Your oldest piece of hardware

[Lindy]

Like a good many other geeks I put together my own computers. Over the years, and after several reiterations my machine has become a real frankenstein. Bits from here, bits from there, bits from everywhere! In it's current form the oldest component of my computer is the keyboard. It's one of those big heavy IBM jobs that was made in 1994. So fellow geeks what's the oldest component of your computer?

[sailor]

I have a Seagate 8 gig harddrive that I rescued from one of the compurters at work which is probaly 5-10 years old...it is the HD that I installed FC1 on....I still have all the computers I ever owned...3 and all still run....

[PeTzZz]

I have one working 3½" floppy drive in the cupboard that has a sticker with numbers 02.01.91. Is it possible that it means date? I bought it some time ago to put it into my sister's computer where the floppy drive is broken. It really looks very old.

[Prometheus]

I got a old 1 gig i got from a friend. They stopped making things smaller than that in like 96-97, so its at least that old. I cant remember what the QC date is, and im too lazy to unscrew it to look. Thats gotta be the oldest though, since i completely revamped the system in like sept.

[Jman]

I have a Gateway 2000 tower manufactured 9/3/93. It has a 83 MHz processor, a 400 MB and a 2.5 GB harddrive, a couple CD-ROM drives, a loud 250 MB tape drive, a 10 Mbs ISA network card, and the original keyboard. Just about every component has been upgraded. This system cost my family thousands of dollars (US) in its day.

It still runs. It ran Windows 95 for a long while and then 98 barely. Then I tried Redhat. It has run a webserver for more than a year now on 7.3. It has the longest uptime of any of our computers. 86 days is my personal record to beat.

I should get around to upgrading to Fedora one of these days.

[Prometheus]

That reminds me, my dad has an ancient 30 mhz laptop that was used by the city for the surveying team i think. A whopping 500 meg hard drive, a touch screen (the pen broke so we have to use a mouse now) and it takes about 3 minutes to load 3.1. Ahh, those were the days. Oh yeah, the original clock battery died, so the default date is august 23, 1991. Its gonna be an antique someday, and the only thing i ever use it for is to play solitare on long car rides.

[Ug]

*would like to place an objection to the term "fellow geeks" - I am not a geek*

Anyway, the oldest piece of hardware I have must be this CPU, a 450 from 1997. Mind you we've got an Amiga 600 still kicking around somewhere...

[i686]

I have 2x 250mb (yes MB) hard drives and 1x 120mb (yes MB) hard drive on the shelf..

Warranty expired way back in 1992 on them..

All 3 are in full working order, no bad sectors or anything..

i686

[sailor]

Ok, if not geeks then nerds...heheheh
I did have a Radio Shack/Tandy Mark IV...two 5 1/4 floppys and a whoopping 240,000 kb of memory
no hard drive...ran the OS off one disk ...and used other disk for programs...It worked fine...but I could not find software...I tried ordering it through Radio Shack..but they never could get anything although it was listed in the catalog...I don't know where it ended up...someone is probably using it for a doorstop...I think my ex-wife has it...

[hugo]

I have a Gateway 2000 with a 25MHz 386. I fire it up once and a while. It runs Windows 3.0 like a dream. I'll even play a little Kings Quest or Wolfenstien 3d once and awhile. A long while.
I also have one of those Macs with the 8inch b&w screens in a closet somewhere.

[ezeze5000]

I have an old 286/16mhz tower with 4mb of ram
mfm full size MFM 80mb hd, 1.2 mb floppy and a 360k floppy. This unit was once a server for a company. It now runs DOS 5.0 and a lot of old DOS games. I don't think I could get a useable version of linux to run on it.
I upgraded the video card to an isa vga, so some of the games would run. The original was a hercules.

[GallComp]

I have a 20 MB hard drive that I bought somewhere in the late 80's... That darn thing still working... I have it in a shelf but sometimes I jsut hook it up to see if it still runs...

:D Yeah I'm a geek...

[ckr]

As a hand-me-down I recently received a 486 processor computer with 16MB RAM that I believe had a 584MB hard drive. Got rid of most of that computer, but the hard drive is in one of my extra computers as a slave. It was running Win 95 first edition.

[fjleal]

I still have an old Spectrum, by Sinclair. Does anybody here remember the ZX Spectrum, with 48 KB ram? Now, that was computing! :)

[Jman]

We did have a 286 around for a while before we junked it. 20 MB hard drive and less than a meg of memory. Dual floppy drives, both old style and modern 3 1/2 inch. No idea when it was built.

For those feeling nostalgic, dosbox (http://dosbox.sourceforge.net/) is a DOS emulator. Ironically it requires a fast machine to emulate a slow game, but at least you don't have to dual boot.

