April 17, 2009

Really Old Computers

Filed under: Main — admin @ 12:01 am

Dig back, way back into your PC closet. I call mine “the bone yard.” As your turning the pages of your personal computer history, answer this question, “How old is the oldest working computer you own?”

The oldest computer I have that still works is my NeXTstation, which I bought in 1989. It still powers up, still logs me in, still runs, though it believes the time to be 1995 or something weird.

My oldest working PC is an IBM model from 1994. I used it to test some Windows for Workgroups stuff for a project I worked on in 2007. I was floored that it still powered up and ran just fine. It’s a hearty little beast.

If I kept all of my old computers, I’d be up to my elbows in them. I don’t know how many computers I’ve owned in my lifetime, but it has to be well over 50, probably more like 80.

Mostly I toss out my older PCs, gutting their hard drive and memory, then properly disposing the console carcass. I really don’t have any sentimental value attached to the older PCs, though I keep a host of them around “just in case.” You never know.

My computer boneyard.

My computer boneyard.

Then again, I have some very, very old computers out in the boneyard. Some of them are my own, but many of them are computers I purchased on eBay for my book Laptops For Dummies.

I wanted to have lots of pictures of older laptops in my Laptops book, primarily to show laptop evolution. There are pictures available on the Internet, of course, but the good ones are copyrighted and you cannot use a copyrighted image for profit without permission.

There is a large image repository called Corbis (owned by Bill Gates), but they wanted to charge me over $2,000 per image to use it.

For a while I toyed with the idea of sketching the older laptops, which works but is very time consuming. Then I hit upon eBay.

Costing far less than renting an image from Corbis, I could use eBay to bid on the old portable computer systems I wanted to photograph. The computers didn’t even have to work, because I just wanted their pictures. In the end, I paid about $300 for six old computers, ranging from an Osborne 1 to an NEC Ultralight laptop. I took the images myself and they’ve graced the first chapter of my Laptops book for three editions now.

Bottom line, the oldest of the oldest PCs I own is that Osborne I, which is from 1982. It works, but I don’t have an operating system disk for it. Yes, I tried: I have an OS image that I copied to a 5 1/4-inch floppy, and I even used a special formatting program that would prepare that floppy diskette for the Osborne. But I never could get it to work.

4 Comments

  1. Ah, I love old computers! For a period, I had Windows 3.1 running in DOSBox for fun.

    But, pardon the blatant advertising, one very good use for old computers that still work for those who run businesses and still use an old cash register is to load up FreeDOS and Dale Harris POS, both of which I believe run on anything made within the last twenty or so years. Total cost: $0 (unless you need a new keyboard or monitor for the computer).

    Comment by Douglas — April 17, 2009 @ 3:49 am

  2. You forgot a link, Douglas! 🙂

    http://pages.prodigy.net/daleharris/pos.htm

    Comment by admin — April 17, 2009 @ 6:18 am

  3. I also recently uncovered an ancient computer that still works: a TARGA TS30AS from some time when Windows 3.1(1) was still the default OS on most PCs. Because my main machine still has a floppy drive (how quaint!) I managed to beat it into running Debian 1.1 using a stack of recycled 1440K disks. It’s command-line-only, but it works.

    There’s a great anecdote about the Osborne I: at a trade fair, its creator, Adam Osborne, ran into some folks from Apple and told them the machine would outsell the Apple II and the Mac combined. Later, his secretary got a personal phone call from Steve Jobs—and, true to form, it was filled with expletives. Naturally, Jobs was right and Osborne was wrong.

    Comment by Jonathan Rothwell — April 17, 2009 @ 2:03 pm

  4. Obsorne is an interesting character. The Osborne 2 was infamous in that its pre-announcement killed the company. No one bought the Osborne 1 after the Osborne 2 was announced, and that was about 8 months before it would hit the market. With a sudden stop in sales of the Osborne 1, the company died. Since then, the PC industry has been notoriously tight-lipped about all new computer announcements.

    I’ve often thought of converting an older PC to a Linux command-line box, but can’t really see any reason to have such a machine at this time. 🙁

    Comment by admin — April 17, 2009 @ 3:24 pm

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