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Who Has The Oldest Computer?; Or The Slowest Internet Connection?
Topic Started: Jul 2 2015, 12:22 AM (1,161 Views)
scratchpaddy
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Not so fast

My computer is starting to get "old", as a built it four years ago, but it's still powerful enough to handle just about any game on the market at max settings. Maybe in a few more years, I'll build another.

Some of the hardware around it is pretty old, though. My keyboard is from 1986. It came from the old wax engraving machine they used to use at work. I get my sound through a Sony receiver from 1976, though the speakers are newer. I got it from Goodwill for $20. Love that thing. Nothing beats the feel of those weighted aluminum knobs, and I love the solid "clunk" it makes when I flip the switches.

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Stubby79
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mt999999
Jul 2 2015, 12:22 AM
My Windows 7 laptop just bit the dust, and until I (attempt to) patch together the broken pieces inside, I am stuck downgrading to the only free computer in the house. We no longer have an active desktop, and the rest of my family has laptops on Comcast high speed wifi internet. So, I have our only desktop remaining set up at my workstation here. You guys should see this rig, it's pathetic. I wish I could take a picture and share it, but the computer won't connect to my camera! :lol

The DVD drive is broken, so the machine is still running Windows 98 SE, running on less than a 1 GHZ Processor. Most of your smart phones are more powerful that this thing. We have free long distance telephone, and I don't have a good Ethernet port, so I am connected to a free dial-up server 2,000 miles away in California. Thank goodness we are "still in 2005 here" (quoting Coche Blanco). :lol This allows the forum to run on my version Firefox version 2.0. It works, but pictures are painfully slow on this 33.6 KB/S connection. I really don't miss this, so here's to hoping my laptop starts working again soon.

Out of curiosity, do I have the oldest machine still running on the forum here, or do one of you old timers have something equally archaic still running? :rofl Curious to see how this goes...
:lol

My netbook could run circles around your computer! And it does it on about 3 watts on average! That would be lucky to power an incandescent flashlight! :P
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rmcelwee
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perfesser
Jul 2 2015, 09:45 AM
Doviatt - that was Old Man with the slide rule and abacus. Could have been me though. I got my first college degree using a slide rule. I still have 4-5 in a drawer waiting for us to get over our infatuation with electrons. A limitation of the slide rules is that you can't add or subtract on them. My abacus I got in Korea. When the first electronic calculators hit the market, I bought a refurb at the PX and took it over to the orphanage I volunteered at to show the kids. One of the girls pulled an abacus out of her book bag and challenged me to a race. I have never been beaten so badly!! She could have answers faster than I could enter the numbers! And then my battery died and she just kept right on going. Next time I went over there, the kids had all chipped in to buy me an abacus and a book on how to use it.
When someone mentions an abacus this is the first thing that comes to mind (skip to 4:45 - yes, pretty racist but it was 1968 so you have to give them a break):


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mt999999
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Stubby79
Jul 2 2015, 12:05 PM
mt999999
Jul 2 2015, 12:22 AM
My Windows 7 laptop just bit the dust, and until I (attempt to) patch together the broken pieces inside, I am stuck downgrading to the only free computer in the house. We no longer have an active desktop, and the rest of my family has laptops on Comcast high speed wifi internet. So, I have our only desktop remaining set up at my workstation here. You guys should see this rig, it's pathetic. I wish I could take a picture and share it, but the computer won't connect to my camera! :lol

The DVD drive is broken, so the machine is still running Windows 98 SE, running on less than a 1 GHZ Processor. Most of your smart phones are more powerful that this thing. We have free long distance telephone, and I don't have a good Ethernet port, so I am connected to a free dial-up server 2,000 miles away in California. Thank goodness we are "still in 2005 here" (quoting Coche Blanco). :lol This allows the forum to run on my version Firefox version 2.0. It works, but pictures are painfully slow on this 33.6 KB/S connection. I really don't miss this, so here's to hoping my laptop starts working again soon.

