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What do you actually do with your vintage computers?

falter

falter

Veteran Member
Joined
Jan 22, 2011
Messages
6,574
Location
Vancouver, BC
Kind of sounds like a dumb question right? But I've been pondering this as my collection grew from 5 a decade or so ago to 85 today. And I'm curious to hear people's answers because a) I'm just curious and b) hoping to discover things I might do with what I have, to 'exercise' them a bit.

For me, I find I like 'the chase' the best. Finding some half dead (or fully dead) machine somewhere on the cheap, fixing it up and learning as I go. I bought my Lisa 2 with Profile drive for $800 non functional, and spent a Christmas vacation slowly patching traces and bringing it back to life. I bought an Apple II case and spent months researching and locating parts, and rebuilding it to proper specs. Some have stumped me (never did figure out what was wrong with my Rev A. Amiga 1000), but I keep trying now and again.

But I rarely actually use them. My Lisa I fire up once every so many months just to admire it. I have no practical use for it and am leery of putting too many more hours on it given its fragile state. A few machines I do actually pop out and use for a bit: my Apple IIe, my 64 and my Mac Plus all see regular use for games I enjoy playing from my youth. But even there not a lot; at 40 and with young kids I feel kind of silly sitting playing games when there are so many other things going on. I just got an original Sinclair ZX80 yesterday, and it works great.. but I'm like.. hmm.. what do I do with this?

I'd really like to program, but I don't know what or why. Even my BASIC skills are seriously rusting, although I did have fun playing with my Ohio Scientific C1P, and making use of the USS Enterprise graphics. But beyond that, kind of wasn't sure what else to do with it.

These days I've been preoccupied with recreations, mainly my TVT replica project. But one day that will be finished also. Mostly my machines just surround me in my little office, and I look admiringly at them from time to time and marvel when I see a vintage youtube video and say 'Hey, I have that!'. Wouldn't mind getting out to festivals and toting a few along.. but we don't have those anywhere near where I am.

Anyway, let's hear how you use your stuff and particularly any unique purposes you've found for them. My favourite example of 'unique' is that guy that ran Christmas lights with his PDP. Clever!
 
I've used my Apple //c and IIgs for serial consoles in my routing/switching lab on occasion. I've also used them connected to a raspberry pi as a terminal server, for Internet access. Once my Uthernet II cards arrive, the IIgs and //e will be occasionally used on the network directly. :)

I have NCSA Telnet installed on my Tandy 1000TX, using an Etherlink III card to connect to my home network Linux box, for both Telnet and FTP duties. The Tandy is mainly used to play Simcity and Starflight I and II, and F-19 Stealth Fighter, all games I played on a Tandy in high school.

So, mainly games and some utility programs. I've also used them for data recovery from old media, found some Zip disks the other day I should fire up my G3 Mac to check out.
 
The most serious thing I do with them, is managing my ATARI and Olivetti collection. That I do stylish on my ETV 260. The other thing is, restaurating them, bringing them to meetings/exibitions. And often I use one of my electronic typewriters to fill in some paper forms, write adresses onto envelopes, etc.
 
Playing games, listening to music (I've yet to run across an emulator that 100% nails the sound of an actual OPL2/3 chip,) and programming (when I find the time.)
 
If I can find an excuse to learn something new (like my Netware Lite project) I'm all over it, but generally once they're setup and happy - unless there is a software title I want to try out - I don't really do any practical work with them.
The part I enjoy the most is actually the repair and the setup. The worst is when a machine arrives in perfect working condition, the horror.
 
I never threw out most of the computers I've used in my life, and many of them were still in a working state. I thought it would be nice to revisit the platforms, now that I was a well-rounded programmer. To study how people wrote software on these old machines, with old tools, and how the hardware was used.
I mean, as I grew up and played games and watched demos on C64 and Amiga, I picked up *some* of the stuff, and I also tried to program a bit, but back then, a lot of it went over my head.
Going back and truly understanding the technology was quite an interesting journey.

As the experiments with the hardware became more elaborate, I could no longer rely on emulators and random clones of computers, so I started seeking out real hardware.
In the process, I came into contact with like-minded people, and we actually discovered some completely new hardware tricks on some of these old machines.
For example, being able to render lines and polygons with subpixel precision on the Amiga blitter, or the 1024-colour CGA composite video modes.
 
I'm old enough (58 ) that I bought my first Apple II+ new in 1983. I was asked many times the next couple years "what do you actually DO with it?"
I was already in my 20's so I had no real desire to play games which was all anybody knew what to DO with a computer (still true today).
I taught myself 6502 assembly, basic, pascal mainly built an understanding of how a computer works from the inside out from the hardware to
the software. My career was electronics troubleshooting, repair which eventually got me an IT job doing onsite hardware/software repair.
My biggest achievement as far as 80's technology was being paid very well to set up an Apple IIe using Appleworks and TimeOut Ultramacros to handle
the entire office requirements of an electronics repair business. Parts inventory, billing, employee timecards, etc. Those were the days ...
Unfortunately in the late 90's all the old computers were considered junk and during a house move I tossed many, many items.
You guys would cry if you saw the roll off dumpster full of electronics.