[Ug]

Dual Floppies? Woah.

[gcblig]

Macintosh Performa 5200

[PorkChop]

Apple 512 - MAC 2si ..both are being converted into File servers with MINI ITX boards, and a few IDE drives...

God bless the Goodwill computer store!!!

PorkChop

[ewdi]

i still have the GoldStar 8088 System case with the power supply :p it gives u electric shock everytime u touch the side of teh case :p hjahah

[prisen]

Been a system builder for a while :P

Still have an original IBM 8086, 5MB HDD and "billg's nobody needs any more than" 640kb RAM. 4.77MHz baby!

This one is a little odd but I have one of the oldest consumer-grade laptops. It's a Toshiba 8086 that runs its OS off of ROM. BIOS and OS are on the same chip..MS-DOS 2.2. No hard drive, too big at that time and too much power consumption. B/W 80 columb screen, could not display graphics at all.

Also have a *working* Commodore 64 with a load of great games..2 1541 5.25" disk drives to go with that, horribly slow..

Working Packard Bell Legend I - 80286/12, 4MB ram, 20MB hdd

Custom Pentium (no MMX even) 133MHz with top-of-the-line hardware for its day. 64MB ram, Sound Blaster AWE32 and Diamond Monster Fusion PCI..great for playing Duke Nukem 3D and Rise of the Triad

The home server is a dual Celeron 533 (Abit BP6..solid board) with some really big hard drives (160gb+)..handles em with no problem

You guys and yer newfangled hardware :P

Newest box in the house is an Asus SK8N with FX51 cpu. Loving it so far.

[Varkk]

Hmmm, this is a tough one as my PC has had most parts swapped out over the last 18 months so that it is now a completely new machine. Even my mouse and keyboard received the treatment. I think my oldest current hardware in my main rig is my 40gb Seagate 5400 RPM drive currently serving as a secondary, main one is a 80GB barracudaV. But that may be put out to pasture in the next week or two if I buy a shiny new 160GB disk.

[Prometheus]

I really envy you rich little suckers that can afford a 64 bit chip. I thought the $160 i paid for my 2700+ was a lot when i bought it. I wish i had the cash for a 64 bit chip, lucky little buggers.

[Avon]

BBC Micro model B, purchased in 1982 (thanks Mum and Dad). 32K of RAM and still solid as a rock :)

[jcstille]

I have a 5 1/4 in drive. I still have a couple 90mhz processors, Some 56k audio cards, A lot of ISA stuff. I got quite a bit of junk.

[ilja]

I have a Sun Sparc 10 from 1993 standing next to me ;)

[2660mhz]

16k of ram TI 99/4A. I ran out of ram sooooo many times... Saved programs on a tape drive.
First HD was 32mb. I thought I had lots of space then. You could really tweak them old drives.

Yep you guessed it, I'm getting old...

The first HD I ever laid eyes upon was a woooopppppiing 5mb. I see someone else has/had one. Beat the hell out of tapes and floppys. Single Sided floppy anyone?

[pigpen]

I feel so old now... here's my museum (http://daisy.rz.uni-regensburg.de/~rem17904/computers.php)

1Kb should be enough for everyone :D

[marks_linux]

I have aa 256 meg hard drive which I fitted to an amiga1200 - don't know where the amiga got to but still have the HD somehow! Oh I remember the joy of trying to cram the HD into the plastic case of the amiga. (it actualy pushed out the base of the comp slightly so it rocked when you typed)

[vinu]

Pentium 133Mhz with 32 MB RAM + RH 8.0 running as a small server: runs Apache, Postgresql, vsftpd, and w-agora (BBS software).

[harlekin]

some stuff always survives...

got an old ISA-Soundcard Sb 2.0 from back in august 92 when i brought my first pc (386-dx with incredibkle 40 Mhz) at least the soundcard survived... together with a 10 Mbit Network card that was extremely expensive that time (although it's no name)

the oldest piece still in use is my router:
P-166
64 Mbyte of RAM
hd's: 2gig / 850 Mbyte / 2gig scsi
running core 1

[ukdelinquent]

I am a geek - geek is the new Kool. And i still get laid. My life is perfect :)

[Xeophonix]

Ok well, I made a totally new system but retained 2 components:

1) Floppy drive
2) Monitor

Both are 4 years old. Being a gamer, I find the monitor a real pain, I have ALWAYS said i'll buy a new monitor, but I always seem to spend my money on other things (or components) when I think about it, I have spent enough on relatively un-needed upgrades that I didn't really need, just things to improve my overclock, which usually means buying the best, especially with cooling products. *sigh* I now have buyers remorse. :-P

[ChrisMUC]

Oldest piece of HW still in use? It's probably my old noname 3.5" floppy drive, made in 1992.
I don't know, if it's the drive or the old disks (which are sometimes even older), 4 out of 5 are not usable anymore. Formatting and checking for bad blocks return errors on them. It's really difficult for me to find working disks any more.

