{"id":482,"date":"2009-04-17T00:01:49","date_gmt":"2009-04-17T07:01:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/?p=482"},"modified":"2009-04-16T13:06:08","modified_gmt":"2009-04-16T20:06:08","slug":"really-old-computers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/?p=482","title":{"rendered":"Really Old Computers"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Dig back, way back into your PC closet. I call mine &#8220;the bone yard.&#8221; As your turning the pages of your personal computer history, answer this question, &#8220;How old is the oldest working computer you own?&#8221;<br \/>\n<!--more--><br \/>\nThe 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.<\/p>\n<p>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&#8217;s a hearty little beast.<\/p>\n<p>If I kept <em>all<\/em> of my old computers, I&#8217;d be up to my elbows in them. I don&#8217;t know how many computers I&#8217;ve owned in my lifetime, but it has to be well over 50, probably more like 80.<\/p>\n<p>Mostly I toss out my older PCs, gutting their hard drive and memory, then properly disposing the console carcass. I really don&#8217;t have any sentimental value attached to the older PCs, though I keep a host of them around &#8220;just in case.&#8221; You never know.<\/p>\n<div id=\"attachment_483\" style=\"width: 261px\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-483\" src=\"http:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/04\/boneyard.png\" alt=\"My computer boneyard.\" title=\"boneyard\" width=\"251\" height=\"350\" class=\"size-full wp-image-483\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/04\/boneyard.png 251w, https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/04\/boneyard-215x300.png 215w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 251px) 100vw, 251px\" \/><p id=\"caption-attachment-483\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">My computer boneyard.<\/p><\/div>\n<p>Then again, I have some very, <em>very<\/em> 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 <em>Laptops For Dummies<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p>I wanted to have lots of pictures of older laptops in my <em>Laptops<\/em> 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.<\/p>\n<p>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.<\/p>\n<p>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.<\/p>\n<p>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&#8217;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&#8217;ve graced the first chapter of my <em>Laptops<\/em> book for three editions now.<\/p>\n<p>Bottom line, the oldest of the oldest PCs I own is that Osborne I, which is from 1982. It works, but I don&#8217;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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Dig back, way back into your PC closet. I call mine &#8220;the bone yard.&#8221; As your turning the pages of your personal computer history, answer this question, &#8220;How old is the oldest working computer you own?&#8221;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-482","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-main"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/482","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=482"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/482\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":492,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/482\/revisions\/492"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=482"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=482"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=482"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}