Out of curiosity, do I have the oldest machine still running on the forum here, or do one of you old timers have something equally archaic still running? :rofl Curious to see how this goes...
:lol

My netbook could run circles around your computer! And it does it on about 3 watts on average! That would be lucky to power an incandescent flashlight! :P
I'm running it right now, and it works! The first day after my laptop died, I pulled the 1997 DTK computer out of our cellar, and started with it. 28kb modem, 2 GB Hard drive, 32 MB ram. Windows 95B. That was even more painful... I was gifted the Windows 98SE machine the next day; a friend was throwing it out. It was top of the line in the early 2000. CD burner (I tried it, its SLOW. Like, quad speed slow. 40 some minutes to burn a music disk.), DVD drive, 40 (Factory!) hard drive (partitioned, of course), and 256 MB ram. I was going to up it to 512 and install XP, but the DVD drive is shot. The 56k modem is a nice upgrade (haha...). It works as a temporary thing, but I can't access my email... I have Thunderbird POP mail on my laptop, and really cant move it over to this PC.
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mt999999
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perfesser
Jul 2 2015, 09:45 AM
Back in '85 I had a Fat Mac on my desk at work. 512k RAM and 2(!!!) 880k 3.5" floppy drives. Hard drives at that time cost about $1k/MB. The Apple Lisa had a 5 MB HDD, but no one could afford it.

I was working at the IBM plant in Boca Raton when they were building the production line for the (not yet announced) IBM PC. When it was introduced it had 64k RAM and the storage was handled by a cassette tape backup that plugged into the back of the box! (I have one in my office just to show the students.) My job at the plant was to design a new machine to insert the 8" floppies into their envelopes. (Yes, 8"!! Some of you may have seen the old 5.25" floppies, but these came first. Double-side, double-density, held 180k, and there weren't any files big enough to fill one!)

Doviatt - that was Old Man with the slide rule and abacus. Could have been me though. I got my first college degree using a slide rule. I still have 4-5 in a drawer waiting for us to get over our infatuation with electrons. A limitation of the slide rules is that you can't add or subtract on them. My abacus I got in Korea. When the first electronic calculators hit the market, I bought a refurb at the PX and took it over to the orphanage I volunteered at to show the kids. One of the girls pulled an abacus out of her book bag and challenged me to a race. I have never been beaten so badly!! She could have answers faster than I could enter the numbers! And then my battery died and she just kept right on going. Next time I went over there, the kids had all chipped in to buy me an abacus and a book on how to use it.
Trust me, I know the 8 inch floppies! I have several boxes of them laying around. Still stored in my dad's cellar is an IBM System 23. This monster has a "green screen" when it comes on, and numbers/codes come up flashing on the screen. I don't know how it's programmed, nor do I know how to use it, but most of the original volumes of books are still stored with it. It has an original printer (probably dot matrix) store with it as well. It is an all-in-one machine, with a double floppy drive built in for 8 inch disks. This thing was operating in the early to mid 80's at a radio station he worked for (WESA in Charleroi, PA). I guess he got to take it home when it was retired. Lots of old data from the station is still stored on those monster floppies. I have quite a few 5.25 inch floppies for Windows 3.1 era, as well as a lot of 5.25 floppies for an Apple 2C (with a green screen - that we still own as well) I did not know that the 8 inch IBM disks were double sided.
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mt999999
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Self-Declared "Genious"

OK, some of you guys have me beat (even on my IBM System 23). But, I think I am still technically winning since I am using my Windows 98 system as we speak. Let me rephrase, or ask a new question:

Who has the oldest computer connected to the internet. Preferably one that they can access the GMF from? It doesn't have to be your main computer, but I know some 70-some year old guy out there still has a Windows 9x era machine connected to dial-up that doesn't want to upgrade. Come on, show yourselves! :P At least anyone still on dial-up?
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mt999999
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scratchpaddy
Jul 2 2015, 12:00 PM
My computer is starting to get "old", as a built it four years ago, but it's still powerful enough to handle just about any game on the market at max settings. Maybe in a few more years, I'll build another.

Some of the hardware around it is pretty old, though. My keyboard is from 1986. It came from the old wax engraving machine they used to use at work. I get my sound through a Sony receiver from 1976, though the speakers are newer. I got it from Goodwill for $20. Love that thing. Nothing beats the feel of those weighted aluminum knobs, and I love the solid "clunk" it makes when I flip the switches.