I think studying computers helped me to think logically how to solve problems and has boosted my IT career to this day. Now decades later
these computers have become "vintage" collector items and of course over-priced on ebay. I did save some of the best I had and collected a few
when they were "junk" and now through the generosity of others I mainly re-live my glory days ...

PS - I still have all the floppies of the timeout ultramacros business software I set up and now once again an Apple IIe with a hard drive to run it !!!

Larry G
 
You know how kids pull out toys and play with them? That's basically what my vintage computers are... toys. The only one I keep set up is my heavily modified C-128D. The others are usually kept in storage until I get the desire to take them out and play with them.
 
For me it is "keeping the door open" (no, not as a doorstop... usually :) ) to running older software application programs.

Emulators are great and all, but there are plenty of times when they will not run some piece of obscure software, or won't run it 100% correctly. This is especially true of things like device drivers or other tools that work at the hardware level. There are also plenty of obscure business platforms that do not yet have, and probably never will have, working emulators.
 
I run environmental control software (that I developed for my family's greenhouses) for my kennel on a 1994 Pentium-100 running FreeBSD 6.4. It is a nice test bed for the software because if it runs well on that box there will be no problem on a 3ish GHz machine with 2 GiB RAM.

Sometimes I set up an older machine just to remind myself how far we've come in the last decades. Other than that, not much.
 
Hello falter.

Eh no need to feel silly. Hey it's your thing just like all the rest of us. Yeah I don't have a boat load of practical use either for my vintage stuff other than like you said playing some old vintage games. I just like to fire mine up, tinker with them, think about what else I can do to them, and just basically enjoy them from my youth too. I'm 56 and still growing younger and enjoy mine. Actually I've been able to do more with my vintage stuff now then I did when I originally had them because the Internet has made it possible to find all the stuff so much easier than in the vintage days. Plus in my younger days RAM was unreachable for many folks (too pricey). Internet brings more tools and more hardware options closer to us much easier to find.

I have an old IBM 5150 that I built up that was in great shape when I bought it just dirty and dusty. It runs just as well now as it did brand new. SURE components are 30+ years old but runs great. A few years back I found an NOS Intel Board 386-16 I put in it and it's so much faster. SURE it's not stock, but if Intel designed it then I believe in it and I can take it back to stock in 10 minutes. Eh they're just fun and nostalgic.

Enjoy!
 
Rarely do I do anything productive with them. I've got a boat load of stuff and most of it works. I tend to go from one thing to the next. When I'm not fooling with the big gaming rig, I'm messing with the 386 - a favorite. At this moment I'm putting the finishing touches on the Tyan server project. Why? I don't know, kind of a sickness maybe. Not much different than coins, stamps, and golf. I just get the urge to trot something out and play with it for a while. I suppose I like the 386 for the older games and it's real nice to play with Quick BASIC and such.
 
>I tend to go from one thing to the next ... kind of a sickness maybe.

Yea, I suffer from that too. Computer ADHD.
Once something is running just fine, I look for another problem to solve.
 
falter said:
But I rarely actually use them.
Click to expand...

After many years of keeping my small collection stored around the house I've recently found I get the best value out of them by having about seven units on display in my living room. They look great and are easier to set up for occasional testing.

I like "the chase" too, and the process of restoration, but I have enough now and don't want it to become an obsession (again.)
 

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Great answers guys! Thanks! Sidebar: when it comes to rarer systems, do you advocate using them lots (assuming you have a reason to), or minimal use to preserve? I often wonder how future vintage collectors will cope with 50, 100 year old machines with few or no spare parts available.
 
A great post falter. I'm pretty much the same as you, I enjoy the challenge of finding these old machines and making them usable again. Learning about the history and details of each machine. I don't really use them much once they're working. A really good aspect to retro machines is mixing the old with the new, for example when someone develops a disk emulator like the FDC+ or the Floppy Emu, SD2IEC etc. It's great to get the old machines working with new hardware. It also makes them much more practical to use for software projects. It's a good time to be building up collections, I'm sure many on here have noticed the rate at which this stuff is disappearing from the landscape. Only a few years ago these machines couldn't be thrown out or recycled fast enough now there in demand again from enthusiasts. It's my long term plan to pass my collection on to my kids if they have an interest when they get older. Or by that time I'm sure a museum would be happy to have them.
 
>do you advocate using them lots (assuming you have a reason to), or minimal use to preserve?

Definitely minimal. Hardware is finite and at some point unrepairable. To me a functioning machine has more worth.
However, minimal use is definitely better than none as far as preservation of function is concerned. We all know how capacitors handle not being charged for years.
 
Wow retrogear, we're all terminal geeks and always will be. I DO the exact thing. I look for broken stuff and other just to get it running again, or I decide to build one from scratch of parts from various places. Just finished a 486DX-4 with a whopping 64MB in it. Some have criticized me for saying this => but I am still thinking about doing a dial-up BBS just because I can. There's still about two dozen or so in this country. Yeah plain crazy I guess, but I had a Wildcat BBS years ago and loved it. In any event we're all victims of "Computer ADHD."
 
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