drag and drop visual files and folders from their local drive to a network folder. It is a good thing I held back, or I would be posting to a thread about "Things you regret doing to vintage computer USERS!". Baka! :)

But more on topic, I now regret passing up an IBM 5150 I saw at a garage sale sometime in the late 90s. I had less than zero room to store another computer at the time. But I did ask about software, although they said they had none. Go figure.
 
When we had CD-ROMs break at my last place I took the drive tray out and used that as a coaster. Mostly as a joke as it doesn't necessarily keep liquid from touching the table but it entertained folks.
 
Remembered 2 more regretted sales

Micro Configurations Corp 0A XT - God, I loved that machine, flip top case, 2X ST-506/412 interface drives, it was ugly, and kind of hackishly built. I sold it for a nice profit just to give it all back in refund because of USPS destroying it and the IBM 5153 I sold with it in shipping.

Compaq Deskpro 386 2570 - another monitor/computer bundle I've been missing. All original inside and out, with the type 41 sticker on the CDC 60MB HDD! Probably will pop up again on E-bay someday for $650.00 with that original DSM Color monitor in it's original box (facepalm).
 
Another regret: I had three partially working Compaq Portable IIIs and I used the best parts of all three to make a "perfect" Portable III -- and then discarded the rest of the parts. If I had been more patient or diligent, I'm certain I could have cobbled together another functional Portable III. Oh well.
 
Trixter said:
Another regret: I had three partially working Compaq Portable IIIs and I used the best parts of all three to make a "perfect" Portable III -- and then discarded the rest of the parts. If I had been more patient or diligent, I'm certain I could have cobbled together another functional Portable III. Oh well.
Click to expand...

My problem with your situation is I would probably have tried to make 3 complete units. l learned that the hard way when I was given a huge box of Apple Wallstreet parts machines years ago. In your case keeping the screens or other hard to find parts might have been a good idea, just not everything.
 
I mostly regret throwing out nice working IBM 5153 monitor and model M keyboard in my work as overcomed old craps, in times of modern VGA monitors and nice looking (rubber dome !) keyboards... together with many working XT and 286 mobos, full and half size MFM disks and controllers, EGA monitors (together with old 20'' NEC Multisync), and one nice 486 EISA server with ESDI disk and EISA controller.
 
I have a few:

Having a full Mac Plus setup ready to take home. And then changing jobs before I got the chance to do it.

Ripping a Sinclair QL apart in a misguided attempt to interface it to a Data General terminal keyboard (also ripped apart)

Not buying a VT100 when they were being thrown out by the skip load in the early '90s

Throwing out a fully populated Compaq Pentium rack mount server and disk array. Built like a tank!
 
I regret leaving behind a nice chunk of my collection when I moved once because I gave in to pressure from my family. Abandoned items included a nice selection of early Macs all in working condition, ranging from Mac Plus to Powermac 8100; also several stacks of components including 386-486-pentium motherboards, various cards inclufing a pile of Exos205T (both 8-bit and 16-bit ISA versions) and many other things that are pretty much extinct nowadays. I had salvaged most of that stuff for free from the recycling heap of the institution I was working at. So stupid giving them up.
 
Selling my TRS-80 with expansion unit and disk drives.

My mum was complaining about the space and I loved the machine. Still I kept the Zork & subscript floppy disk..
 
ripping apart several 5150's in high school, taking out the motherboard out of one of them and shooting it with a bb gun with my best friend.


throwing away a 'dead' 486 pci system i had held forever. turns out the motherboard was misconfigured.
 
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