Posted Image
Cool setup! My laptop is three years old. Eventually, I'll build myself a nice desktop computer. What I would like to do is get a big, old 386 desktop. I'll gut it, save the good parts for projects, and build a brand new, powerful computer inside of the old desktop... I'll just have to modify the unit to fit the new motherboard in it.
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t3ragtop
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Turbo3 and Twincam Tweaker

i have a packard bell 8088 machine running dos 3.11 (12 floppy discs,) a bunch of thinkpad 386 dxII laptops that run security/ lighting control duty through my house's electrical system, and gem of a gateway 311 386 running windows 95.

none of those boxes are useful even for web browsing these days, mostly due to ancient 56k modem connectivity. the only reason i keep them around at all is that they still have some valuable function for my own entertainment. new computers do not really have any useful functionality when it comes to coding in dos. new ms operating systems don't even have a fake dos window. since i'm as old as dirt i write a fair amount in dos to run my old hardware on process control software i coded myself.

also, since i still use a lot of lab grade hardware like a 10 port 'rocket port' serial i/o board and a once state of the art mavica camera that stores files on a floppy disc i keep old tech around.

as a matter of fact, i'll go on record as saying that i have spent as much time recovering old data and archiving it on modern hard drives as i have on creating new data.

i'm so old that i remember reading the release info on the first consumer desk top computer, the commodore pet. then i waited a year to just see one. i had the little sinclair computer before it was bought and produced as the timex sinclair computer. i built i/o equipment that allowed the radio shack trs-80 to run as a data acquisition system. as a matter of fact that was what i was using in conjunction with a big cray main frame computer that took up 2 floors of an office building. prior to my trs-80 data transfers i had to punch cards to input data into the main frame.

one of my earliest programs was used to build complex audio frequency filters. i could select the filter type - butterworth, chebychev, etc. along with the rolloff slope, frequency pass function, and the output level. as components came available i upgraded the circuit topology design function from transistor based to i/c circuits and produced sound re-inforcement and esoteric audio filters for multi-amped systems until digital sound processing became a thing.

personally, i'm still partial to the sound of analog filters. the digital stuff these days is missing the warm fuzziness of analog signal processing. i also built and sold a very popular filter that operated in a few modes. it removed the very low sub frequency range noise created when the stylus of a phonograph needle rode the hump of a warp in the vinyl record and it also removed a very narrow band where defects in the record's surface would creat a pop. i also had a switchable filter that reduced hiss. all of that pre-dated dolby processing.

all the basic work on those devices came from my old dos filter program so i felt compelled to save it.

that program i wrote sat for years on a computer compact cassette stored in old westchester code data format until i dusted off a cassette player to extract the code. there again i needed an old box with a floppy drive to move the program to a format suitable for the next gen storage devices.

i sort of bailed on keeping up with computers from 1988 until the mid 90s when i sort of got back into it. in 2001 when i was recovering from an industrial accident i did all of my windows certifications and was up to date enough to get a cisco cert but didn't want to pay for it. i was contemplating moving from hands on electrical engineering in speed controls, motor controls, and process control applications for those devices which used standard communications for computer to floor manufacturing and processing to more of a computer science based ie tech. i never made that career jump, soldiered on with the process control work, and finally just quit engineering for hire.

i found a new spark in environmental investigation and eventually found myself familiar enough with the municipal sewer collection system in the state capital where i live that i sort of fell into a job as a sewer trouble shooter. now i'm more of an advanced user than i am a tech geek. i use some very well developed programs that include gis and reporting systems. i have a huge volume of data to draw from covering everything from public servers containing property data to sewer records dating back to the 1930s. all that is available on the mobile computer connected to the internet by wireless air card while my driver bounces me around driving the truck. nothing is as fun as typing while my partner flogs it from one end of the city to the other. :-/

the laptop i'm on this moment is an ibm tp t42 running xp enterprise. the latest update of explorer is no longer supported on main stream web sites like youtube. the up side is that now those annoying ads just show up as red x or cannot display boxes on my screen. :P

have you guys read about the massive loss of historic nasa data losses? all of the video shot during the apollo moon mission days is lost due to the fact that the equipment required to play the tapes was decomissioned and sold for scrap. the world has lost as much data due to the advancements in computer technology as is actually accessible today. :smackface
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mt999999
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t3ragtop
Jul 2 2015, 06:12 PM
i have a packard bell 8088 machine running dos 3.11 (12 floppy discs,) a bunch of thinkpad 386 dxII laptops that run security/ lighting control duty through my house's electrical system, and gem of a gateway 311 386 running windows 95.