In my cellar, there are two boxes out of really old hardware, all still usable (at least theoretically, since most modern mainboards don't have ISA slots any more). The oldest of
them are probably a Siemens MFM Disk (5 1/4", full height, 600MB) with controller, still working, which was used until last year in my kids' Pentium 200 MMX computer, some ISA VGA Graphics cards from the late eighties and an acoustic coupler with 1200 Baud. And of course a Schneider PC1512 with two 360KB drives, color monitor and dot-matrix-printer. In working condition, of course.

Who knows, probably this old stuff will become interesting in fifty years or so :)

[chatles]

Atari 600XL

[codergeek42]

Up until a few months ago, I would have said that the oldest piece of hardware in my machine was my video card (Riva TNT2). I've since replaced that with a shiny Radeon 9200, so all is well. :D

I guess the oldest aspect of my box now is my backup hard disk, which is a 3 year-old Quantum Fireball (20 gigs, 2 meg cache, ATA/100).

[Zigzagcom]

I can't find that old slide rule I used in the 70's any more, if that would count as old "hardware", lol.
But this thread made me rummage through all my old HDD's. The oldest I could find was a 530MB
SCSI Fujitsu, but no date. Many of the drives on my shelf are hand-me-downs. Maybe it's time to see what can be salvaged.

[spartas]

The oldest piece of hardware I have (that I still use) is a WD 80Gb hard drive from 2001. I picked it up under $100 after Mail-In rebate and I thought that was a good deal.

My non-usable hardware includes a Kaypro 10 system with a 10Mb hard drive from 1983. It ran CP/M quite well.

[Dan]

The Oscar Fox punching the keys on the keyboard!

[Omega Blue]

The most ancient thingies I have are a Plextor CD-ROM SCSI drive at 4x speed and a Maxtor 200MB SCSI HDD. Both over 10 years old. I used to have a 5 1/4 FDD but chucked it out a while ago.

[leadgolem]

Now? A lexmark z55 printer. Which actually does work in fedora 6-7, after some fiddling. If you had asked me last year, it would have been a dot matrix printer, production date 1984.... The same year I was born...

[techmatt]

dam youngsters ;)

I have an Apple IIe that I still use to play Carmen Sandiego (never have beat it)

[Coolerthanyou]

If you count a gamepad, that is the oldest thing connected to it. It's a simple 4 button gamepad, rather crappy, but it has outlasted the fancier PC gamepads I have bought and it's there because I don't feel like wasting money on another one that will last less than a year and cost too much bundled with all sorts of bells and whistles. The old pad has been around since the 80's or early 90's probably. Why can't any of these good for nothing companies of today make a decent, lasting gamepad? Silly bastards! :)

[Lindy]

What surprises me is the age of this thread!!

[leadgolem]

Spartas woke it up this time.:) It looks like somebody has stumbled across it from time to time, posted, and revived it for a while. Good subjects never die, they just get beaten over and over and over.............................................. ..............and over.............................................. .....................................and.......... ...BANG

In breaking news an errant poster on the popular linux forum "Fedora Forum" was shot by a worker for "The Campaign against infinities" And now the Weather.

[w5set]

@leadgolem
So give with the weather--I'm tired of rain here.....what's it gonna do?

Oldness of the thread not withstanding--does a 486 sx 30 laptop with cga screen and 32 meg mem/dial up modem, floppy, 240 meg hard drive and no network card/or CD running win 95 (that's a laptop??)
qualify for still runnable and hanging around?

[stevea]

The wife :(

Hey - we're talking abt the oldest you still use !

[lmo]

I recently donated to charity, a 300 baud, thermal printing dialup terminal with an acoustic coupler.

[joe.pelayo]

It is difficult for me to actually state the oldest component of my computer. In my main desktop, a AMD Sempron based, the oldest things are the monitor and speakers (they came with my first computer, a Compaq Presario 7476 in 2001).

Talking about the oldest component I have SOMEWHERE, not exactly in use, is an old WD hard drive of 246MB I think. I believe it is even older than the Am486 I have somewhere too.

Joe.

[leadgolem]

@leadgolem
So give with the weather--I'm tired of rain here.....what's it gonna do?High winds and storms tonight, High of 99 tomorrow with a chance of showers. In sports Tux squares off against Redmond. Now bob, some people are calling this a true David and Goliath match...