none of those boxes are useful even for web browsing these days, mostly due to ancient 56k modem connectivity. the only reason i keep them around at all is that they still have some valuable function for my own entertainment. new computers do not really have any useful functionality when it comes to coding in dos. new ms operating systems don't even have a fake dos window. since i'm as old as dirt i write a fair amount in dos to run my old hardware on process control software i coded myself.

also, since i still use a lot of lab grade hardware like a 10 port 'rocket port' serial i/o board and a once state of the art mavica camera that stores files on a floppy disc i keep old tech around.

as a matter of fact, i'll go on record as saying that i have spent as much time recovering old data and archiving it on modern hard drives as i have on creating new data.

i'm so old that i remember reading the release info on the first consumer desk top computer, the commodore pet. then i waited a year to just see one. i had the little sinclair computer before it was bought and produced as the timex sinclair computer. i built i/o equipment that allowed the radio shack trs-80 to run as a data acquisition system. as a matter of fact that was what i was using in conjunction with a big cray main frame computer that took up 2 floors of an office building. prior to my trs-80 data transfers i had to punch cards to input data into the main frame.

one of my earliest programs was used to build complex audio frequency filters. i could select the filter type - butterworth, chebychev, etc. along with the rolloff slope, frequency pass function, and the output level. as components came available i upgraded the circuit topology design function from transistor based to i/c circuits and produced sound re-inforcement and esoteric audio filters for multi-amped systems until digital sound processing became a thing.

personally, i'm still partial to the sound of analog filters. the digital stuff these days is missing the warm fuzziness of analog signal processing. i also built and sold a very popular filter that operated in a few modes. it removed the very low sub frequency range noise created when the stylus of a phonograph needle rode the hump of a warp in the vinyl record and it also removed a very narrow band where defects in the record's surface would creat a pop. i also had a switchable filter that reduced hiss. all of that pre-dated dolby processing.

all the basic work on those devices came from my old dos filter program so i felt compelled to save it.

that program i wrote sat for years on a computer compact cassette stored in old westchester code data format until i dusted off a cassette player to extract the code. there again i needed an old box with a floppy drive to move the program to a format suitable for the next gen storage devices.

i sort of bailed on keeping up with computers from 1988 until the mid 90s when i sort of got back into it. in 2001 when i was recovering from an industrial accident i did all of my windows certifications and was up to date enough to get a cisco cert but didn't want to pay for it. i was contemplating moving from hands on electrical engineering in speed controls, motor controls, and process control applications for those devices which used standard communications for computer to floor manufacturing and processing to more of a computer science based ie tech. i never made that career jump, soldiered on with the process control work, and finally just quit engineering for hire.

i found a new spark in environmental investigation and eventually found myself familiar enough with the municipal sewer collection system in the state capital where i live that i sort of fell into a job as a sewer trouble shooter. now i'm more of an advanced user than i am a tech geek. i use some very well developed programs that include gis and reporting systems. i have a huge volume of data to draw from covering everything from public servers containing property data to sewer records dating back to the 1930s. all that is available on the mobile computer connected to the internet by wireless air card while my driver bounces me around driving the truck. nothing is as fun as typing while my partner flogs it from one end of the city to the other. :-/

the laptop i'm on this moment is an ibm tp t42 running xp enterprise. the latest update of explorer is no longer supported on main stream web sites like youtube. the up side is that now those annoying ads just show up as red x or cannot display boxes on my screen. :P

have you guys read about the massive loss of historic nasa data losses? all of the video shot during the apollo moon mission days is lost due to the fact that the equipment required to play the tapes was decomissioned and sold for scrap. the world has lost as much data due to the advancements in computer technology as is actually accessible today. :smackface
Wow... that's a lot of type!

A 386 Gateway running Windows 95? Ouch... that must be painful. I'd downgrade it to 3.x to make for a less painful experience (Haha...). I have quite a few Windows 3.x and 9x era computers, but it sounds like you like 'em even more than me! I have to say, this dial-up thing is killing me. We had it for years, and I said, "Well, I'll just set it up again until I get my new laptop". Once you get "spoiled" on high-speed, it's not quite the same. My Windows 7 laptop has an "MS-Dos" shell. I haven't tried Windows 8, and I surely don't plan on it.

My grandma worked for Westinghouse here in Pittsburgh for years, and I still have a couple of those old punch cards that she kept. They sure make for an interesting conversation piece. I was really into collecting vinyl as well. If I put all of my albums together, I bet I'd have a stack from the floor to the ceiling. We have 9' ceilings in this house too! I did vaguely hear about the NASA data loss... what a shame! You would think that they would find a way around it still play the tapes, with all of today's technology. I bet they could even remake the equipment if they had to. But I am sure there are plenty of copies of the footage that other people have saved.
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Bad Bent
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Facetious Educated Donkey

I think our oldest computer in the house is a 2001 iMAC. :-/

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I never used a slide rule. My 1972-1973 high school computer club used a Teletype machine and 5 hole paper tape.

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Silver2K


Groovy!
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cwatkin


I come across old stuff all the time working on computers and electronics. Anything made by Apple seems to have some value no matter how outdated it is or even if it is broken. It is worth putting on eBay although I have never come across anything really worth a lot of money. I get lots of old VHS players, tapes, and recently had some reel to reel machines. Unfortunately I get very little value from old PC hardware. This stuff is currently a dime a dozen. I offer trade in value on lots of things and will no longer even consider something with only a single core processor. Although a Pentium 4 machine still can browse the web fine, they don't sell for anything. Trying to make money selling something like this is hopeless. You spend more time than you can recoup even if the machine was free to you. Also, selling low-end and low-cost equipment is very frustrating. You are already selling something that is close to worthless and people nickel and dime you on every little thing. Then you get the nasty people who make you not even want to do work for anyone when dealing with the low-cost machines. Unfortunately the economics of dealing with these units and the people they seem to attract make them a lot easier to scrap. Yeah, they might work for a lot of things but I don't have the room to store them myself and they build up quickly.

I know lots of historical stuff is getting trashed all the time like the tape players required by NASA to play the moon videos. You would think someone would still have similar equipment somewhere and that the data could be recovered. Unfortunately that is how government works. I deal with lots of maps/GIS myself. The local USGS office here used to have a storage warehouse full of the etched copper plates used to make the old topographic maps. There were 3 or so and each one printed a different color/theme. Once things started to go digital, these things were looked at as junk and piled into dumpsters by the ton. I know quite a few were dug out and kept but word got around and the rest got dug out for scrap metal. Copper is expensive after all. These things were a work of art themselves and covered most of the country.

The government now has the idea that they are valuable and are now commonly seen on government auction sites along with surplus vehicles, computers, and the like. I am sure the majority of them went to scrap but at least the ones left now won't. The office here has several of them framed on the walls and when they go to auction, they go for WAY more than scrap price!

The oldest machine I probably have that I ever use for work or the like is a 1st gen Core i3 laptop. I have a 2nd gen Core i5, 2nd gen Core i7, and 4th gen Core i7 laptop on hand too along with a dual core Intel based netbook of sorts.

I am currently building someone a 4GHZ state of the art i7 unit. This is one of those units that will really scream and likely put anything I have to shame.

Conor

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ZXTjato
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bass heads

over clock those "K" i7s for some real crunching power. with the non "K" i have reached 4.2 GHz, they arent ment to OC so it spazzes out any higher.
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ZXTjato
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bass heads

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not my top Ghz mark but pretty close, it gets unstable much higher.

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and just over 1200 mhz on the gpu, it will go farther in some games but in the witcher 3 it gets artifacts and some times locks up.

completly 180 from the thread topic but still on slight subject
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